To be irritated at my mum

[Talby91]

Hi all first time poster here but I just want to get this off my chest.

I have a 12 week old son and whenever we spend time with his grandparents and he hungry cries my mum will jump in and says oh no he isn't he just ate, he needs a cuddle/changing/burping or any other reason under the sun when I absolutely know his cues at this point.

Mind you he is over 98th percentile for height, always having growth spurts and is already growing out of his 6 month clothes, so he feeds quite regularly.

He is a very happy easy going baby and although sometimes he will cry if he wants to be picked up/put down or is overtired or bored, mainly he cries because he needs feeding and I can tell the difference.

What's worse is when he takes the bottle and immediately calms down she seems sort of irritated and distant and won't even look in his direction until he's finished as if I'm spoiling him?!

Last time she said he "can't be hungry again" I sort of had a mini outburst at her and I feel awful about it now as she's a really good grandmother and very attentive, it's just this one thing that really grates on my nerves.

She keeps suggesting me and OH leave him with her for a day/weekend so we can get a break but this just makes me hesitant. Maybe it's just postpartum hormones getting the better of me and it's not that big of a deal 😂

Our PILs were like this, they seemed totally incapable of understanding feeding or changing cues. They kept telling us quite pushily that the baby just needed cuddles and got annoyed when we removed the baby from them for feeds/changes that they kept saying he didn’t need (and they showed no interest in doing it themselves). I think in their day (70s), they had a rigid feeding/changing schedule and they just didn’t know how to take their cues from the baby (or really see him as an individual with his own wants and needs yet). They didn’t get to see him very much and we never left him with them because we couldn’t trust them to meet his needs. They got better with him when he was talking fluently, so around age 4.

I think this is possibly the case and although she means well I hate the thought of him going hungry because of some imaginary schedule she thinks he should be on.

Hopefully as time goes on it will get better as we don't have much else in terms of a support network 🤞

Agree that they will have been told to feed on a strict schedule, probably every 4 hours. I was an au pair for a new baby and I had to adhere to this religiously.

In 1979.

We left DS1 at a few weeks old with PIL many years ago for a rare night out, and came back to find him hysterical. They hadn’t fed him because. ‘It hadn’t been four hours!!’