Hips and harnesses

Elodie, it seems, is not quite perfect in the physical sense. Clicky hips discovered on her newborn paediatric exam have now turned out to be developmental displasia of the hips - and she has to wear a harness for at least six weeks.

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about it - it is, by the sounds of it, an entirely fixable problem and the physios umm-ed and aah-ed for some time before deciding she should go into the harness so she is sort of borderline. And the hip which was identified as problematic at birth improved drastically after wearing double nappies for two weeks - unfortunately the other hip, which had been borderline, did not improve at all. Hence the harness.

It looks a bit like a parachute harness without the parachute and with the addition of straps going down her legs and enclosing her feet. It is not exactly convenient. While she is allowed it off briefly every day to have some time to kick her legs about, the shape and structure of the harness means she can no longer wear vests that do up under the nappy, and some of her babygrows are immediately too small meaning for the most part we have had to move up to 0-3month size. More annoyingly for me has been the fact that she can't breastfeed in the same positions we had mastered - she has to have her legs held open at all times so cradling her is a big no-no. After quite a bit of practice (well, she does feed about a million times a day) we have got two poses, one for sitting down and one for lying down, which seem to be mutually satisfactory.

In other news, my mother has been ensconced here on and off for two weeks and has been extremely helpful. While here mainly to help me with things that the c-section physically makes difficult, she has also been doing almost all the cooking and washing up, as well as making lots of cups of tea and generally being helpful but not at all overbearing. I have managed to breastfeed in public once (prior to the harness being put in) down the pub with my sister and her husband, and have also had lunch in Costa Coffee with my mother and managed to make it to a postnatal group, a baby clinic and the breastfeeding cafe. I have also expressed my first breastmilk - but therein lies another post...