The Error of Our Ways

I hadn't thought about writing about this subject but I suppose I should really hold my hands up: I have done a complete U Turn on one aspect of child raising and this post by the Analytical Armadillo explains beautifully why.

Dear Sleep Trainer Expert,

by The Analytical Armadillo on Friday, 22 July 2011 at 13:34

COPIED FROM BLOG COMMENTS - BY EMMA:

Dear Sleep Trainer Expert,

My Grandfather died a month ago and my Grandmother was still not sleeping very well until last week and she was crying a lot in the night. It's really been disturbing my sleep. She had a stroke about 2 years ago and can't walk or talk so I'm her primary carer. It's hard work but I love her, and I know it will pass but I really needed more sleep! I was desperate!

I wanted to tell you how pleased I was to find your book "The Contented Little Baby Whisperer's guide to Saving my Sleep". Over the last few nights I've been sensible and strong. It's been tough, but we did it!

I've put Gran onto a routine where I feed her at 7pm, and that's THAT. She's learning now that if she's thirsty in the night, she'll have to wait. I bathe her with the lights low and tuck her in bed with 16 blankets, said goodnight and left her to it. Let me tell you she didn't half complain on that first night! She cried and cried but I wasn't going to let her manipulate me. Just because she's slept next to Grandpa for the last 45 years! She has to learn to be independent from other people, I realise that now.

I found that going in every few minutes and not giving her eye contact eventually meant she got the message. She was sick at one point which was a shock. I didn't know old people could manipulate like that! Anyway, I cleaned her up and just ignored it so she won't be trying that again.

She seems very happy today. Well, she's quiet anyway. Not hassling me at all! Bonus.

I can't wait to tell all my friends about your amazing system. My friend Sally has a disabled daughter who is 10 and can't talk or walk. I'm sure she'd find this system works brilliantly for her, too.

Love your biggest fan,

xxx

Yup, we followed the *cough* sage advice *cough* of a best selling (and highly litigious) sleep training expert and we made our boy follow a strict schedule of feeds and sleep trained him in his blacked out room, swaddled in his cot from the day we brought him home.

I honestly believe we're just about unpicking the damage of that approach to this day.

It is pointless to beat myself up over our approach, and in honesty Keith still doesn't really see that our approach was wrong at all, but then I am the sort of person who voraciously consumes research and he is the sort of person who looks at the end result  of a relatively peaceful night and considers that the end justifies the means.

I'm not going to get on my soapbox and quote a lot of research about how sleep training leaves a deep and lasting scar on the mental and emotional makeup of a child because if you are the sort of person who thinks about these things, you are fully able to search Google for the many studies that have been done. 

I just wanted to post that "letter", as much to myself as anyone else, as an amusing reminder why I will never, EVER let my child cry it out alone at night again. 

I blinked ...

... and missed half my pregnancy.

Honestly that’s how it feels,

“FFFFFFFFFFFFWWWWWWWwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”

“What the hell was that?!”

“Oh that? That was your pregnancy, here’s your daughter”

I feel like the milestones are hitting me one after another and the latest one is we have now completed 24 weeks. That is my favourite milestone of all because it’s the time at which my daughter starts to be treated by the outside world as a proper potential person.

The way I felt about the last few weeks is, I imagine, similar to the way people feel when they reach the £500,000 question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The closer to 24 weeks, the higher the jeopardy and you just want everything to hang together for just those few more days and weeks until some mythical box is ticked and yes, your child is now viable.

It actually makes no real difference, there are babies who survive happily before 24 weeks and babies who don’t survive long after 24 weeks has passed, but that stupid arbitrary numbers is the key to buying your child a chance at life at the hands of the medical profession and that makes it important.

I remember feeling the same way about Alfie which in hindsight is quite amusing considering how long my pregnancy lasted. I also note the stark contrast between my pregnancies in that this time I have done nothing to prepare for this birth.

I’m reliably informed that comes from having a toddler in the house.

I think I should also point out that unlike in the post above, there have so far been no knitted gifts arriving from the land of Gibraltaria. I point this out because my daughter is all “where’s my damn waffle fries??” and it’s my ribs that are taking the beating. So you, Auntie Michie, get on it.

In actual fact that is no joke, by ribs ARE taking a pounding at the moment which is simultaneously great because it means my little girl is head down most of the time and bad because it bloody hurts. Considering I have an anterior placenta this time I am shocked at how strong this baby is, and how much of a pounding my belly is taking. I don’t ever remember being able to watch my belly jump around last time, but I can now.

She is also a total daddy’s girl and every time Keith puts a hand near my belly she’s all KA-BLAMO!!!! ... sweet that he finally gets to feel a baby kicking him, not so sweet when it happens at 5am after Keith has rolled over and cuddled into me. She kicked him so hard this morning he actually half woke up and asked if what he’d just felt was a kick.

No my sweet, I was just having a clandestine game of Buckaroo.

I also haven’t managed to take or post one single belly shot this pregnancy either, but I feel the time has come. And since Keith was too busy lamenting the end of the space mission to take a photo for me, I had to cobble one together this morning with the aid of a mirror and barely opened eyes.

 As my final thought for the day, I’m strangely drawn to researching Kangaroo Care this pregnancy. No idea why. But I saw this article today and I thought I would share it as a good introduction to something that I hope will become common practice in the care of premie babies. Like all good ideas this one feels like nothing more than good common sense.

Are You Feeling Quite Right?

Some of you may have heard that a pretty major paper was released last week by the RCOG and that I have singularly failed to comment on it.

Am I feeling ok? Has the cutes of my first born dulled my previous sharp inclination to social commentary?

Firstly, yes I am feeling just fine and secondly, he’s not cute. He is a rabid little monster who refused to come inside from his house last night (despite there being a full on downpour) until his dad dragged him in sporting a death pout.

There is actually a very good reason why I haven’t bothered to blog so far about the RCOG paper, and that’s the lesson I was taught as a child that if you have nothing nice to say, you should stay quiet.

Well I tried but the more I read about this story, the more I feel compelled to write something about it. I feel bad being the wet blanket here but I feel like I have to return a dose of reality to things.

With my NCT hat on, this report is amazing news, not just for what it says but for the fact that we as the NCT were heavily involved in contributing. Organisations working together to provide healthcare – that in itself is worthy of the news coverage surely?

I’m also loving the idea that the organisation representing consultants is recommending that more birth be taken outside of the current tertiary setting (that’s consultant led care to you and me) and back into the community where it belongs. It’s a pretty shocking statement to hear from the governing body of God complexes isn’t it?

So what’s your problem woman? What’s with the negativity?

OK well I’ll tell you.

It’s never going to happen.

There I said it. Sorry, I hate naysayers usually but I feel like this euphoria needs a serious dose of reality.

The proposals that are made in the RCOG require what is optimistically called a “cultural change” in the NHS. More precisely it says:

“The impact of developing a woman’s health network will result in more services being delivered in a primary and community-based setting. Women will still have ready access to hospital-based care

but this will be when clinical need dictates or the woman chooses to have her care delivered in this setting (if clinically appropriate). Specialist services are likely to be strengthened by pooling the

subspecialist consultant resource into fewer localities, allowing for more focused delivery of care.

It is likely that the medical workforce will be required to be more flexible in the settings in which they work to facilitate improvement in care. This will require contractual negotiations across

foundation trusts. However, such an excellent model exists within midwifery, with midwives working across different levels of service. This also facilitates continuity of care for the woman.

Such a major change needs a culture change among professionals (particularly primary and secondary care physicians), commissioners and women. A concerted effort will be required to

educate all stakeholders.”

Are you out of your ever loving minds?!?!

So just to clarify:

Women (who have spent the last 3 generations being told that if they don’t come to hospital to birth their bodies will implode into a big ball of fail) are going to be suddenly empowered to choose a different model of care. They are going to choose to abandon hospitals in their droves when at the moment most hospitals struggle to get them off their backs in the delivery room.

Midwives who are (according to the report) 5,000 members down on where they need to be now are going to take on a larger slice of maternity care.

And just to top it off, commissioners are going to implement a nationwide strategy removing local variations in service offerings.

Ah ha. I’m sorry was I away the day they dished out the jazz cigarettes?

This is one of those times I really hope I’m wrong because it’s amazing to hear the RCOG looking beyond their egos to what is genuinely in the best interests of women. But my limit experience of the machinations of the NHS leave me feeling pretty hopeless that this paper will ever come to pass. It is certainly not geared up to be able to deliver it now, and to develop that capability and get the people on the front line of delivering the service to implement it on a consistent basis would be like expecting the army to hand in their weapons and resolve all future conflicts through the power of song.

There are your chips, consider them well and truly peed on.    

Fig Tree Cottage - The Junior Edition

On Friday Alfie had a very special delivery of his first house.

There is one constant in Alfie's play regimes and that is if there is a play house in a 10 metre radius, the house is belong to him. Or more specifically the door.

Door opens, door closes, door opens, door closes.

I'll be honest, it's not a game that plays out well with other children and usually ends up in squawking hissy fits from whoever loses the battle of It's-My-Door-No-It's-Not.

So we saw a house recently with some money off and decided to use some vouchers we had hanging about to splurge and give Alfie a front door of his very own.

Check out the Mediterranean pose ... Ciao!

So after he installed himself in his house, we thought it might be nice to see if he might want to play. Keith went up to the door, knocked and asked to come in - yeah I know, like he'd fit, right? - the answer was unequivocally "No!".   

That's the polite version, the actual reaction involved the baby equivalent of "F'coff" and the threat of wanton violence.

Keith sensibly beat a hasty retreat but if anyone wants to come over for a play date, I'm sure we can hog tie him long enough to let someone else have a go.

Swamp Thing

Warning: This post will probably make you think I'm the worst mother in the world. If so, I expect a hearty UNFOLLOW!

Yesterday we were once again abandoned by Keith, so Alfie and I arranged to go and spend some time with Tiff and her her hounds at a local beauty spot.

It's a bit shameful to admit but in the 3 years I lived near it, I never knew it existed. I wish I had because it is just the mos amazing place and I am quite gutted I no longer have it on my doorstep.

When we arrived I hurried Alfie past the ice cream van and callously sidetracked him with carved wooden creatures in the children's area.

He bought it - and I do appreciate the fact that or a few short months I can persuade him that climbing is preferable to a Zoom lolly, I doubt I will be so lucky next summer.

It did help that in this case there were other children to play with. I'm pretty sure he's pulling his best "so .... you come here often" line on her in this photo.

Not long after this we met up with Tiff and went off into the wilds of the park proper. Alfie in his buggy, the dogs running laps around us as we got out of the baking sun and into the cool of the forest.

Eventually we reached a pool where the dogs belly flopped gratefully after sticks.

Alfie thought this was a marvellous idea and knowing I had one spare t shirt, one spare nappy and a boy who loves water, I decided to strip him down to his T and shoes and for us both to go for a paddle.

It's called pragmatic parenting.

I want to say a massive thank you to Tiff for taking these photos and for letting me share them, otherwise you would only have my words instead of the following sequence that actually gave me a stitch.

c'MON mum!!

Just a bit deeper, see the Fey dog is all the way over there!

Can I sit here for a bit? I can make swirly mud shapes if I kick my feet.

I. don't. want. to. warm. up. I. am. FINE! 

See we can stand here and watch the dogs

And maybe we can do the splashing

I splash YOU!

Oh, I splash me too.

I do stick throwing too.

Stick goes down.

Stupid follow-though

I am WOES!!!

Poor me.

But tasty treat makes it better.

Yup, I am a bad, bad mother. Or maybe I'm a mum who takes an old school approach of letting my over adventurous son discover his limitations for himself - these days the two seem to be viewed as the same thing.

Sad really, whole generations of kids will miss out on impromptu skinny dipping in favour of over chlorined toddler pools. Sadder still that they will miss out on an important life lesson in cause and effect - throw stick too forcefully, get stinky pond water up nose. Fact.

Books That Change Your World

There are some books that you read and then set aside and go on with your life. There are others that you read at just the right moment so that they leave a huge indelible footprint on you.

A lovely friend leant me a book recently called Birthing from Within. It was hard going at first because it started with chapters on birth art (which I really had no interest in creating for myself) but then the book moved on to other subjects.

At that point, my head was still in a similar place to where I was with Alfie: I was busy trying to organise my way to the perfect care and birth. A really strange thing happened as I was reading the book though, my focus begun to shift as the words I was reading slowly began to sink in.

I read a chapter about Birth Plans and it suddenly made sense to me why I had been struggling to visualise labour. With Alfie my focus was on organising every detail, my Birth Plan long and trying to account for every eventuality and what I had really done was make it so narrow that it was almost impossible to achieve. I was trying to organise my way into what I imagined the perfect labour to be, this book flipped that on its head and made me realise that the perfect birth was adaptable, flexible and very much in the moment.

I haven’t written a birth plan this time. Instead I have put my energy into talking to Mel about where I am and where my boundaries lie.

Instead of a Birth Plan I have an awesome picture copied from the book and blown up to stick on the wall which illustrates this next passage.

Because the lesson I really took from this book in a light-bulb moment was that to succeed, I was going to have to not think. If I was going to do any preparation before this birth it wasn’t to educate myself, but to pass my thoughts and feelings onto someone I trusted to use them so that I could forget them entirely.

I don’t try and visualise labour any more (I still can’t see what it’s going to look like) instead I visualise doing nothing extra.

Except booking my TENS, I really need to do that.

Everything About You

I’ve been focused on writing about this pregnancy recently because that is what has been filling my head. Luckily for me I also have the most amazing toddler in the world who makes me and his dad remark on a daily basis how much we love him and find him the funniest thing since Del Boy fell through a bar.

In the last few months every part of his development has just exploded and I can suddenly see before me the child that my baby is becoming. It’s a pretty awe inspiring thing to witness, this little person emerging from the cocoon of a toddler and I thought it was time I captured the things I love most about Alfie right now so that when he is 16 and trying to be The Big I Am in front of some girl, I can call this page up and embarrass the crap out of him:

Oh No!

You have to imagine a slightly Cartman-esque delivery for this one, it’s usually said “ooooooh NOH!” with hands raised melodramatically to cheeks. It is also said about 50 times a day at the moment and if there is nothing currently going wrong, my little darling will create something just so he can say it. I’ve now lost track of the number of times Keith and I have replied “don’t you oh no me, you did it!” but on the other hand I hope he never stops doing it because behind every raised eyebrow and stern look is a chuckle desperately trying to force its way out.

Blowing dandelions

Now that the weather is warm and the evenings long, we have become a bit more chilled about pushing back Alfie’s bedtime. After dinner we often go for walks up a local closed road called West Drive which is a great place for Alfie to weave his drunken toddler way in our wake investigating the plants and sticks. We taught him how to blow the seeds from dandelion clocks except he didn’t quite get the blowing part. First he would just kiss them, which was sweet but not entirely effective. Then he mistook what we were trying to tell him and started sucking instead of blowing. I have spent many minutes on our walks fishing clumps of spit soggied dandelion seeds from my son’s mouth recently while trying not to laugh too hard.  

Dancing

Alfie loves to dance. At home, in the car, in fact anywhere. I bought Keith a Paulo Nutini album recently and it lives in the mighty Benz. Not only does Alfie clap enthusiastically at the end of several tracks but when Pencil Full of Lead comes on he does this really sweet sitting down hula dance move in his car seat. It starts with the head going side to side and by the end of the track is a bit of a full torso tank slapper. It’s even worse when he’s standing up but at least he offsets the wobble with a weird stamping arm flapping arrangement. If it weren’t for the smile nailed to his face I might get worried he were suffering some kind of seizure.

Balala?

Still a favourite food, The Banana has been renamed. He’s getting pretty good at identifying the various parts of a balala too. Yesterday during our midwife appointment (which went perfectly) Alfie looked into a waste paper basket and seeing a banana skin turned, pointed to it and asked “balala?” in his best “please may I have one?” intonation. I love that he recognises the word when we say it in conversation and looks up quizzically with a “yes-please-now” expression. I love that he has now taken banana eating to the next level by experimenting with eating them widthways as well lengthways. I especially love it when he can’t decide how many bites are left and instead rams the whole damn lot into his chops, often to the extent that he needs a hand placed over his mouth to stop the whole lot escaping again.

Bedtime

Bedtimes are still me and Alfie time and I treasure them more and more every day. They always go the same way: We go upstairs, he gets up onto his bed and tucks into his bedtime drink while I change him into his night clothes. Then I lift him round onto the pillow, tuck him up with ‘Walla and we read a story. Often I read him one of the Spanish books we have because it’s the only way he gets to hear Spanish regularly and he points at pictures while I read. When he’s finished he hands me his drink and turns onto his side with a big sigh. I have to leave the book though otherwise there are grumblings. Then I kiss him, tell him I love him and leave him to it. By ‘it’ I mean the hour of playing that always follows me leaving the room. I love that he thinks me and his dad can’t hear the herd of Rhinostrich upstairs, or that we don’t twig when his room looks like Armageddon the next morning, but if I look back at the door, I can always see a beady eye trained on me just waiting for me to go. Son, you had better get better at being subtle if you ever want to sneak out of the house.  

In terms of things I don’t like about Alfie these days there is but one – The Toddler Tantrum. 

Oh dear Lord how they do vex! 

I saw this article today though and it was a timely reminder for me. I sometimes find it really hard to remember that flailing screaming ab dabs aren’t just an exercise in pissing me off but this article I think takes a pragmatic and sensible approach to what you can do to avoid selling your offspring for the price of a G&T.

Waterbaby

I must be one of the few people who was actually quite hoping for our UK summer to underachieve in its usual spectacular way.

For most of this pregnancy I have been THIRSTY and all this warm weather has just sent me over the edge. Seriously, don’t leave a drink near me, I’ll down it.

I also have a fairly common folate metabolism disorder which means I am stuck with taking folic acid (and aspirin) every day of my pregnancy. Not exactly the biggest inconvenience for the pleasure of growing a new human, but still a bit of a faff sometimes. I have bottles of tablets at home, at work and even in the car and an alarm set on my phone and yet somehow I still end up forgetting; but that’s nappy brain for you.

Anyway the point is that my troubles may be over!!

I won a competition run by a new company called Waterbaby who have produced water with folic acid and other good stuff in it. That means I will soon be getting a supply of citrusy flavoured water that means I won’t risk giving myself crippling stomach ache again when I accidentally forget and take my tablets on an empty stomach.

In the days when I was feeling like I was in a small boat in the middle of a stormy sea this would have been the perfect way to get my folic acid without running the daily gauntlet of breakfast. I’m not condoning skipping meals of course but the reality of morning sickness is that it doesn’t exactly give you an appetite.

I fully intend to install my free supply of Waterbaby in my car so that when I’m slowing char broiling on the M25 in standing traffic, I will at least have the pleasure of knowing that I am giving my little girl the goodness she needs.

Birth Grief

I was reminded by a good friend the other day that people read this blog. Not a shocking revelation perhaps but she told me the story of her friend who had gone to an antenatal appointment and in response to some seemingly innocuous comment had released a whole can of whoopass on herself when the emotional maelstrom of her first birth was suddenly and violently released. I’ve been thinking about that lady for the last few days, and my own experiences this pregnancy, and I decided to share what I can in the spirit of sisterhood.

I was left emotionally broken by Alfie’s birth. Like a lot of women though I didn’t stop to acknowledge that fact, I sucked it up, dug deep and threw myself 100% into the evolution of our new little family. I didn’t do it deliberately but I am the sort of person who seems to get called a “strong woman” a lot, and us strong women don’t sit in a corner and weep, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and join some committees to kick the ever loving crap out of the system that did us wrong.

I think I would have quite happily carried on like that had we not decided to have more children. I’m not sure what innocuous trigger would have set me off, perhaps that is irrelevant because it would have been something, but in actual fact for me it was my hynobirthing CDs doing what they were supposed to be doing and helping me let go of my past birth. Except instead of the few resentments I thought I was carrying, what those CDs did was open a door I didn’t even know was there and suddenly my entire insides were full of anger and pain and hurt and I don’t know what the hell you are but you have 3 heads and big fucking teeth!!

It made me want to cry lots. And shout too. It made me want the whole world to go away and leave me the hell alone. It didn’t make sense and it certainly wasn’t under my control and I didn’t understand any of it. Most importantly I didn’t know what to do with it.

So I did what us ‘strong women’ do and got on with things and left this thing to sit in the corner and throw its toddler tantrum. Except that didn’t make it go away, although it did give me the time to be able to study it and slowly it turned from a mass of nasty into tangible themes and shapes and reasons that I was actually capable of putting into words. The problem then was who would listen to those words.

I chose to talk things through with my doula Mel and it was a wise decision. For those of you who have husbands like mine, who think the only topics of conversation that hold any merit are the transfer window or whether Vettel has this championship locked out (unfortunately I think he may well do) please find yourself a ‘Mel’. I have spent the last five months being told “god you’re so pregnant” whenever I’ve gotten emotional or cross and I’ve known there was little to no point in trying to explain that actually I’m grieving horribly because it would be a little like trying to explain to a gazelle that the lion doesn’t hate him, it’s just really hungry.

I have felt horribly alone and lost with the strength and intensity of the emotions I’ve been feeling which is ironic because I’m not alone at all: This is not an unusual situation I find myself in. There are a lot of us going through this horrible reckoning during our subsequent pregnancies and it is hard to deal with, not least because of the guilt you feel that your last pregnancy was like a Disney film and this one has been a complete train wreck. It isn’t helped by idiots who try to give you the idea that your last birth was ok “because you all came out of it alive” (if you are one of these people do yourself a favour and don’t EVER say those words again) because that is patronising and horribly ignorant of your needs as a woman.

There is no real point to this post I suppose, other than to say to any woman out there who reads this and feels a spark or recognition that a) you’re not going mad, you’re grieving, it’s allowed and b) you are not alone.

For the first time ever I am able to cry and for it to feel good. It’s a horrible road that will leave you cut and raw, but it’s a good road too. And when I reach the end of it, maybe I will share more of my journey along it.