Mila Time
Mila Juno Hutchins
Ladies and gentlemen meet Mila Juno Hutchins. Mila Juno Hutchins meet the ladies and gentlemen.
So, she’s out, and as a result I have a new found respect for women. THAT. WAS. BRUTAL! My tiny wife somehow managed to push out a 57 cm long, 8 pound 10 ounce baby. My little wife who can still comfortably shop at Baby GAP. I have to doff my cap to my amazing better half and also to the miracle of modern medicine, as if the events of August 4th had taken place one hundred years ago I’ve no idea how we would have got her out. But all is well and we are both in shellshock. Oh my God. What a day. What a lovely day!
It started at 0500 with The Show.
My wife wakes me up.
“Honey, The Show has started!”
The Show! The Fucking Show! Sounds like so much fun doesn’t it? Visions of jazz hands, music, dancing, can-can girls and maybe even a magic trick. But then my wife shows me The Show first hand and I can confirm that The Show is not as entertaining as it sounds, and probably wasn’t written by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The Show was shortly followed by a series of contractions that made my wife make noises that sadly, I don’t think I will ever make her make. It’s definitely happening. I calm my wife by charging around the flat screaming “Don’t panic!” I am Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army. We get in the car and off we go. Over the past month I’ve discovered that the roads of Budapest are particularly confusing at the best of times, but when you are driving along with your wife screaming in pain every five minutes, and me screaming “Don’t panic!”, I can confirm they are still fairly baffling.
We get to the hospital and I am surrounded by rooms of women screaming and groaning, They are no doubt either giving birth, watching pornography or watching The Walking Dead. I mentally decide that they are watching pornography.
We get in to a room and it begins. Zsuzsa is in pain, crying and wailing. Given that she usually cries if she misses a train this isn’t abnormal, but I sense this is more than a missed train. Call it intuition. I give her a piece of chocolate and start recording her with a video. She doesn’t appreciate this. I stop recording.
What followed was like the opening twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, but for seven hours. I’ve never witnessed such savagery, such brutality. Oh the horror! THE HORROR! I felt as though I was starring in my own, foreign language version of SAW.
At one point, I was holding one of my wife’s legs, a midwife was holding the other, one doctor was playing the slip fielder, while another big male doctor pressed down hard on my little wife’s belly, trying to force the baby out with some kind of crazy Hungarian toothpaste technique! And all of this whilst not understanding a single fucking word of what anyone was saying! Throw in an exam paper that I hadn't revised for and take away my trousers and that's my nightmare! Right there! I had visions beforehand of casually sitting by my lady wife’s head, holding her hand and whispering sweet nothings while the doctor did the dirty work, but I had no say in the matter. I was at the business end. I was in the trenches. I probably now have trench foot.
Outnumbered
And now it’s over and I can confirm that I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhâuser Gate. Now I’ve seen a baby's head do unmentionable things. All of those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain.
If you are not familiar with Blade Runner you may now be thinking that I’ve been over doing it on the nitrous oxide. Outrageously though, they don’t have nitrous oxide in Hungarian hospitals! It was the whole reason that I got my wife pregnant in the first place! Livid.
But she’s out. Both mother and daughter are doing well. Mother will hobble and sit on a rubber ring for a few weeks I’d imagine, but all is good. We are ecstatic. Our little family has just grown by 50% and she’s gorgeous. I’m sure there will be tough times ahead, but for now, we are an overjoyed, mentally drained, tired, family.
I leave the hospital for the night while my wife and little Mila both try and work out how to breast feed. I’m now out numbered by ladies, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
My girls