Restaurants

She Sneezes Into Her Hand As Well

/ bperica / 4 Comments

She sneezed into her hand five minutes after it happened. I shook my head in disgust and in further disappointment in myself for not stopping her five minutes earlier.

We were all out at one of my favorite restaurants, the Bull and Bush, having an excellent weekend dinner. London was in a high chair eating off of the disinfected table. She wasn’t too enthralled with the food. It was great, but there was so much to look at so sometimes she just wouldn’t eat what we were offering her. When that happens we always set the food in front of her.

London is finicky about when she wants to feed herself versus when she wants us to give her food on a spoon or with our fingers. Right before our server walked up to the table London turned away from a piece of food Kate was offering her. Kate placed it on the table in front of London, knowing that London would pick it up eventually and feed herself. But there would be no time for that. The server picked up the piece of food and fed London right off her finger.

I was so freaking surprised I froze, didn’t say anything, and looked at Kate. Did that just happen?

Kate’s eyes answered back, yes, yes it did. 

Okay, I thought. It’s probably not that bad. Wait, who am I kidding here? That server just fed London like she was her grandkid (interestingly enough, she was plenty old to have a few) without any knowledge of London’s past. And we have no knowledge of where her hands have been. Does she wash them as much as she should? Not sure, but I found out she prefers to sneeze directly into her palm.

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Our old lofty perch, from where the Bull and Bush was within walking distance.

I thought about saying something to her or writing on the receipt, but the damage had been done. If she had some disgusting bacteria on her hand she had already gifted London with it. I know very well that at some point I will transfer a bug to London, but that’s the right of the parent to do. Plus, I know I have big pump action bottles of hand sanitizer on both floors of the house. I know my hands get dry and cracked from using so much of that stuff. I have the cleanest hands I have ever had in my life.

Yes, I was mad at the server, but I let it go. I was mostly disappointed in myself. We were both trying to be so nice that we didn’t say anything at all when it happened. And it happened so fast. If we were going to say anything at all it would have needed to be pretty blunt like, “Stop! What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I vow to never let this happen again, but I also don’t expect to come across too many servers who feel like they can hand feed my baby. If they do, I’ll throw being polite right out the window.

Losing Anticipation

/ bperica / Leave a comment

I touched on this topic a while back in “Life Goes On, But Something Was Lost,” but I wanted to write about it a little more.

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A getaway to Voodoo Doughnuts…we did bring some back to the NICU for the nurses.

When you have a baby in the NICU long-term, it takes a while to establish a routine. At first, you’re there all the time, until life elsewhere completely falls apart. By life elsewhere falling apart, I mean there will be no food in the fridge when you come home from the hospital, you’re out of toilet paper, you’ve forgot to pay bills, and you forget how to have fun, or, at the very least, you feel guilty for having fun or for merely being busy with something else other than sitting in the hospital with your baby.

The NICU nurses tell you right away that you can’t be at the hospital all the time. You’ll go mad if you do. As weird as it feels, you need to go out for dinner, go see a movie, and spend some time at home just relaxing. In our case, it was spending time at the house making it feel more like a home…we had moved in two weeks before London arrived.

At the NICU, I got the impression that some parents didn’t heed the nurses’ advice and spent every waking minute at the NICU. And when their baby was ready to come home, they were already exhausted. Eventually, we did take the nurses’ advice. Spending time away from the hospital did keep us sane, but it also allowed us to gain back some of that time we feel we had lost, the time we would have spent anticipating the arrival of our first baby. We had a lot of that time left, 14 weeks perhaps, and then it vanished the night London was born.

As a couple, spending time together away from the hospital was essential to our ability to get through the challenges that London faced. Before she was born, I had made Valentine’s Day reservations at a place downtown we had been wanting to go to for a while. When London arrived, I assumed I’d be canceling that reservation. It seemed like everything was off the table for weeks. Thankfully, I was wrong.

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My sister and I, post-brunch and many mimosas, getting ice cream at Little Man.

We could have gone 109 days without a night out, a Sunday brunch at Cafe Bar, a trip to Little Man Ice Cream. Kate could have gone without a baby shower…or three (with pictures of actual baby present). I could have gone without a couple trips to the Bull and Bush (“The pub you’ve been practicing for.” God bless them). We could have passed on going to church Easter morning. But if we had not done all these things, we would have completely lost those 14 weeks to the NICU.

The NICU is a beast. You don’t want to give her more time than you already have to. Of course, don’t take this too far. One nurse told us about a couple who had been told that their baby was going to be discharged on Friday of that week and they objected because they were going to Vegas that weekend. There’s a sweet spot you can find. I think we eventually found it. Our hearts never left the NICU, but our minds and bodies knew they had to leave that place every once in while to keep going.