Two facts change the whole shape of this. Most Irish maternity units ask people
not to bring flowers onto the ward, and after an uncomplicated birth a mother
and baby are frequently home within a day or two. Together they mean the
hospital is usually the wrong address, even when it is the address you were
given.
The ward problem
Hospital flower policies in Ireland tightened over the last fifteen years and
tightened again more recently. The reasons given are consistent: infection
control around standing water, allergies in a shared room, and the plain fact
that there is no surface beside a maternity bed that is not already holding
something.
Policies vary by hospital and by unit, and they change. A single phone call to
the ward settles it, and the ward will tell you plainly. If the baby is in a
neonatal unit, assume no flowers at all and do not ask twice; a card and a
message are what is wanted there.
Even where flowers are allowed, there is the going-home problem. Everything that
arrives at a bed has to be carried out of the hospital, usually by one person
already holding a newborn, a car seat and a bag.
Send to the house
The family home solves all of it. Nobody has to transport anything, there is a
kitchen counter and a sink, and the flowers are there for the fortnight when the
house is quietest.
Two details make a house delivery work better:
Ask for no doorbell. Put it in the delivery notes. A courier ringing a bell
at two in the afternoon in a house where a baby has just gone down is a small
disaster, and most drivers will happily leave a parcel in a porch if they are
told to.
Send something that needs nothing done to it. A bouquet that arrives wrapped
needs a vase found, stems cut and water changed, by a person who has not slept.
An arrangement in a container, already in water, is one less job. So is a
letterbox box, which posts flat through the door with no doorbell involved at
all. There is more on how those work on
letterbox flowers in Ireland.
Timing
Week one is not the moment. It looks like the moment, because that is when
everybody sends things, and it is exactly when nobody has a free hand. The house
is full of visitors, the kitchen is full of other people's tinfoil, and there are
already three bunches on the windowsill.
Week two or three is better. The visitors have stopped, the partner has gone
back to work, and the days are long. Flowers arriving then get looked at.
There is no deadline. Something arriving at six weeks with a note saying you were
waiting until the mayhem died down is a thoughtful gesture, not a late one.
What to send
- Low and sturdy. A container arrangement rather than a tall vase. Houses
with newborns get tired and clumsy.
- Unscented or lightly scented. Nausea is common after a birth, and a small
room with heavy lilies or a mass of stocks is genuinely unpleasant. This is the
most common mistake made with new baby flowers.
- No lilies. Pollen that stains everything it touches is a poor gift to a
house doing four washes a day, and lilies are toxic to cats.
- Nothing enormous. A large arrangement in a small sitting room is furniture
nobody asked for.
Colour convention in Ireland has loosened. Pink for a girl and blue for a boy is
still what florists offer and still what a lot of people order, but soft mixed
brights, whites and greens are more common now and nobody reads anything into
them.
For the mother, not the baby
Address the card to her. She is the person who has been through something, and
she is the one who will be looking at the flowers at four in the morning.
Second and third babies get a fraction of the attention the first one did, which
every parent notices and nobody mentions. Sending flowers for a second baby is
one of the more appreciated things you can do precisely because so few people
bother.
The thing that beats flowers
Food. A cooked dinner that goes straight in the oven, dropped at the door with no
expectation of a chat, is worth more in the first fortnight than any bouquet in
the country.
Flowers do their work later, when the food has stopped arriving and the house has
gone quiet again. If you can do both, do the food first and the flowers in week
three.
