October 2014 // thread 5 // baby's first Christmas

[JeannePoole]

Welcome back!

(Dear greetings cards manufacturers: 'Baby's First Christmas' does NOT necessarily have to include Baby being liberally sprinkled with glitter from your shoddily-made merchandise.

Except that, as I'm rapidly discovering, it does.

Oh and decided I can't stay in the house all day with my three younger ones so we are going for a coffee and they can have cake! My hairs buggered already from the rain so it can't get any worse :)

Oh dear same bad night here too! Lo slept until 3.30 and then woke every hour until I gave up at 9 as he was flailing about like a shark attack and chatting! I want my sleep for 5-7 hours straight back! He only seems to nap well during the day! Gah!! Hubby is still asleep ....bastard

Bad night here too so we have stayed in bed until now, I salute those of you with other kids! It is this bloody cold and the growth spurt. How bad does the cold have to be to prevent the 12 wk jabs happening?

Got my period today too, which was definite confirmation that the bleeding I had last month was my period returning so soon! This period is a year to the day of the period I conceived violet. It probably sounds a bit weird but it feels like it marks the end of my baby making chapter and definitely won't be having more now.

yellow, me we are on 10mg tablet per day, and hes just coming up to 6kg so maybe needs adjusting, or ive heard some people split it and give half am and half pm to make sure it keeps working?

goats i know exactly what you mean, i wish i could make babymoose big soft squishy warm boob for his cot that he could cuddle up to! As it is i get boob cuddles usually with a good nipple chew (which im still getting now as weve still not emerged from bed despite me being starving and needing a wee!)

munday you should see my hair :s its like someones poured water on it then just messed with it for hours, its this constant shuffling round the bed to find better boob positions for feeding, turns me into something out of a horror show!
Dh kept drifting off and snoring last night while i was fighting babymoose! I know he has to go to work but a little help would be nice, and comments like "just feed him more" dont help! Yes dear i'll just turn the boobs up to max and press go! He knows we have feeding issues and have our second tt appointment this aft. Muppet!

smooshie seriously whats with the flailing! Babymoose was like a posessed octopus last night! Feeding/sleeping just constant thrashing about! Even when he went back down for an hour at 6am he ended up turning himself 90degrees in his cot! Have never been able to swaddle him for this reason

me mine returned a few days ago, most annoyed as had the injection at 8 weeks and thought that meant no or very light periods! Not impressed!

Well just had another bad weigh in. I'm devastated. Going to double the formula supplement from 4 to 8 oz a day so probably going to kill off the breastfeeding. I'm such a hideous failure at this. My heart is breaking.

I dont whats wrong with me, sitting here crying as i have go & enroll dd1 at school on thursday, i am going to miss her so much, she just seems so much more mature since the summer, she's a proper little girl who's vocabulary amazes me, not a baby not a toddler not an infant but just a mature wee girl who's ready for the next chapter in her life, i always used to wonder what all the fuss was about when i seen people crying at the school gates on first day of term... Now i know why, its the end of your baby years with that child, i am going to miss her so much, my wee sidekick for the last five years... God she has been hardwork but its been worth the blood, sweat & tears! Thank god i have another to worry about or i would be a total wreck just now

splendid your anything but a failure, you have tried everything possible, sometimes things just dont work out for reasons we might never know, if its any consolation im sitting here beating myself up about how i have maybe not spent enough time playing with dd1 & she's away to school in august, as a mother you are aways beating yourself up about something but what i try and remind myself is the kids don't know any different to us, they have nothing to compare us with, we are their world, warts and all ! We need to do things that sometimes we don't particularly enjoy ie getting up through the night for months on end, wiping shitty arses for years on end, sharing your bed with them & ending up looking like the hunchback of notre dam, but we do it ... This moment for you is only a blip in time in your child's life, he wont remember it, so please dont think you are failure, you are honestly amazing, i dont think enough people tell us that in everyday life and do take a mothers work for granted xxxx

Cant believe im taking babymoose to have his tt cut after hes being crying and puking all day. Hes going to absolutely hate me :( i was meant to get him weighed this morning but i stayed in bed feeding him instead because i was worried about what his weight would be :s am feeling like worlds worst mum.
So sorry youre still having a shitty time splendide. I would be devastated if i had to swap to formula but ive always insisted i wouldnt do what i wanted over what is best for him but i imagine that still doesnt make it any easier. You really have done amazingly well to get this far x

Splendide, this morning you said "Hey. we did quite well last night...".

You did and are doing well. You know that so stop beating yourself up over something as insignificant as how you feed him. In the grand scheme of the parenting you'll do over the next 20+ years, this is a very small thing.

Moose you'll both be fine. A was outraged when they cut it (fair enough) then had a feed and was fine. We then had a very bad night with him - I suspect it had swollen by then (he got upset about 5 hours after he'd had it done). He was fine the next day.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm just so sad to be looking at realistically giving up bf. I'll try to keep mixing but it's going to be really tricky as we're upping the formula. Fate is quite right though, it's just a tiny part of parenting isn't it?

Yep, a successful parent feeds their child what he/she needs to be healthy. That's all there is to it really when it's on paper.

Thanks splendide he wasnt best pleased but dont imagine i would be either! Just hope it helps him a bit
And you are completely right, feeding is such a tiny part of all the other amazing things you are doing so try not to dwell on it. Sorry of my foot-in-mouth attempt of telling you i understand how you feel didnt exactly help, ive just reread it and it sounds bloody harsh and not really what i meant, just that i can understand why its so upsetting. But im sure the weight gain and happy baby will soon easily make up for it. I keep forgetting that i was only ever intending on bf til 6 months with no real thought as to what id do then! Presumably formula! I can be a muppet at times!

stigz I totally know where you're coming from dd2 starts in September too and I feel physically sick when I think about it.
With dd1 it wasn't so bad as she was uber confident and just strolled in with a bye mum!
Dd2 is much less confident and quite shy. I just imagine her standing in the playground on her own with no one to play with or falling over and I'm not there to give her a cuddle.
I'm already worrying about how I will deal with it when they are all at school I've been raising little ones for so long now what will I do?

Dp says go to the gym, meet friends for lunch and have a life again not sure I'm really a lady who lunches

Don't worry Moose, it wasn't foot in mouth. I am devastated.

I can't let him continue to lose weight though. I can't. The tongue tie snip helped us a bit but he's so little anyway and he needs to gain. He's still only average newborn size at 10 weeks.

splendide you've done amazingly well during an incredibly tough time. Stopping feeding dd1 was very difficult for me at first and I had similar feeling to you it was hard while my milk was drying up but after a couple of weeks of formula feeding I couldn't believe what a huge deal I'd made out of such a small part of parenting. Dd was much happier and I knew after acoupke of days that I'd made the right decision for me and for her.
It really will be fine and hopefully in a couple of weeks you will feel the same way i did. :)

Re reading that not trying to say you are making a big deal out of it. You're not. But I built it up in my head to be this huge thing and it really wasn't in the grand scheme of things. :)

splendide I know it's all been said already but please be good to yourself. I was gutted when it became clear bf wasn't going to work for us but ff has its upsides. I'll never forget the look on DHs face the first time he did a feed with our little Pop in his arms. You are doing whatever it takes to give your little man what he needs and that makes you super mum!

splendide you are doing what you need to do to take care of your wee man and that makes you super mum! I was gutted not to be able to bf but ff has its upsides. I'll never forget DHs face the first time he got to feed little Pop himself.

Be good to yourself.

Urg, guess the first message did post after all. Sorry all.

Ah pregnant glad im not the only one . It is just constant worry with your children, my mum told me it never goes away even when your child grows up & has a family of their own, I'll be grey by the time im thirty.. Which is next month you never know by the time rocco goes to school you might become the queen of ladies who lunch ... God you deserve it after raising all your kids !!

Splendide, feeding really is such a small part, and it's worth remembering that a lot of the claimed benefits of breast feeding are not uncontroversial, and that things like immunity matter very little when we are living with clean houses, clean water, immunizations. The important thing is that you're happy together.

On another feeding related note... Just got in from a run to find baby on the sofa and dp patiently feeding her 80 ml of EBM using a calpol syringe. I've ordered some mam bottles so I really hope they work, but there's something surprisingly touching watching the two of them trying to work it out together. A bit like going back twelve weeks to when we were learning breast feeding.

Although I'm expressing a bit every day now I don't know if I'm going to have enough in reserve when I go out for the day in a fortnight. I think I might get some ready made formula so I don't have to spend two weeks milking myself. I don't even know how much I would need to leave. Any guesses? I'll be gone six hours.

What is a wonder week?

Splendide I had a wee prem boy - was about 8lb 4 at 10wks & only 10lb 10oz now at 16wks. I had to mostly FF from day 5 as I wasn't producing enough milk - I was horribly upset and felt I'd failed him, as you said in your post. But he started to pack on weight almost immediately, so it was clearly the right thing to do, and in that sense, good mothering. I was still able to begin each feed with a boob for a while, until meds necessitated I stop - it won't necessarily be the end of BF totally. Be nice to yourself, as others said.

Slidein - it's all about baby's development, what is happening when, why it happens etc. but I've bought The Wonder Week book and just downloaded the app and still don't understand it!! Lol

Saying that, the Boo has become very fussy since last night and feeding and sleeping is all over the place (less of a routine than the non routine before) apparently he's making a leap in 11 days So I wonder if this is all linked?

Spledide - why do you feel like a failure if you have to give your baby formula? Whilst breast is best, there is something to be said of the pros of formula too - it really is not the devil.
I couldn't BF because my body never produced milk, and I've now learnt this is more common than people realise. Please don't beat yourself up (that's the PND talking) a healthy happy baby is much more important sweetheart. Xx

The school thing is freaking me out too. Ds1 starts in September and he is such a sensitive kind soul I worry he will be too quiet and not have friends... Silly I'm sure. They've got to fend for themselves sooner or later...but I feel it's so early. I wish they started school at 7 like in Sweden. I'm also really worried we won't get our first choice as we are right on the edge of the catchment.