How to protect my baby from smoking

[Tombo80]

After a night sleeping on the sofa, my wife has gone off the hook crazy about the issue of smoking! Please can someone tell me if I deserve this!

Our first baby is due in mid May and despite my father chain smoking 50 a day around me and my 4 sisters i am determined that my little bear will not come into contact with any cigarette smoke, but what I thought were reasonable precautions are apparently not acceptable. This is the situation;

We live in the frozen moores of saddleworth.
The house was built in 1912 with an old detached outside privy opposite the front door.
About 10 years ago the previous owners put a plastic glazed lean-to to join the house to the toilet. The exterior grade door to the house still exists.
I smoke in this lean-to, but agree that I will have to modify this when the baby comes.

I have agreed that I will have to smoke outside during the day, when the baby is awake, and when the weather is not extreme (as it so often is up here). Bearing in mind the starting point is that the baby should never come into contact with my smoking, i thought that smoking in this lean to room, with the exterior grade door closed, when it is raining and sub zero and the baby was in bed was not going to be a problem.... but apparently i am the worst human ever!

My wife has been a real trooper and is normally so calm, but this has really got her mad. What do you guys think? Please help, because I don't want to be on the sofa again tonight!

Smoke outside if you cant quit erm
..thats not what we are saying.

You can quit. You wont.

Ok Tombo, I very rarely get involved in discussions about smoking but...

me and my sisters would sit in a car for 36 hours on a drive down to spain with my dad puffing away constantly.... It didn't seem to do us any damage, which is why i find it difficult to reconcile the catastrophic circumstances of not having a shower and changing my clothes vs what I grew up with. I also work in social housing and see people with very healthy babies who take no precautions at all during and after pregnancy, how can this be?

What was known about the effects of smoking has changed a lot over the years..... we used to be driven around in cars with no seat belts, I even remember sitting on my mums knee in the front passenger seat once......... you wouldn't dream of doing that now.

I grew up in a smoking household, and as a child it didn't affect me (to my knowledge)........ however, I suffer with chronic sinus problems and have done all my adult life. AND far more importantly my mum died of lung cancer when she was 52, I was 26. She never met any of her grandchildren, she never retired. She was 'perfectly healthy' (apart from the smokers cough) up until she found a lump on her neck one day. She went to the doctors asap and she was referred to the hospital, within a month she was told it was terminal and within a few months she was dead. 5th November 1999 she went to the doctors 25th feb 2000 she died.

Don't think it wont happen to you, because it does, and you don't want your child to be telling a similar story down the road do you.

You've stopped before, you can do it again........ don't do it for your unborn child's health, don't do it because some random people on the internet are telling you to, do it for your own health and because you want to.

P.S. I begged my mum to stop smoking......... she wouldn't do it for me then, so I don't expect you to do it for me now.

Glad you've made up.

But you've really not got it, have you?

That's the thing - it always happens to somebody else.
Right up until it happens to you.

Oh good, one of those "AIBU?" "Yes!" "No I'm not" threads

I know!

Your thread title indicated that you were concerned about your baby's health.

If your main objective was to get your wife to shut up and stop giving you a hard time, you might have said so. Then you wouldn't have had people wasting their time and energy responding.

The smoking outside, changing clothes, and waiting 20 mins is the OFFICIAL advice given to people who will be around babies. It's meant to be the last resort if you really can't or won't stop baby being around a smoker. It's not some extremist panic, it's actually 'pandering to people too selfish or immature to put a baby's needs above their own, best of a bad job' stuff.

You say being around loads of smoking as a child hasn't done you any harm - well, you seem incapable or unwilling to accept simple facts about the effects of smoking on yourself, others, and most importantly, babies, and you are willing to prioritise your own addiction over the health and well-being of you child when it arrives. I'd call that damaged.

And what's worse is that you're prepared to harm your child, just so you can keep lying to yourself about your own childhood. Slow handclap. Father of the year.

As if any smoker is actually going to do the whole waiting 20 mins and changing clothes routine.

This kind of flippant thread (the OP not everyone else) really upsets me as it's such a serious subject and brings up all sorts of emotions in people that have been directly affected by the subject matter.

I sincerely hope that the OP's wife gets him to see sense, but from what he's written I highly doubt it. I hope his baby is happy and healthy in spite of the father's selfishness.

And, I hope the OP fucks off to the far side of fuck and stays there before posting something like this again when he really doesn't care what anyone else says and doesn't care about the effect his thread has had on others.

I am also a bit bewildered as to why his wife thought it was funny...

I wouldn't want my baby to have a dad who kept disappearing to have a fag. How can you look after the baby on your own?

I don't want my baby held by people who have smoke on their clothes.

I don't want my baby's father putting himself at serious risk of a smoking related illness.

And I sure as hell don't want my baby's father frittering cash on a ghastly deadly habit when it could fund my baby's education instead.

Totally agree with your wife. But then I wouldn't have kids with a smoker to begin with. Stupid expensive stinky habit for weak willed people.

Do your whole family a favour and quit.

Er - yep the outside clothes and 30 mins thing (as well as outside) is the minimum I'd do actually. When I was at a sure start children's group once someone came around with a kind of breathaliser thing for nicotine and it showed that the levels slowly decreased to 0 after around 30 minutes. It surprised me because I thought it would be much longer, but 30 minutes isn't too long at all so worth doing especially when the baby is tiny, unless there was an emergency or something.

There didn't used to be a smoking ban in pubs/clubs, and I'm so glad there is now. I'm not a smoker but after a night out before, I'd come home, fall into bed to sleep, then wake up in the morning and the pillow would STINK of smoke, from all the smoke particles lodged in my hair.

So imagine you've had a smoke outside, and then picked your baby up for a cuddle. Your baby will smell like my pillow. You are transferring that smoke to your baby. Your baby, cuddled up against you, is breathing that in. Only you probably can't smell it, because you're a smoker.

Or look at it another way: would you like your baby to grow up to smoke? You can be a role model or a hypocrite as far as that goes.

I smoked at least 20 a day for 22 years. I gave up a year ago this Wednesday.

In September my mil died from lung cancer, she died less then 6 weeks after the diagnosis . I'm now watching a close family friend die from lung cancer.

I still crave a fag most days. I choose not to smoke. You chose to smoke. Simple!

You don't get it, do you?

Your dad was a heavy smoker and the damage to you was that you are now a smoker who is minimalising the problem.

Stop Smoking

I say that as an ex smoker who stopped before I got pregnant with my eldest. And I use the term stop rather than giving up because giving up ev

try the Alan carr book for quitting..my DH swears by it

I hope you realise this can cost you your family.

If you split from your wife she may never agree to your children staying with you if your house smells.

Your grand children may never stay at your house because if you smoking.

Oops.

Giving up evokes a sacrifice of something lovely. A hardship. Read Allen Carr's book and stop.

My Dad was a smoker from 15-70 until he had his first stroke. He stopped there and then. Stopping bought him another 5 years in which he was able to watch my son grow and meet my dd. He died last year aged just 75 due to the impact that his smoking had had on his lungs and heart.

I so wish my dad had stopped when we were born.

But are you really listening Tombo. I suspect not.

I actually can't believe anyone wrote that they didn't see that their parents caused any harm when their dad has COPD.

DH's exW has COPD, and a shadow on her lung. Horrible. She's only 46. DSCs are VERY anti smoking because of it and terrified they'll lose their mum.

They tried to get her to quit so often.

She did try for a while to not smoke around them but it went from only smoking outside, to only smoking in the house if she had friends round, to smoking inside all the time. When you are addicted to something it is very easy to get complacent and not see yourself slipping.

I'm assuming op's wife was laughing because we are mostly agreeing with her!

You came out fine op, but what about the babies who died of SIDS before links were made?

Shelly I absolutely agree. I chose to stop smoking. Just like I chose to smoke every cigarette I put to my mouth.

The OP is choosing to look for reasons to continue to choose to smoke.

My BIL smokes in a lean-to outside the main door. Every time I go to my sister's house I can smell smoke throughout the house, so your child would be in contact with smoke everyday. What worries me is that my niece and nephew see smoking as a normal thing to do, my daughter has never really seen many people smoke and is shocked when she sees him so it, do you want to normalise smoking to your child?

All the 'just quit' posts are so flippant imo

If someone posts to say they can't stop binge eating and people say 'just stop', there'll normally be a ton of posters piling in to point out that some people use food to deal with their emotions...and no-one knows what that person's been through in their life etc...

So why the lack of empathy for nicotine addicts?

I'm not saying the OP shouldn't quit of course, I just wonder if smokers are taken less seriously because there are less of them now?

Well done Shellywelly that must have been so difficult after 22 years

Worra, there's a lot more help out there for smoking addicts than there is for eating addicts.

For one thing, you can live without smoking. You can avoid it.

You can't avoid food.

And smoking affects everyone around you at the time. Over-eating doesn't.

Not the same.