Who Loves You Baby?!

After a quiet month on the Baby Unit, we have had quite a busy time lately, with many sweet little guests passing through.  These adorable triplets made all our hearts swell as they snuggled up in the warm embrace of our Embrace Warmers!

Sarah and Noah (who, by the way, can now ROLL!!!!) have been spending every Tuesday offering a full days training to Maternity Ward midwives, in order to make the Baby Unit staffing more sustainable.  This comes after sadly losing many of our original nurses to the government hospitals, who are usually able to pay more than our hospital is.   The idea is that the Maternity Nurses will rotate through our Unit, but under the supervision of our lovely new Head Baby Unit nurse Cathy, who will be there full-time.  We also did some training of all the hospital staff on “The Workings of the Baby Unit”, with sweets and prizes in order to ensure undivided attention!

Do you remember the original triplets that first motivated our setting up of the Baby Unit?  Well, Noah and Sarah went to visit Paulo and his family in the village a couple of weeks ago and found him alive and well with his doting grandparents.  We’re hoping to visit again soon, to do some nutrition training with his family, and also to teach them a little about how children develop, and how to make toys to stimulate Paulo’s development.    

After our week of intensive studying on the Celebrating Children Course (during which Noah coped admirably, and enjoyed learning about how to listen to children!), we have since been ploughing through the homework in preparation for next week’s instalment of the course – 2 essays, and 5 assignments is no laughing matter when your time and energy is already stretched by a sweet little weasel!

Finally, we leave you with more lessons and observations from Team Crow in Masaka....

Things we’ve learnt the hard way about parenting #3:

NO, two nappy covers will NOT suffice for a day’s training!  Your baby WILL smell like a bog rat by the end of the day.

You know you’re in Uganda when....

1.     You find that an ant colony has taken up residence inside your computer’s hard drive (bye bye macbook!!)

2.     You feel the urge to physically harm yourself, in order to have an excuse to leave, because the visiting preacher has just entered the fourth hour of his preach (alas, not a joke)!!

3.     You get verbally abused by a motorcycle driver for slowing down and indicating to go right, and then... shock, horror.... actually turning right! (not surprising when the main 2 uses of indicators happen to be (1) to replace the use of headlights when driving at night, and (2) to play a sort of haphazard game of indication roulette, "I'm indicating right, am I going to go right?....maybe....possibly....here I go....LEFT!!)