Hi there! My name is Beatrice Emma Howell and today is my birthday! I was born at 6.29am this morning by 
Emergency Caesarean Section at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. What a shock to the system. I wasn't due until 2nd August, but the doctors decided I was 'better out than in', so I came out nearly a month early. Not as early as my sister or some of her pals, so I'm told, but I'm still classed as 'premature', as I was 36 weeks and 3 days gestation. Basically yesterday I got myself into a bit of a pickle and mummy noticed, so asked the midwife and doctors to check up on me. Turns out I wasn't moving around very much, and actually I hadn't been doing much on the growing front in the last couple of weeks either, so after lots of scans and traces in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and a hasty call to mummy's frie
nd Lisa at 1am to come round and look after my sister, mummy and daddy found themselves down in the Delivery Suite of the JR hospital at 
2am waiting for a slot in the emergency C-section queue! Another baby had jumped in before me, so I had to wait a while before being formally introduced to my parents. Well didn't I surprise everyone when I came out. They all expected me to be much bigger than I actually was. I'd fooled them all! Mummy's consultant had said I'd be 5lb, and even the doctor who did my growth scans a few hours before I was born said 4lb 7oz, so imagine everyone's shock when I was only 3lb 12oz (or 1723g). The doctors said that probably the reason I'd stopped moving around was because my umbilical cord was wrapped right round my body like a cocoon, so I couldn't really move around very much. How silly! Because of my weight, the paediatrician said I needed to go to Special Care, even though I screamed the place down to show that th
ere was nothing wrong with my lungs! So after a quick cuddle with daddy and a hasty photo call I was whisked away to the Intensive Care Nursery to hook me up to some monitors and warm me up in an incubator. I had a drip put in my arm to feed me some dextrose to make me big and strong, and a feeding tube into my tummy through my nose, so that I could be fed milk without having to tire myself out sucking. I started by having donated milk from the human milk bank, because I couldn't have milk from mummy for a few days. Mummy donated l
ots of milk when she was feeding my sister apparently, so we're definitely in credit! Daddy came to visit me when I was a couple of hours old. He looked very tired I thought, but then he had been up all night I suppose. Mummy came to see me in the afternoon when the anaesthetic had worn off and she could get out of bed into a wheelchair. I'd been so good that by this point I had already been moved from an incubator to a cot. The incubator was far too hot for me! Mummy gave me a lovely cuddle to say well done, but she couldn't sit with me for very long as her tummy was very sore. I just need to start growing now so I can go home with mummy and daddy soon and meet my big sister Harriet.
Emergency Caesarean Section at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. What a shock to the system. I wasn't due until 2nd August, but the doctors decided I was 'better out than in', so I came out nearly a month early. Not as early as my sister or some of her pals, so I'm told, but I'm still classed as 'premature', as I was 36 weeks and 3 days gestation. Basically yesterday I got myself into a bit of a pickle and mummy noticed, so asked the midwife and doctors to check up on me. Turns out I wasn't moving around very much, and actually I hadn't been doing much on the growing front in the last couple of weeks either, so after lots of scans and traces in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and a hasty call to mummy's frie
nd Lisa at 1am to come round and look after my sister, mummy and daddy found themselves down in the Delivery Suite of the JR hospital at 
2am waiting for a slot in the emergency C-section queue! Another baby had jumped in before me, so I had to wait a while before being formally introduced to my parents. Well didn't I surprise everyone when I came out. They all expected me to be much bigger than I actually was. I'd fooled them all! Mummy's consultant had said I'd be 5lb, and even the doctor who did my growth scans a few hours before I was born said 4lb 7oz, so imagine everyone's shock when I was only 3lb 12oz (or 1723g). The doctors said that probably the reason I'd stopped moving around was because my umbilical cord was wrapped right round my body like a cocoon, so I couldn't really move around very much. How silly! Because of my weight, the paediatrician said I needed to go to Special Care, even though I screamed the place down to show that th
ere was nothing wrong with my lungs! So after a quick cuddle with daddy and a hasty photo call I was whisked away to the Intensive Care Nursery to hook me up to some monitors and warm me up in an incubator. I had a drip put in my arm to feed me some dextrose to make me big and strong, and a feeding tube into my tummy through my nose, so that I could be fed milk without having to tire myself out sucking. I started by having donated milk from the human milk bank, because I couldn't have milk from mummy for a few days. Mummy donated l
ots of milk when she was feeding my sister apparently, so we're definitely in credit! Daddy came to visit me when I was a couple of hours old. He looked very tired I thought, but then he had been up all night I suppose. Mummy came to see me in the afternoon when the anaesthetic had worn off and she could get out of bed into a wheelchair. I'd been so good that by this point I had already been moved from an incubator to a cot. The incubator was far too hot for me! Mummy gave me a lovely cuddle to say well done, but she couldn't sit with me for very long as her tummy was very sore. I just need to start growing now so I can go home with mummy and daddy soon and meet my big sister Harriet.
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