Squirrel Baby Walks

A few days prior to my last post, SB had begun practicing standing up without holding on to anything. He has a large, fabric covered rubber ring which, as I understand it, is meant to contain 6m+ babies who can sit up. SB escaped from it in 20 seconds at 6 months old. But it's still the best purchase so far. He loves to climb in and out of it and at first his wee legs would wriggle like Porky Pig's as he tried to get them over the edge. Now he dives in and climbs out with a bit more finesse. That's a lie. There is no finesse about Samuel. He gets in and out more quickly than he used to and sometimes without banging his head off the floor.

It was in the ring that he first started to practice the hands free standing. I thought he'd walk at 9 months. Perhaps the whiff of parental smugness put him off. He's got it now.
First steps 5 weeks over due and proper walking 2 weeks later. I'm charting the intervening stages in my own wee book because although SB's page is primarily for me, I know a couple of other people read it too. While I could detail it here ad nauseum, I still want people to like me.

I think he may be about 5 by the time he bothers to talk. And he has no idea how to wave. But he does know where his head, ears and tongue are, which is useful I think.

It's Getting Better (or Misery Loves Company)

I have never liked New Year. It probably makes me the ultimate cynic but I really cannot buy into the idea that this particular turn of the calendar can herald anything more than any other. Oh I know no one else really thinks so either, but I can't even pretend. Not even for one night. Which is just as well as I'm stuck indoors with a baby in any case. I really like Christmas and particularly the run up to Christmas Day. After that everything loses its sparkle and perhaps that adds to my antipathy. The best New Year has to offer is extra days off work which doesn't even apply to me this year. Even in the short term I have only the dark days of January and February ahead of me. And this year for me means returning to work - so what's to look forward to?

Okay I had to be that miserable because that is how I always feel on 31 December. Except last year when I was all pregnant and deluded. Wow what a simpler time. I should celebrate 'Happy Old Year' and enjoy how contented I was 12 months ago. Tomorrow I'll feel better. And although I cannot bear resolutions, I do have some hopes for myself. The inevitable weight loss plans, not least because I have bags of size 10 work clothes to fit into by April. Also I'm going to work on feeling positive about going back to work. It is going to happen so I might as well change the only thing that I CAN change, which is my attitude towards it. Difficult though as I'm stuck in a loop of negative thought about it. I want to go part time so I can see enough of SB but we need a bigger house to accomodate growing SB but cannot afford one if I go part time which I want to do to see enough of SB. Arghhhh. And while I'm on the subject, how do people afford more than one child and still send them both to nursery? Poor only child SB.
So, um this is depressing so on to better things such as SB. What a happy chap. I think it's probably more entertaining to read about me coping with a difficult SB, yet getting by and making light of it where I can. In fact now he's just lovely and I don't want to say too much because it will sound like bragging. And there is nothing worse that a bragging mother, especially to those who also have young babies. I'm lucky enough that throughout the really difficult first 5 months, no one bragged to me about their baby. But even knowing that other people were able to take their young babies on holiday or that other babies could go in their buggies without screaming or that other babies did not girn and fuss and wake up every hour at night, made me feel low and useless. When SB's change first came about, I shouted from the rooftops about it. Now it is becoming normal to have a happy baby so I will hold my tongue. Those who know him, know how wonderful he is and all the things he is up to. It is so great to be a proud mother of a happy child.

And so how depressing to have to leave him with others while I go to work. Oh I tried to be positive, but it's 31 December so it's simply not possible.

Are you there Samuel? It's me, Mummy.

SB is 6 months old today. This week he has learned to sit up by himself and is pretty proud of himself. He is also trying his best to get the crawling started. He's up on his hands and knees but he is now trying to go from that position to having his feet flat on the floor. As if he wants to stand. Trust SB to try to walk before he can crawl. I blame myself for playing Sinatra's High Hopes to him daily from 2 months old.

After my sleep training boasts, things are really needing addressed again. SB is spending altogether too much time in our bed. I can't count the number of times I wake up and look to my side to see two sleeping boys. And I think, again, why am I so often awake when they are asleep? The reason that we haven't solved the sleep thing is that I really do not want to listen to crying at night and so I just feed him. Which has led to problems. Not least my desire to inflict violence on anyone whose baby 'has always slept through the night'.
I secretly pray that they will suddenly experience sleep problems about a week after I have solved ours. Some books say there is no way a 6 month old needs to wake in the night for food and that it is just habit. Other books say that some 6 month old babies will need to feed in the night. I also suspect many parents are lying their asses off. Or, to be kinder, are wildly exaggerating. In my book sleeping through the night is 7pm-7am. Anything less than that is not sleeping through the night. One woman I spoke to told me her daughter slept through the night but it transpired that she meant from 11pm to 5am. I'm not judging - as D says, we all do what we need to in order to get by, but please don't call it sleeping through the night. Regardless of anyone else, SB does have a problem and he possibly eats more at night than during the day. Daytime is too exciting to be spent eating as far as he is concerned. But it has to stop. I'm the boss. Yes I am.

I should say that SB did sleep through the night two nights in a row in August. But he has never managed to do it again. We have no idea why he did it in the first place and no idea why he stopped.

Tonight, I decided to make sure that I put him in his cot AWAKE. We'd started to do that in August and then I slowly lapsed back to feeding him to sleep. So now I'm incorporating a bedtime story into his routine. From now on, he'll get a story after milk and before sleep. When I brought him through to his room after his feed tonight he was asleep. I sat down on the rocking chair and got the book out. He was still asleep. I started to read the story - 'That's Not My Penguin'. Still he slept. Is there anybody there?? Usually I'm creeping through, dreading the slightest sound or jolt that might wake him before 'the transfer' to the cot, and now I'm reading aloud to a sleeping baby, sitting on my knee. We did fuzzy tummy penguin, velvety wing penguin, shiny beak penguin, silky head penguin and rubbery feet penguin - nothing. Only a light snore. I got the last page of the book and my final-sentence tone of voice 'that's my penguin' woke him. I held my breath. How awake was he going to get? I wanted drowsy but books can make SB go limb-thrashing crazy with excitement. His arm started to stir. It moved towards the book. But it was just going to gently stroke the fluffy penguin on the last page. I picked him up, said goodnight to his animals, put him in his cot and.....crying. But only for 30 seconds. Hooray.

Next, the difficult bit. Letting him cry at night. He's not getting a feed until 2am tonight so he'll just have to cry before that. And then I plan to stretch the night feeds until there aren't any any more. But the trouble is, I've had to face up to the fact that I actually quite like feeding him in the night. Just once mind. Not three times like last night. But, still, the thought of stopping altogether actually makes me feel a bit sad. Like saying goodbye to night time SB forever.

Clearly I'm quite mad.

Oh b******s - it's 21.48 and he's just woken up because we laughed too loud at the telly. Long night ahead.

It's a roll-over

Ya ya roly, ya ya poly, ya ya roly poly. SB is on the move. He can roll onto his tummy but only to the right. He hasn't mastered the left yet. After 2 or 3 weeks of this he's becoming a bit more comfortable on his tummy and can stay there for a few minutes before having an eppy. I'm pretty sure it won't be long before he crawls so we'll need to pen him in. His legs go nineteen to the dozen when he's on his belly.

But then all his limbs move all the time. He burns calories faster than I can get them into him. And that's not an exaggeration. Since last I wrote, he's barely gained half a pound. I've had the same sized baby for 2 months. I'm ready to throttle the health visitors because on a whim they oscillate between two extremes. First they are at my door wanting to weigh him every week, whipping me up into an anxious frenzy and then they retreat into the shadows leaving me wondering what to do and whether I'm starving the SB. They'll be coming to take him away next.
After the last weigh-in I decided to start to wean him one month 'early'. Obviously I wasn't making enough milk for him and he still won't take a bottle so what else was there to do? So we are about 10 days in and he's loving it. They say babies will tell you when they've had enough by clamping their mouths shut or turning their heads away. Not SB. I think he is trying to make up for lost food over the last 2 months. He's already a happier baby (at last) and now I feel bad that I must have been starving him all this time. But the old NHS breastapo do forbid early weaning and I'm such a square - I always just comply. I'm going to try to use my instincts more. And with that in mind I'm trying to be more relaxed about what I should and shouldn't be doing. So if I want to breast feed SB in the middle of the night when he's probably not hungry but is in need of comfort, I will do it without guilt. And I have long since abandoned the routine. But I am scared about having him weighed next in case he still hasn't gained, even on solids. And when he does gain, how strange it will be. For the last two fifths of his life he's been exactly the same size.

So he's a totty tiny baby but he is making strides in other areas aside from the rolling. He's got much better co-ordination already and he is into everything. He loves to be outside being a nosey parker, watching people go by. He especially likes being in the sling. I don't hear a peep out of him when he's in it and we are out and about. And being tiny, he's easy to carry! I promise I'm not stunting my child's growth for convenience. The rolling is a bit of an issue in terms of sleeping. When he wakes up and cries, it's straight onto the belly and of course he's stuck there with no hope of him settling himself back to sleep. Hopefully he will learn how to roll back soon.

I never ceased to be amazed at the free stuff you get from the NHS as a new mum. Recently it has been free books, a free toothbrush and toothpaste and a free tommy tippee cup. I think it's both sad and ridiculous really. Presumably there are so many people out there that would not think to buy these things themselves that they are bought by the state for everyone. And how wasteful that everyone gets these things when so many of us can afford to buy them ourselves. Far better surely that those less well off are given more help using the money saved from not buying a bunch of middle class women toothbrushes, books and cups. The books come at about 4 months to 'introduce the child to literacy'. SB likes to eat them.

Sleeeeeeep

Okay so this is quite a difficult job, motherhood. I have had no time for updating blogs. We had a couple of weeks around the 2 month mark where things were quite manageable and I even managed to read a book (bizarrely I chose Kate McCann's book about Madeleine). But before and since it's just too time consuming. The poor wee soul has a completely rubbish digestive system. There is, once again, a great deal of vomit in my life.

Little squirrel baby is exclusively breast fed and until last week, I was feeding him umpteen times a night. In fact he was sleeping in bed with me for most of the night and I became an all night snack bar. This was lovely when he was a newborn as he needed to feed often. But more recently it's got a bit silly. We knew we had to do something about his sleeping. Since he was about 4 weeks old, I fed him in bed at 7pm until he was asleep. Then I would carefully put him in his crib. For a long time he would stay there until 11pm and sometimes as late at 2.30am. One night we even went out for dinner and he stayed asleep for the whole time we were away - a bit boring for the grandparents babysitting. That was about 5 weeks ago. Since then, it has proved more and more difficult to get him to fall asleep and into the crib without waking. And even if he finally went to sleep, he'd be awake a very short time later. It was time to make a change. Sleep training beckoned. I spent a small fortune on books, videos and pdfs produced by experts. I got more and more worked up the more that I read. Do I try the cry it out method? Is that cruel? Is he too young for it? Or, in fact, had I left it too long? I learned that baby needed to be put down in the cot awake and NOT asleep. I didn't believe SB would EVER fall asleep by himself. He never had before. He'd always been fed to sleep, or swung in his swing or he's gone to sleep in the car or the pushchair. Eeeek. D took a week off work and we braced ourselves for some very sleepless nights. We agreed that we would let him cry but would go in every 5 minutes. All the books on this method made it sound like your baby would be calmed by your presence and that you would leave the room with the baby quiet and not go in unless he cried again. We knew our SB would not be calmed and would scream through our comforting. And right enough, so it was. We picked him up a lot that first night and he cried for 100 minutes. But night two we didn't pick him up and he cried for 35 minutes. Night 3 it was 4 minutes! And on each occasion he woke just once in the night for a feed and went back into his big cot in his own room. And on each occasion, he slept later each morning. Night 4 was a bit of a blip though. He had some inoculations that day and wasn't in great form. He cried for 80 minutes before falling asleep. But he still had a good night afterwards. Night 5 and 6 (tonight), there was no crying at all. We are sleep training GENIUSES. But my shoulders are up to my ears with tension at the prospect that he could wake at any minute.

Our next challenge is to get the wee man to eat out of a bottle. He just refuses at the moment and it means that I can't leave him with anyone for longer than 3.5 hours. He used to know how to do it but I went for too many weeks without giving him one and now he's forgotten what to do. And he goes absolutely mad if he's given a bottle. I'm not sure how he'll learn when I want to continue breast feeding. Presumably if I was moving to bottle feeding completely, eventually sheer hunger would force him to learn. However, I will offer him one bottle a day and see if he remembers what to do.

D came along to his inoculation this week. That's because I cried the first time he got them and I wanted to see if D would cry too. But he obviously went to great efforts to prepare himself in advance and he remained composed.
Which is quite impressive considering how moist eyed he gets when he's with his 'little dude'. He's so good with him.

The eyes have it

The boy is asleep! And has been for nearly 3 hours! Unheard of during the day, well in the last 3 weeks anyway.

Today I went into town without Samuel to get my eyes checked. They have changed since I was pregnant and again since giving birth. This child bearing business is so all encompassing. No one tells you all the things that it affects. I'm thinking of preparing a sex education course and, believe me, it would be the most effective contraceptive ever. I could go on at great length about the true horrors of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood as well as the minor irritation of needing a new contact lens prescription. But really, who'd have thought it would affect my bloomin' eyes. It just never ends.
Anyway, I've had quite a busy week. I had my first time apart from Samuel on Tuesday morning. I had an appointment with a dermatologist (can't blame that on Sam) and then I went into town and bought a new coat and a bag. But I still rushed home by 11am as I felt guilty about leaving him. That afternoon we went on a 'buggy walk' which is just a community initiative to provide something for new mums to do. There were 5 people there and it was nice although the walk was only 20mins. I wonder if anyone will turn up next week. All the other babies were much older than Samuel - at least a few months. It made me wonder if I was giving myself too hard a time about how well I'm coping. There I am joining community groups when he's only 5 weeks old and at the same time feeling that I'm not coping. On Wednesday we took a bus into town to meet women from my NCT course. While I took him in the sling and not in the buggy, I was feeling pretty proud of myself. Again, at 5 weeks that's not bad, surely?

The weather is really getting me down. It has rained and rained this week. On the way back from the buggy walk I got caught in a mega thunder storm with hailstones. But I was on such good form, I didn't even mind at all (it helped that I was close to home). I even smiled through it.
The next day I had Sam in the sling so I was able to use an umbrella and wasn't too fussed. However, the following 2 days I got soaked and, worse, so did my washing which I'd spent ages hanging up in the garden. Grrrr. My good-natured, earth mother acceptance of the crap weather has therefore worn off.
In other news, our car is kaput. D tried to start it this morning and it just made a funny noise. Something to do with a spark plug but the AA refused to try to fix it in case they made it worse and became liable for it. So it's been taken to the place we bought it. So obviously, that's a bit annoying but it's worse cos we'd planned to go to my parents tomorrow with D taking his bike so he could go out for a ride in the Pentlands. We will likely still go but in a taxi. I just hope the car is fixable and not too expensive. Just what we need.

There's loads of other stuff to report that I've not mentioned. But most of it is dull and vomit or poo related. The only real piece of interesting news is that Samuel has a baby cousin Erin as of yesterday. We can't wait to meet her!

And seeing as I now need to lose weight I should continue to admit to what the scales are saying. Today I am 9 stone 11 pounds.

And he's STILL asleep.....

The new man in charge

He's here! Samuel arrived at 2.17am on Friday 6 May with the maximum of fuss. Good job I wasn't stranded on an island or we'd both be dead quite frankly. Poor wee soul had been break dancing on his head in the womb and had gone back to back and got the cord round his neck twice. As soon as I was in triage and assessment (after an hour on my hands and knees in agony in the waiting room), I was on a trolley in acute pain and didn't move off a bed until the following Saturday morning. I refused drugs except for gas and air and hypnobirthing went right out the window. The midwife was getting frustrated with me for not taking the diamorphine but I kept thinking 'I'll just get through this next contraction and then I might have drugs'. I so didn't want a drugged baby. But in the end things got very dangerous and I was rushed for a c section under general anesthetic. Unfortunately they couldn't intubate me so couldn't continue with the section under GA. Luckily, Samuel's heart rate improved and they did a section with an epidural after all. And it was a text book section and Sam was perfect when he came out - 9 on the AGPAR score. 8 pounds exactly. He had a ridge on his head from where he was trying to push himself out the wrong way. But that went after a day or so.
And now a whole new chapter begins. Wonder if I'll ever have the chance to blog any of it.