Most of you here today do not know Kees. You did not meet him, you did not hold him, you did not see him except in photographs. We want to share something of him with you, so that you know how special and beautiful he was.
As you all know, Kees’ sister Freyja was stillborn in July 2006. When we got pregnant with Kees, Freyja’s death meant that we suffered a lot of anxiety and fear throughout the pregnancy. The main way we coped with this fear was to buy a doppler so that we could listen to his heartbeat every morning and evening. We soon learned to tell the difference between his resting, sleeping heartbeat and his more active times. He was usually more active in the late evening, usually when we were trying to get to sleep – which wasn’t so bad for Craig but made it a bit difficult sometimes for Mirne (which of course made it a bit difficult for Craig also).
We chose to have an induction at 37 weeks. This did not go smoothly, but we had no regrets. When we were presented with a breathing wriggling baby, all we could do was cry with joy. The hospital staff all looked at us like we were slightly batty.
He was a big baby, even though he was 3 weeks early. One of the nurses actually commented the next day that he must have been a week or two overdue, and did not believe us until she had checked the notes for herself that he was in fact underdue.
We had already seen on the ultrasounds before his birth the Kees had inherited Craig’s nose. It was too big for him, but he grew into it nicely (Freyja had Mirne’s nose). Sometimes when we looked at Kees it was scary how much he looked like Freyja. The day that we took Kees home it snowed.
The first weeks were a bit tough on us, with him wanting to feed every 2 hours or so. We chose to bottle feed Kees so that we could both share the special feeding times. We found that we needed to take cat-naps during the day, which never really worked very well for Mirne and usually ended up with Kees sleeping on Craig’s chest. Craig started to do more of the night time feeds, as he was going to be a stay-at-home dad when Mirne returned to work and needed to get into the routine. We soon discovered that the reason he was feeding so often was that he was growing at an extraordinary rate. In his first 4 weeks he put on 1.2 kilos. Over the next 17 days he put on another 900 grams. He was going to be big.
Kees, Mirne and Craig soon settled into a comfortable routine. Sometimes Kees had sleeping days where he slept all day, waking only to feed, and sometimes he had wakeful days where he wouldn’t settle unless he had a dummy, which he normally disliked intensely, and was rocked by one of us. Kees looked like he was going to be a thumb sucker, and we were praying for bodily coordination soon so that he would actually find his mouth with his thumb more often than one time in twenty.
Kees had a beautiful smile, and Craig would often play with him and pretend to gobble up his nose repeatedly just to see that smile and to hear his little laugh. We were convinced he was going to become an artist or an art critic, as he was always looking at our paintings and other pieces of art hanging on the walls in our house. He had his favourite pieces in various different rooms.
Our various parenting books said that around the six to eight week mark Kees would begin making noises other than cries. Our little boy had a variety of sounds that he had been making from about one week. One of his favourites was to bleat like a sheep. He had a special gift, which was to drink a bottle at 2 or 3 in the morning and then to fall asleep and bleat loudly for the next 2 or 3 hours until his next feed, causing us many sleepless nights. His other special gift was to wake us up screaming about an hour after a feed, only to be picked up, still screaming, burp or fart loudly, then fall instantly back to a quiet sleep. Of course, we were by then both wide awake, and would take another hour or so to get back to sleep, just in time for the next feed.
Kees, like many other babies, didn’t like being dressed. However, he loved his baths. At first when we gave him baths he used to float in there and seemed quite content. Towards the end, when he was heading for 6 kilos, his bottom used to sink like a stone to the bottom of the bath. We decided to take him into the shower with us, and although he seemed a little surprised at first we certainly got no complaints.
Just before he was born we invested in a heavy duty jogger/stroller. We hired a basinet for the stroller, having been advised that newborns should be in the basinet for up to 6 months. However, after a bit of research and given the rate of his growth, he was only in the basinet for about 4 weeks and was quite content being strapped into the stroller in his arctic-weight sleeping bag. Kees was a real Amsterdam boy, and loved cobblestones. We could walk around for hours over the cobblestones and be perfectly happy, but dare we go into a shop with a smooth floor and he would instantly wake up and start screeching, only to stop as soon as we were back outside on the cobblestones.
At the hospital, we were told that he should wear hats to ensure that he didn’t lose too much body heat. Kees had other ideas. A hat was good until it slipped down over one or both of his eyes. Then it stopped being fun, and had to be repositioned IMMEDIATELY. After 2 or 3 weeks of this the hats came off. The gloves, however, did not. Given the previously mentioned predilection for thumb sucking combined with the lack of coordination and his long fast-growing fingernails (which Mirne filed several times a week), Kees was often seen about town with socks over his hands and going up his arms. This was so he couldn’t pull them off. We did purchase some special mittens, but these were way too easy for him to remove. If we wanted him, and therefore us, to get any sleep at night he had to have his socks on, otherwise he would wake himself and us by clawing at his face and eyes trying to get his thumb and mouth in the same place and wake up the next morning with bloody scratches all over his face. He often squawked because he had stuck a finger into an eye.
He grew out of clothes so quickly that Mirne had to rearrange his wardrobe on a weekly basis. If she hadn’t done this we were worried that he might have missed out altogether on some of the wonderful clothes that so many people had bought for him. He was so strong that he did push-ups on the day of his 4-week check-up and he was able to support all of his body weight on his legs. Of course, he didn’t yet have the balance to match so needed a little help in that area.
He also had the gift to pee and poo on us during changes. He only got us once each with the poo, and only a couple of times each with the pee, before we learned the correct techniques to avoid it. He did, however, do the most amazing vomits on a couple of occasions. Most notably, he managed to completely drench Mirne in baby-puke twice, resulting in a complete change of clothes for both mother and son.
When Kees was born we found that he liked to be sung to when he was upset. The problem was, we only knew one nursery rhyme – twinkle twinkle little star. Craig tried "We are the champions" by Queen, but it just didn’t have the same effect. Subsequently, Craig made up his own version of "Twinkle twinkle little Kees" to great effect. Many nights we sat up with our little boy singing these to him to calm him down.
On the morning of the Wednesday 19th of March, Craig fed Kees at 6 am. He went back to sleep, and Craig went downstairs to clean up. At about 7 am Craig heard him grumbling a bit over the baby phone, so he went upstairs and took him back downstairs with him so that Mirne could sleep. Craig changed his nappy, and he looked like he was going back to sleep on the change mat so Craig left him there. Craig went to the toilet to pee, and when he came back at 7:30 am he wasn’t breathing. Craig screamed for Mirne, and started CPR. She called the ambulance, and then went outside to meet them. Two policemen arrived, and one of them took over the compressions and counting, and told Craig when to breath. Then two ambulances arrived, and the paramedics took over, closely followed by the helicopter medical team. It took them an hour to revive him, mainly due to trouble with intubation. When we got to the hospital his heart was beating on its own, but he was only breathing with the aid of a machine. We were told that due to the lack of oxygen for such a long time he would likely have massive brain damage. He never recovered consciousness, and our boy was never with us again after that.
On Friday the 21st, at 12:20 pm, his ventilator was switched off. He was lying on his tummy on Craig's naked chest, just the way he used to do, and Mirne was lying next to Craig. We were both holding Kees and holding each other. Twenty minutes later the doctor came in and told us that they had seen on the monitor that his heart had stopped beating, and that he was now dead. For us he had already been dead for 2 days, and we had just been saying goodbye.
On the flight to Adelaide from Kuala Lumpur, the head purser told us that in his religion, Hinduism, they believe that when a young baby dies or is stillborn that they have paid for all of their sins in their last reincarnation and that they only came into the world to fulfill the requirement to live before moving on.
We are here today to put Kees next to his sister Freyja and so that all of us here can say one more goodbye and so that we can be in peace knowing that the two of them are here together. Now they are here together on earth, and we hope that they are also together wherever they are now.
