Angela and I were just remembering coming home from H’s birth, over two years ago.
We were at a hospital about four blocks from our house. They wouldn’t let us leave with the baby unless we put her into one of those infant carseats (or “baby buckets” as we call them around here). We hadn’t even brought a seat to the hospital and had to send a friend to get one.
We gathered up our things, strapped in the kid (our buckling job was carefully checked by one of the nurses), and hobbled slowly outside.
I grabbed a cab, put an exhausted Angela, who had just finished a long and grueling labor, inside with a friend who had come to help us home. I briefly considered strapping the seat into the non-LATCH equipped cab, and then thought better of it, took the kid out, and chucked the empty carseat in the cab. I carefully held our brand new daughter, swaddled in my arms, and walked the four blocks home.
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I love reading all of these posts! We are expecting our first baby and living in downtown Seattle, where it seems that everyone thinks that we're crazy for not having a vehicle. Who needs it? Not us. We're hoping for a home birth so that we don't have to deal with the trials of strapping a baby into a seat right out of the hospital. I imagine that your little one was much safer in your arms than she would have been in a car!
I carried my son the three blocks home from the hospital after a protracted, stupid argument with the pediatrician about whether we were required to take him home in a car. We had offered to show them his carseat installed in a car if it was installation that worried them, but they were most concerned that the baby actually be in a car. Since I was in my power wheelchair I couldn’t take a car, we had no van, and I wasn’t going home without my baby. Eventually they caved.