This little snuggle bug is now 3 months old. After her rocky start she has settled into our family and is back to being a regular newborn. The temperature wobbles have disappeared and that frightening skin mottle is just a bad memory. She’s beautiful and healthy, eats well, gaining weight, and alert.

Her siblings are besotted with her. Bear is 2 and loves her with a degree of unrestrained enthusiasm that requires attentive supervision! Poppy at 8 is old enough to carry her and even sometimes walk her to sleep. Nemo didn’t think they could fall as hard for any baby as they did for Bear and has discovered that joy of your heart expanding.

Calliope has discovered she can interrupt any activity and melt any heart simply by smiling. She has the most adorable dimple on one side. She loves to talk back and forth with her little burble and coo. When she’s interested in chatting she’ll lift her eyebrows in an expression of intense surprise. She is happy for a time in her bassinet but loves to be carried in a wrap, snuggled close to your chest. Sometimes if she’s sad and crying she’ll stop and listen if you sing to her. If she’s very upset, her favourite song to calm down is Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman.

I cannot believe how incredibly fortunate I’ve been. Back when I was 14 I realised that I deeply wanted children. So many obstacles came between me and that dream, the collapse of my marriage, my struggles with endometriosis and adenomyosis, coming out from a hostile religious background, chronic illnesses, poverty, unemployment. To be unpacking the carefully saved clothes for the fifth and last child, and this time putting them aside to pass onto someone else is simply astonishing. It’s a very busy, very tiring life but I’m absolutely in love with it. It’s a privilege beyond words to raise these children and I’m very aware how many people don’t get the chance.

We recently put a little money together to hire what Nightingale calls a Baby Whisperer. A lovely NICU nurse with a lot of additional training including in Newborn Behavioural Observation came and spent some time with Calliope. Nightingale and I have noticed that we don’t seem to be able to read her cues as well as we could with Bear – at this age we could pick a number of different pitch cries that indicated hunger or tiredness or discomfort with him, but with her we’re often unsure. The Baby Whisperer came and assessed her to see how she was after the illnesses and hospitalizations. We discussed how she had been showing signs of feeding and touch aversions from the trauma of her treatments. We’ve been gently rubbing cream into her hands during restful moments like when she’s feeding to help her recover from the stress of multiple painful gelcos being placed.

The outcome was really thrilling. She’s recovered incredibly well. She has strong cues, she’s robust, able to soothe herself when a little agitated, not showing any residual touch aversions and only a little feeding aversion. The glitch is more that we’ve been basically trained to be hyper sensitive to her health cues – we’re not very tuned into her different cries but we pick up on skin colour changes with incredible speed and sensitivity. So we’re missing some of her social and emotional cues as a result. In a nutshell, she’s not traumatised but we are a bit! So we’re working on that. Having her so sick, and the hospital response so fragmented and contradictory cemented that we need to be intensely vigilant monitoring her health and advocating for her. It takes a minute to stand that down and switch over to focusing on connection.

So here we are, 4 fabulous kids in the house growing up at a phenomenal rate. Chronically broken sleep. Date nights few and far between. The other day the older 2 kids happened to be out of the house for the night and we got very excited that we only had the younger two to care for and said brilliant! Date night! Cooked steak, lit a candle, and laughed at ourselves because we don’t know anyone who would consider caring for a toddler and a 2 month old a night off. It is gruelling hard work, and there’s times of overwhelm and misery. There’s also a beautiful bittersweet awareness that every milestone she reaches is the last time we’ll have that experience. Daft people who haven’t quite followed the complicated nature of conception in our queer family tell us we can’t be sure we’re done and we never know what might happen. (So much planning and baby math goes into conception for us) We are savouring everything, and so tired we’re forgetting half of it, falling over it in the dark, tag teaming, staggering along in the perpetual dampness of infant care. It’s absolutely beautiful and utterly consuming and I’m incredibly proud of how we’re living it and looking after each other.

She’s beautiful, she’s healthy, and she’s so well loved.