Baby Blogs On

The babes story has moved yet again... and can now be found here.

This blog has moved!
Hacked again by babyfather

Go to: 'babymother' for further installments in the life of babe.

Never again...
20 weeks

...will I interrupt babe's precious sleep - especially that 3 hour stint in the morning - for the frivolous purpose of meeting friends.

Spent the rest of the day picking up the pieces. Eating and sleeping out of the window. Hers and ours.

Morning has broken
20 weeks soon

Babe slept til 6.50am, very civilized, but as usual I have been up since 5am...

I woke up from a dream about someone eating in our bedroom to realise that the cat was washing herself noisily right next to the bed. This is her sly way of telling me it's time for breakfast without actually jumping on me. Then I had to get up because I was parched. Then I thought I'd feed the cat while I was in the kitchen (no doubt waking up CB whose room is next to the kitchen). In walking past the nursery I must have made a noise, because once I was in the kitchen I heard a bit of an eruption - babe can do this in her sleep - so I sprinted quietly back to our room to shut the door on sleeping babyfather, who was starting to huff and puff under the duvet. I was thoroughly awake by this time and realised I couldn't possibly go back to sleep without a large bowl of muesli, which I ate as quietly as I could on the landing. Then, all having returned to quiet, I crept back to bed.

Just as I was drifting off the peace was shattered by the cat vomiting loudly in the bedroom doorway.

As this noise subsided, the special rubbish collection for the care home next door turned up, roaring and clanking. By then it was ten past six and any further attempts at sleep were useless.


Whew

Must remember to put the brake on the pushchair before I let go of it. Especially when on a slope leading to a busy road.

The fingers get busier



Favourite toy: two wooden frogs which spin round the top of a music box to the tune of Swan Lake. She studies them with furious concentration, fingers fluttering all over the place, before knocking them onto the floor.

Watching her use her hands reminds me of trying to do a delicate operation wearing a very thick pair of gloves. The fingers don't quite go where you intend them to. It looks frustrating at times. Still, it must be rewarding to get babyfather picking the same toy off the floor for you three times in as many minutes.

Cybermum
19 weeks and some

The blog has suffered because I have discovered 'mumsnet'. It allows you to post your inane new-mum questions and get bombarded with concerned old-mum responses. I'm hooked.

I had another panic at the end of last week about breastfeeding the babe. The feeding policy has changed daily. We've had top-ups with formula, starting her on solids (again), expressing breast milk to top her up in the evening, back where we started with just breastfeeding and the intention of staying off solids til 6 months, to more top-ups with formula. It all depended on whose advice I heard last. I was running in circles phoning friends, talking to breastfeeding counsellors, the health visitor, posting mumsnet, and least helpfully of all reading Gina Ford (The Fascist Little Mother Book). Health visitors say wean her, she's 4 months. But the World Health Organisation and the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers say wait til 6 months. Gina Ford says keep her in a strict routine of 4-hourly feeds. The breastfeeding mafiosa say feed on demand to build your milk supply and never give formula.

At the end of all this I looked at babe, she smiled back at me, and I realised what a gorgeous little girl she is. She's the picture of health, her default is set to 'happy', she sleeps for Britain and I love her. So what exactly is the problem? I have now resolved to enjoy my baby no matter what (and avoid extremist ideology).

Phew
19 weeks, 1 day and still alive

Must stop dashing behind reversing cars with the pushchair.

Little fingers
19 weeks

It's true that you get used to doing everything with one hand, especially with a baby that needs keeping upright for a while after feeding. I've been carrying babe around with one hand and doing all sorts of dexterous things with the other since the start. Babe isn't one to allow herself just to be baggage, however. Once she learnt that the routine was pick her up, go to the kitchen, get the Gaviscon from the fridge, warm it up, carry it to the front room and feed her, she has made her feelings known when I deviate from that routine. She watches everything like a hawk and if I do something irrelevant such as walk into the wrong room / pick up something that isn't her bottle / start a conversation, she lets out an indignant shriek. There's been a new factor for the last three weeks or so too; I'll be getting a CD out of its cover to put in the player and suddenly find that the cover is being held by one big hand and two tiny ones. Anything I'm holding, she wants to hold too. This is quite useful, especially so because at this age babies are better at grasping than letting go. So if I carry her into the bedroom to fetch a clean bib, I can give it to her to carry wherever we're going next. Like a sort of cute portable clothespeg.

Colic and panic
4 months and a bit

You can be sure that if the blog goes quiet for a bit, the babe hasn't been.

Her evenings have been pretty unsettled for the last 4 weeks, then from Wednesday they all went horribly wrong - lots of discomfort and screaming after feeds - and all of Thursday she had diarrhoea accompanied by more screaming. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I have used the out-of-hours doctors' service twice since then, once by phone and once in person, and been to North Middlesex A & E. I hasten to add I only went to A & E because I was trying to use the NHS 'walk-in service'. It turned out to be the NHS stand-around service, where after about 15 minutes in a queue I was told to go next door to A & E because I had a child under a year old. Accident and Emergency was as close to one of the circles of hell as I can imagine without actually bothering to read Dante. It was dimly lit and full of restrained suffering including more queuing (a sort of English flavour of hell). The woman queuing in front of me had to be held in a standing position by her partner and by the time she was called in to see the doctor she was crouching on the floor. Babe, embarrassingly enough, was all chirpy and the picture of health.

Finally, in the children's A & E department a fed-up nurse told me that all the doctors had just changed over to start a new three-month rotation, none of them knew what they were doing yet, everything was taking ages, they all had less experience than a GP, and if she were me she'd go home. Which I did, after a surreal conversation with a blond Irish woman whose one-year-old had asthma, about whether breast feeding made your boobs ugly or not.

Finally a nice, plump, bearded, Greek doctor told me today that babe probably has colic as well as reflux and I should give her fennel tea.

Family, shedloads of,
4 calendar months



The babe has been to Wales this weekend for some adoration from the rellies.

Babyfather and I left her for the first time in the care of someone else, on two occasions, during the course of the weekend. The someone elses were the capable Nanny and Noo Noo, but nonetheless I managed to have palpitations when I was meant to be enjoying some shopping. The increasing volume of milk I was carrying about was not helping, but mainly it was separation anxiety, which I thought only happened to the child part of the equation.

Babe coped well with the large numbers of people (who she'd already met but probably were strangers as far as she was concerned). Welsh Babycousin is a firm favourite, being of the small variety (five and three quarters). She grabbed his nose, much to her own amusement. He is now an expert at replacing her dummy and hosted his own radio show over the baby monitor.

Progress report
4 months

If babe is to reach the heights of football prowess that babyfather expects, there are a few skills to be mastered first - learning to sit up, for instance. Lying around in the field could hamper her team mates, however good her dribbling.

Today babe made exciting progress in that direction (at least you'd be excited if you were her grandmother and a paediatric physiotherapist, both of which Ganny happens to be). I laid her on her front for a spot of baby massage after her bath, and she pushed up with her hands so that she was holding her head and chest off the floor. She kept this up for the several minutes I spent oiling her. I was of course completely calm and unconcerned but I thought Ganny would want to know so I phoned her in the next five minutes.

Another milestone was the introduction of a teaspoon of 'baby rice' to the babe's mouth, and thence to her bib. Apparently she will eventually learn to keep it inside her mouth, which makes it easier to digest.

Babymother is pleased to report that the bosom friendship continues. :-)

Boobs, boobs, read all about it
16 weeks 5 days

Apologies for the long blog-gap. Bloggap?

My whole life for the last week has been to do with breast-feeding, and the agonies and ecstacies thereof. I followed the health visitor's advice and tried to feed the babe more often to build up my milk supply (you may recall that I was starving her). Unfortunately I made the mistake of trying to feed her a couple of times after only two hours (traditionally, it's four), when my boobs were off-duty. She tried to feed, got nothing out, concluded that boobs are useless and nothing would persuade her to try again. So she had a bottle of formula. That's happened a few times, and there have also been times when she's drunk all I had to offer and still been hungry, so I've topped her up with formula. I'm really not sure that I have enough milk to keep up with her new voracious appetite, and now she knows about bottles, she's really not sure she has enough patience for my slow output.

This could be the end of our bosom friendship, and I have to say, I'm gutted. There's nothing like the intimacy of breast feeding, and the feeling of providing all she needs from my own body as I did in pregnancy. I also love the naturalness of it (although in reality my milk will presumably have a higher pesticide content than Cow & Gate organic formula).

So I'm hanging on to it while I can by expressing milk every time she rejects it, to be fed to her later, and to keep up my milk supply.

Having said all that, it really doesn't matter in the slightest, and thank God for formula. If I find it upsetting to have babe screaming at my breast, when I can just get some formula out of the kitchen cupboard, how do mothers find it when there is no other way to feed their baby?

Too thick to pray
16 weeks tomorrow

Yesterday was mostly horrible - I'd had very little sleep as usual and just could not see a solution to, or even a cause of, babe's evening wailing. It had happened at the same time of day, every day, from Wednesday to Sunday. I spoke to two pharmacists, a health visitor, a Paediatrician's Hotline (turned out to be for GPs only) and a hospital walk-in clinic. I concluded it wasn't constipation because the health visitor said babe's tummy would feel very solid if it was. But I wasn't sure if one more dose of Gaviscon would make a difference. Finally it occurred to me that after the drama of the birth, and the chaos of all the crying in the first few weeks, I haven't asked God for much help with babe. So I apologised, mentally handed her back to him, put my hand on her tummy, prayed for healing and then had a nap (feeling much better). The scheduled evening scream did not materialise, and it still hasn't. Make of that what you will!

However, she has managed to lose an ounce in the last week and barely gained anything the three weeks before that. I saw the lovely health visitor today who first encouraged me to try Gaviscon. (She's called Faith, so perhaps my whole life is just a sort of Pilgrim's Progress analogy.) She says that babies do sometimes stop gaining weight after they start sleeping through the night because they have dropped a whole feed. I need to cram in as many as I can in the daytime now... Or we'll have to go with babe's plan, which is to wake up for a night feed again. She's done it for the last two nights.

Antics for Dummies
15 weeks 5 days

Babe is very skilled in dummy control, therefore a budding footballer according to babyfather. Here are some of her moves, all performed while lying down:

- the chomp: picks up dummy from mattress by pouncing on and closing open mouth around teat in one swift action
- the 180: swivels dummy 180 degrees in mouth to acheive correct position (often combined with chomp)
- the flick: inserts finger in dummy handle and flings across room
- the seal: juggles dummy in mouth precariously while turning head from side to side
- the multi-tasker: sucks dummy and fingers simultaneously.

Babyfather observed a slightly self defeating move yesterday when she grabbed hold of the dummy handle, yanked it out of her mouth and held it at arm's length while wailing because she couldn't suck it any more. Still, this could be used to confuse the opposition.

4 seconds in the life of babe
15 weeks 5 days




Cats on blackboards

The last entry was the start of a downward trend - every evening at about the same time, babe gets very distressed and can't sleep through most of her last naptime of the day. If we sit next to her, rocking the crib and making sure her dummy doesn't escape her, she screeches intermittently like a scalded cat. Or like nails on a blackboard. That cry has got to be one of the most grating noises known to man - I suppose it's designed NOT to be ignored. So she gets picked up and carried around til our backs ache.

Something's obviously amiss - is it the reflux? If so, more Gaviscon would be the answer. Or is it constipation, caused by Gaviscon? If so, the opposite is true. We might instead try Carobel, a thickener that hasn't been linked to constipation as far as I can see on the internet (thank you Jeeves).

Big Bottom Girl

The washable nappies arrived yesterday. They are a delicious array of lilac, pink, green, yellow and orange terry towelling. I aready have the waterproof 'wraps' (not pants, thank you very much) that go on top. These nappies are the size below the ones I tried previously so her bottom is not so bulky. However, I worked out that she has to wear this size for the next 16 weeks at least before the cost works out cheaper than disposables. Of course, if I want to make a spectacular saving I could put my next six babies in them.