The first ten days

And just like that, out of nowhere, it was over. The pregnancy, the delivery, the contractions that I kept feeling afterwards, and the so-called ‘kraamtijd‘, a Dutch word to indicate the first ten days after birth. According to google translate this ten day period right after the birth is called the maternity period in English, but let’s be honest, I have never heard anyone use this term before. In the Netherlands the “kraamtijd” is a very common concept and it is traditionally filled with a lot of “kraam“-stuff.

First of all, as the lady who just delivered her baby/babies you are called the “kraamvrouw” and you get to spend a lot of time in your “kraambed“. To create a “kraambed” you have to lift up your bed with ‘bed-legs’ to a height of 80 cm. This makes it pretty much impossible for you (or your toddler) to get onto your bed, especially just after giving birth, but it makes it very easy for the “kraamzorg” to attend to you. “Kraamzorg” is a nationally organized concept of a nurse that comes to your house every day in your “kraamtijd” to check on you and the baby, to help you in the house and assist you with things like breast feeding. It is a most wonderful invention, aside from needing to increase the height of your bed.

The kraamzorg arrives at 8 AM, a time at which you may or may not be asleep, and asks you how the night went. This was for us always a funny question because honestly, with two babies that eat around the clock every 3 hours, the night is about the same as the day, other than that we consistently try to sleep in between the feedings, usually failing at that. During the day they help with all the things that I am not yet able to do, like doing the laundry and making sure I eat and drink enough. They also watch the babies while I try to sleep for an hour to catch up on the hours I missed out on. Basically they saved us in those early days on twin parenthood. Without them I wouldn’t know how we would have managed.

On Wednesday, 10 days after our delivery, at 1:00 PM the kraamzorg left our department and we were officially by ourselves as a family of five. No more daily help, no more assistance or explanations with things we had not experienced before. It was just us; from three to five. The five of us.

The end of the kraamtijd was also marked with new things, as the cycle of life goes, old friends from Maryland came to visit us in the Netherlands and Skye woke up talking about monsters for the first time. Time passes by, one period ends, and another one starts. We just keep going with the flow, now officially as a family of five.