One thing I’ve learnt as a Mum-in-training is that when the baby goes to sleep, you have a small window of time to get things done. Ultimately I’ll get distracted by something online (usually something to do with this blog) then will realise I’ve used up 20mins and have a max of 40mins to get whatever I was planning to do, done.

In yesterday’s case, that was: having a shower and doing a new site insertion. Simple as it may sound, there are some days it takes me til midday to get in the shower, depending on what’s happening baby-wise (I often use his first sleep of the day to go for a walk before it gets too hot).

So – I wasted about half an hour pottering around cleaning up and responding to emails, then decided I’d best get in the shower. By the time I was out of the shower, the baby was already crying, so I ran up to try to settle him then ran back down to the bathroom to do the site insertion. Only, this time it was a new type of insertion set which I’d never attempted before. I really should have thought to do this on a weekend when my husband was around to look after the baby. I didn’t have a step-by-step guide in front of me and figured I’d wing it… I’d tried a number of sets before and reckoned I had it sort of sussed. All went well until the point when I needed to disconnect and prime – arrrrgh, how does it disconnect? By this time the crying was at fever pitch. Ran back upstairs in my towel, grabbed the baby, downstairs to the laptop (while trying not to trip over the 110cm tubing), googled the insertion set, found a demo and loaded it up while bouncing the baby on my lap. Unfortunately the demo was a 20-step animation which was slow to get through, and in the end didn’t actually show me what I needed to know. So – I put the baby in the bouncer and carried him and it back up the stairs to the bathroom where I could look in the mirror as I tried to suss how to disconnect the pump. I was standing on one foot, with the other propped against the bouncer, saying to my three-month-old son “Just a minute darling, Mummy’s got an important thing to do which she’s having trouble with”, trying not to sound too desperate. Eventually I figured out that it required twisting, not squeezing (I’m still not sure why it has bits on the side which push in to be honest) and sussed it, primed the line and managed to restore some sort of order….. ahhhhhh. Then dealt to the baby.

Lesson learnt: make sure when you try a new insertion set you have (a) looked at the instructions on how to use it and (b) allowed yourself extra time to take it slowly.