Baby Blogs On

Films to not watch as a new mum

Finding Nemo: this was my first venture out in the evening without babe, having left some expressed milk with babyfather. No-one had told me that Finding Nemo is all about the trauma of a father fish losing his last remaining child, the others having been massacred by a predator. I was very nearly in tears when he cradles his only surviving egg with the tiny fish visible inside and promises to protect it. I don't think of myself as an anxious mum - I don't feel the need to check that she's breathing every ten minutes and turn the light on at every nocturnal gurgle. But I felt distinctly jittery as Nemo's separation from his frantic father continued and I actually left the screen to phone home. My friend wanted to watch the credits and so on but there was NO WAY I was staying a second longer.

The Mission: There's this scene when native Indian villagers are forced to pile their babies in the rain and mud at the feet of some soldiers. One of them is helplessly clawing at a soldier's boot. Can't bear it...

Practically ready for university
8 weeks 2 days

Babe has made huge developmental leaps since the last blog, after a delay caused by a visit to Ganny and Gandad. For a start her vocabulary has increased from 'Ah' (that's a short 'a'; my keyboard lacks a phonetic alphabet) and the quite hard to pronounce 'Awwwr' (think of that scene in the cave towards the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). She punctuates her conversations with sudden SHOUTS to emphasise her points, and has a whole gamut of indignant shrieks mainly related to vest-changing.

Furthermore, three days ago babe was seen to use Hand-Eye Co-ordination! I noticed her sweeping her hand across a pattern on a pillowcase that had caught her attention. When I put a toy in the same place she must have concentrated on it for a full minute, goggling with huge eyes and batting at it gently. It seemed like the most amazingly clever thing in the world. She uses her whole arm as a rather blunt instrument, unaware of the use of her fingers. But it's still wonderful.

Another (unpleasant) milestone yesterday was the jabs. One in each thigh, and the needle was easily the same diameter as her little leg. I couldn't look. But proving that my assessment of babe's looks is completely objective, the GP pronounced her 'gorgeous' and that was when she was screaming! (babe not the GP.)

New sleep policy

There has been a complete volte-face since the last blog on the putting-to-bed routine. No-one could have convinced me that babe's pre-sleep cuddle was not absolutely necessary until Ganny confiscated her one morning and put her to bed herself. Plonk, in the cot, wide awake and emitting shrieks. One suck of her dummy, one deep sigh which Ganny interpreted as 'thank God you've finally all left me alone' and straight into a deep sleep. Then on the way home on the train she was grizzling after I'd put her to sleep in her car seat ,so I thought, ha, no Ganny around, I will pick her up and cuddle her I will, so I did and she roared at the top of her lungs until I put her back again.

Now the routine consists of just one hour in every 3 to 4 when I get her up, feed her, play with her, change her nappy and put her straight down again. I have the rest of the time to do leisurely things like rearrange the cereal boxes in the kitchen. I have some sympathy with my mum's friend who used to get bored and wake her babies up if they slept too long. Actually, I know God is graciously giving me the time to write my children's novel like I asked him to, but I'm studiously ignoring this fact. After all, there are cereal boxes to organise.

Happiness is a warm babe

Babe has a proper routine now. It goes like this:

Wake up, about three hours after the start of the last feed.
Feed for about half an hour.
Feel happy and talkative for about 15 minutes.
Have nappy changed. This is fine, get to look at Stimulating Pictures on mobile, unless followed by a change of clothes.
If followed by a change of clothes: scream inconsolably for about 15 minutes.
About an hour after waking up, get grizzly anyway, and start crying.
Get cuddled lying on parent's chest face down, with dummy inserted, especially if parent has headache.
Feel warm and cosy and drift off to sleep.
Get placed in crib. Wake up in about ten minutes to see if parent is paying attention. Dummy is reinserted and go back to sleep again.
Sleep for one and a half to two hours.
Wake up...

This is what we do all day if I'm not planning anything ambitious like leaving the house or, God forbid, giving babe a bath (as for change of clothes but times ten). It really does go like clockwork. I'm not a big fan of the popular 'Contented Little Baby Book' by Gina Ford - we dubbed it 'The Fascist Little Mother Book' before babe was born - but I have to admit that routines work. For both of us. She knows when she's going to get fed, and I know why she's crying according to what time it is, and how long I've got to do Something Else while she sleeps (like wash or eat).

But the Fascist Little Mother absolutely forbids cuddling your baby off to sleep, and that's where we part company. I'll worry about her having a 'sleep prop' when she's at least 3 months old, thank you very much. In the mean time, there is nothing better than a small, warm, spreadagled baby lying on your chest and fast asleep.

7 weeks tomorrow

What babe can do, now she's nearly 7 weeks:

Look adorable (OK, that's been happening for some time now)

Great gummy grins. She has been smiling socially since she was 10 days old, I kid you not. There's definitely a difference between the 'smile' that accompanies wind and the real smile in response to us smiling at her.

See the pictures on her mobile. We've got her an 'Infant Stim-mobile' (my friend leaned over her and said 'Are You Being Stimulated?') and she laughs at the pictures now as if they're hilarious. She also chats away to it while her nappy is being changed. Preferable to screaming.

Sit up straight when you hold her. Her head control is good but it does wobble back and forth like a nodding dog. Her expressions change every second from ecstatic to puzzled to sulking to just plain gormless. Then she's sick, or goes completely cross-eyed and fills her nappy with a sound so loud that I've been blamed for it.

Thank You Mr Gaviscon
6 weeks 1 day

On Tuesday, babe was such a contented little bunny that I decided to try not using the Gaviscon any more – I had my doubts that it was helping her colicky symptoms anyway. Big mistake. What I’d forgotten was what she was like before we started giving her Gaviscon.

There seem to be three levels to a baby’s cry:

Level one: unsettled, grizzly, not actually crying but not able to sleep either
Level two: crying but easily consoled with a cuddle or dummy
Level three: completely and utterly inconsolable crying, no matter what you do. (And you should see the lengths we go to)

I thought she was crying less because we were getting better at comforting her, but actually she hadn’t done any level three crying while she was on the Gaviscon – and it came back with a vengeance yesterday. I had to forget any plans I had for the evening yesterday and by the time babyfather came home from a very long day at work he had two crying females to sort out.

I wouldn’t have known about Gaviscon if it wasn’t for friends of ours who had a problem with their baby – she had very bad reflux which was making her scream for hours after every feed. Apparently the top opening of the stomach can be underdeveloped in babies, allowing acid from the stomach out into the oesophagus. It wasn’t diagnosed as reflux because there was no projectile vomiting, so it took months and at least one hospital admission to find a solution, and that solution was just a small amount of Gaviscon (there is a special type for infants) mixed with her feed. Gaviscon thickens the milk to help it not to escape, and neutralises the acid. I don’t quite understand why reflux would cause literally hours of crying and not just a few minutes after the feed, but I do know that babe is a completely different babe when she has Gaviscon; so reflux must be part of the problem.

Sleep?

Babe repeated her amazing sleep feat just once, although the cat woke me up instead by wailing at an intruder cat which had got into the house. Babe was back to waking at 3.30am this morning. At least my boobs were happy and there was no need to change my pjs.

Marsupials

I’ve been using a sling since babe’s first week – it’s a handy blue and white striped cloth contraption made by Wilkinet to tie babe onto my front. Babe thinks she is back in the womb, only the wrong way up, and goes straight to sleep. Mum gets on with housework / walks in the park / waits til babe is sleeping and whips her into the cot. Anyway, it looks perfectly OK to me, but Babyfather thinks he looks like a ‘wuss’ wearing it and has ordered a macho version which arrived yesterday. This one is serious. You strap a steel-grey harness to your virile torso (looks like the sort of gun holster the Mafia might wear under their suits) then insert babe into a matching grey pouch and click her onto your harness, whilst ruggedly scanning the horizon, one foot perched casually on a rock. There’s a handy zip up pocket for your revolver / mobile phone and when it rains you can pull out a little steel grey awning to shelter babe’s head. It has already served babyfather in such adverse environments as Sainsbury’s and The Park.

Sleep is possible
(5 weeks 3 days)

Babe has done the unbelievable – went to sleep at 11pm last night and woke up at 6am this morning. I thought that sleeping through the night is something you hoped for from 8 weeks at the earliest. I woke up at 3.30am for the usual feed, but she did not. I was quite happy to go back to sleep again; but my boobs were not aware of the new schedule and I had to change my soaking pyjama tops twice by morning. Will she repeat this tonight?

(The down side: I was told yesterday that your menstrual cycle starts up, not when you stop breast feeding altogether as I had thought, but when you drop the night feeds. Bummer. Wonder if this is true? Still, given the choice between having to suffer periods or sleep deprivation, I’d take the periods…)

NCT Reunion

We met up again today with the other couples who had attended National Childbirth Trust classes with us. All the bumps had turned into babies. Funny how I used to think that all babies looked the same.

First sighting of a baby smaller than babe since the birth – Adam at 5lb something. Feel nostalgic for babe’s younger days now she is so grown up. Soon people will stop stopping in their tracks in the supermarket, church and most recently the Natural History Museum (babe was prime exhibit) and say ‘How old is she?’ and then gasp and get misty eyed and call over their husband / wife and finish by saying ‘Oh, it doesn’t last long – ours is 6 foot 3 now…’

I loved the NCT classes. The aim is to prepare parents-to-be for birth, teaching on positions to adopt, breathing, pain relief, and medical interventions. There is an emphasis on avoiding medical interventions where they are not strictly necessary. NCT seems to be regarded with some suspicion by the medical profession as a result. One woman who attended an in-hospital birth class was told the NCT was all about lighting joss sticks and meditation.

Our class was attended almost exclusively by white middle class married couples aged about 30. Where was everyone else? Perhaps teenage mums and single mums couldn’t afford the £90 it cost, or perhaps they also thought they would have to meditate with joss sticks and anyway, pain is pain so bring on the drugs. Or perhaps if you’re on your own the last thing you want is to sit in a room full of smug marrieds.

Memorable moment in the NCT class: on the subject of pain relief the teacher asked if anyone had refused a local anaesthetic injection for dental treatment. I was wondering what kind of stupid question that was when one of the men put his hand up. The only black guy in the group was sitting next to this man and he turned to him and said simply, in a tone of deep respect, ‘Geezer.’

(N.B. in the birth videos they showed us, none of the mothers seemed to lose any blood, or indeed any unsightly bodily fluids, during the birth. How? Was it mopped up by CGI? Or where did they find these bloodless women? Or did they scrap a hundred bloody birth videos for every bloodless one that got released? I have to say, though, I’m very grateful for this bowdlerism – if someone had shown me a video of a birth like ours before it happened, with a pint of blood, meconium, amniotic fluid and other unmentionable substances in puddles on the floor, I may have opted for a caesarean under general anaesthetic. Some things you’re better not to know in advance.)

On the second of the two NCT ante natal classes we had mingled at lunchtime with new parents who had returned for their reunion with their babies. They seemed impossibly superior and worldly wise – the graduates. Today we were the graduates, quizzed by the new batch of undergrads, all pregnant and wide eyed. (OK, the men were just wide-eyed.) It does feel as if there is a huge unbridgeable gulf between those who are parents and those who aren’t. It’s not about superiority or inferiority. On my second day at home I said to my friend, a single mum who lives on our street, ‘I can’t believe we’re both standing here holding a baby.’ She said, ‘You’ve crossed the Rubicon. No-one can tell you what it’s like until you get here.’ What I don’t understand is why no-one explained how good it is. But then I probably never asked.