Second High Point continued

 

That Pigeon Feeder

 

This is the Pigeon Feeder. There is a little hole running down the plastic spoon and opening on to the bowl, which allows the milk to run from the bottle into the bowl when you tip it up. You have to judge how much to tip for the baby to drink, before dropping the bottle back to stop the milk rushing out all over the baby's face.

 

So the bottle goes up and down as the baby drinks, like a bird drinking from a bird bath, hence the name.

 

Sounds easy? But like most physical skills it takes some practice to get right! Meantime baby and parent get covered with milk, partly because the baby splutters milk everywhere when her mouth gets overfull.

 

Once you have learnt the skill, everything is fine: baby drinks ravenously and long, and parents and relatives enjoy the process too. In fact, in Julia's case, there were howls of protest when  the milk ran out and we had to replace the empty bottle with another warmed full one in half a second while she was catching enough breath to continue. The pigeon feeder was wonderful at the time but there are much more sophisticated gadgets nowadays..

 

Margaret tried breastfeeding but because Julia couldn't suck properly, due to the hole in the roof of her mouth, we had to use the pigeon-feeder and express breast milk. Back then there was only hand pump expression, and that took so long it became impractical, especially with us also having a very active 2-year old who needed the attention of his parents as well. So we had to juggle formulae until we found the right one for Julia's digestion. Like lots of other parents! 

 

The repair process in those days involved closing the lip at 5 months, and the palate at 9 months.

 Our youngest granddaughter, Sophie, is nine- months now and we shudder to think of what we had to put Julia through at that age - a crash-course in learning that Mummy and Daddy always come back!

 

At five months, there was not quite the same reason for worry, although we were quite normal in that we worried a lot all the same! We stayed in Auckland while Julia was in hospital. And we cuddled her a lot once the operation was over. She had milk-shake cartons on her arms for several weeks to stop her touching the wound on her lip. That first operation made a huge difference to her facial appearance and we spent hours just staring at her - she looked so different and we had become quite used to her the way she was - absolutely beautiful in spite of the cleft problems. Mr Williams, the surgeon, had performed an incredibly intricate first operation and in four months time his incredible skills were used to correct  the hole in the palate, so important for physical activities like breathing, eating and drinking, sneezing, coughing, and talking. So many people commented on the wonderful 'job' that Mr Williams had performed, and even as an adult Julia's operation has been 'admired' by a Doctor in London, when she was working for Medical Education England, who told Julia it was the best cleft lip operation he had ever seen.

 

By now Matthew was starting to be a fairly typical 2-year old. Ruby and Rex (Nana and Grandad) were taking care of him during some of Julia's second operation - we didn't want to leave him with them for too long so we had to leave Julia in the care of the wonderful nurses at Middlemore until we came back a few days later. And I had to catch up on a bit of work!! During these few days Julia's Aunties, Denise and Olwyn, visited her and Karen (Terry's wife, Julia's sister-in-law), also spent some time with her. Margaret was able to stay in the Nurses' Hostel for the last week of the three that Julia was in hospital and that meant they could spend lots of special and precious times together before finally coming home to New Plymouth.