Month: February 2005

Today I started with all the paperwork that needs to be done for the baby and Olga’s medical expenses.

In order to get the birth certificate, I have to bring some papers from the clinic, passports, and pink slips for both me and Olga to the Limassol district office. I came there today, but they had some technical problems and asked to try tomorrow.

I also went to see our caretaker to pay her some money and fill in the insurance claim. I had some fun imagining how I look sitting in the queue to the gynaecologist. No other man was sitting there alone.

Social insurance is nice. They are kind enough to pay about 200 CYP annualy for the baby, plus they are giving about 200 CYP once for the delivery of the baby. I will have all the needed forms by tomorrow to get these money.

The only guy who I missed taking care of today was our pediatrician. I’ll leave him for tomorrow…

Continuing the line of welcoming posts, I would like to welcome Max home. We left the clinic today and went on to our stressful journey. I never thought that I would be so scared to drive the car. I was watching everyone and everything much more attentively than usual. I was using extra smooth accelerating and decelerating. I was driving around even the smallest holes in the round, while trying to keep the car steady. While doing all of the above, I was also trying to keep the proper conditions inside the car.

Something smart that I did before the journey was practicing the seat belt saga on the relax seat. Provided documentation showed only once side of the picture. It took two adult engineers about 30 minutes to figure out how to fix it rock solid. If you are about too take drive a baby in the new seat and you never did so before, take my advice – practice the fixing thing.

The rush of the first few days is over now and we are taking control back to our hands. Today we decided that breastfeeding is the best option for Max. Switching from the milk in the bottle is tough even after a couple of days. It is like switching from free high speed unlimited Internet connection to a crappy and expensive dial-up. But what needs to be done has to be done.

Max knowledge of easily available food from the bottle is not the only problem at this moment. Probably a bigger problem is Olga’s and mine total lack of experience with breastfeeding (except for being a baby, which doesn’t count). It turns out that for the milk to come, baby has to suck the breast for clear the milk channels. Sucking the tit is hard. Sucking the tit without milk is a total no-fun.

Less slip, less food, hard work, and stress all over the place – now this sounds pretty much like a real world. Welcome Max! ;)

It’s a good thing that kids grow slowly. Their needs and habbits change gradually (even if that’s one or two days). Parents are given time to learn new stuff. Olga and I are trying our very best at this very moment. Luckily, Maxim doesn’t need too much.

Olga changed his diper once today. Then she fed him. I changed his dipers twice so far. And than I bathed him. I wanted to take slightly more time to learn these things, but there weren’t any. At least I was given those few minutes and a couple of instructions…

Alex and Katia Georgiades are helping us a lot. For some reason all medical personnel is not talking too much. That includes our pediatritian, Dr. Simos Kitiris. When you ask anyone of them a question, they wil answer. But they are not telling anything by themselves. The whole parenting thing and baby needs area are still very new to us, so we rarely have any specific questions yet. Alex and Katia just tell us all sorts of things. And showing us also. And I am not talking about the FAQ entries – real stuff! Of course, it’s still our choice wheather to follow the advice or not, but at least we are getting the knowledge. Thanks a bunch, guys!