Returning home

Home time

For a couple of (thankfully) non-serious reasons, we stayed in hospital with Marley for two extra nights before returning home.

He was fairly small (6lbs) and they wanted to make sure he was feeding properly. They also checked his blood-sugar levels just to make sure the gestational diabetes hadn’t had any lingering effects.

(Gestational diabetes, for those who don’t know, is basically like Type 2 diabetes in the pregnant mother that lasts for the duration of her pregnancy, and then usually goes away as fast as it came – I had no idea it was a thing).

The cat

I had left out a couple of days’ worth of cat food for Bo while we had been away, but even so she was absolutely delighted to see me when I returned to check on her before taking the car back to collect Catriona and Marley.

Once we were all back home, it only took a couple of hours before she started realising something was up. There are some awful stories about cats smothering new-born babies just by sitting on them.

Some say the cats are just looking for somewhere warm to sit, but I must say I have my suspicions….either way, we weren’t going to risk it, so we locked Bo out of our bedroom from day one

Bo, Marley and me

There was some scratching on the door on that first night, but as Bo quickly but reluctantly accepted her place in the pecking order, it subsided.

It is a bit sad that she seems to feel like we’ve replaced her….but then she is a cat, and that makes her a psychopath, so who knows what she is thinking half the time anyway.

Naughty cat

Our new life

We settled in to our new routine faster than she did, and pretty soon we were changing Marley’s nappy in under a minute. Burping him after feeding, and getting him down to sleep – at least during the day – all became part of our new life.

There were a couple of funny moments in those two or three days of settling in; while I was changing him, a card was posted through our front door and Catriona went to get it. It was from our neighbours (they’d heard Marley before they’d seen him!) and as she read out the message while I changed him, I saw a spray of liquid shoot up and cover the card. Marley seemed to have aimed directly at it. And he knew.