June 2008 babies: rolling, sitting, crawling, babbling, teething, laughing, sleeping (not yet!)

[spongebrainbigpants]

New home!

natural births: we are so blessed to have access to decent pain relief. I had the lot when I had ds and can't imagine how awful it would have been not to have access to it. Only g+a with Caitlin but she was smaller, better positioned and a 2nd timer, so it was v. quick; but having been really up for a so-called 'natural birth' first time round, 2nd time I was absolutely ready for any pain relief going! All this hype about what's 'natural' is so unnecessary, people forget how incredibly lucky we are to have good medical care and low mortality rates.

sponge wish I'd seen your sweary post

Hello all. Natural birth - hah! If only I'd known how wonderful G&A is, I would have had the minute I walked into the hospital. I was also very pleased with morphine.

Goingto, I like those leggings - saw similar in TK Maxx too, but not in the right sizes.

Systems, ouch at every 1.5 hours, it is hard not to snuggle with them, good luck with the will of iron.

Job chat went quite well, I think it is going to come down to whether or not they think they can manage with me doing it PT. Will know next week.

i can't keep up,

At the moment, being back at work is knackering me out but

OMG sponge having a post withdrawn, and bought the V2's second hand for £49 for 7

Natural birth - when I got to the hospital I begged for pethidine (and was only 2cm's), 3 hours later begging for Epidural, 'oh no you can't be that dilated yet' Yep I was 7.5 cm and desperate for epidural, although I am one of the 10% of people it is not completely effective for.

Off now to trawl the internet for a new job, i really cannot hack this one for much longer

hedgehog My epidural with DD1 only worked on one side, it took about 40 mins to do and I started pushing just before the dr finished and he was still writting in the notes when she was born and apologising a lot!

P&P where did you order the carseat from. I'm sure you've seen pics of dd1 on my facebook page - she was often mistaken for a boy even when dressed in pink as a baby, she's very girly looking now!

Been quietly lurking, Sponge - I hope you got some sleep today, I'm gutted that I missed your swearing post!

Whinegums - fingers crossed for the job - and you too HH

Systems - that takes some willpower to sit and feed in the chair every 1.5 hours, well done. We put Ethan in with his brothers again last night and decided to let him cry a little more than usual as they are on half term so it didn't matter so much. he woke at 10, 12 and 2 but each time I left him a while and was almost going in to him when he stopped crying, then slept until 6.00 - a breakthrough.

Childbirth - natural here, don't you remember - I just found out the week before I was due that in austria they don't give gas and air!I wish they had, it was VERY painful but quick I suppose.

Five - pleased you got your dvd player replaced, loved your reaction to Poppy's lovely coat

Puree - how's the ankle?

Goodnightssleep ordered it from Germany only 11 Euros shipping and much cheaper than any of the UK stockists, despite the crappy exchange rate.

Hi all- ankle the size of the baby so walking with my stick again...takes me back to being pregnant!! Anyway DH about to put me in bed so see you later xxxx

Hello everyone. I confess I have not had time to read all the pages - you've been very active. It's weird not being up to speed with what everyone is doing and I miss it. I wish someone would do a one paragraph synopsis! So apologies I cn't respond to anyone personally.

Work is great and I am really busy but Luke alas is making my life very difficult by waking up at 4.30 every morning (I mean waking and staying awake). I have put a request for help on the sleep page but only one response. hmm.

Luke is soooooo almost there with his crawling now. We did a vid which I will upload as soon as it has processed. Thing is he is constantly practicing in his cot and potentially that is what he might be doing at 4.30am. Also he has moved on leaps and bounds in his movement and can go from all fours to sitting and vice versa, pull himself up to sitting and kneeling and is inches away from standing. Maybe that's what getting him up so early. If that's it surely it can't get better only worse!!!

Actually on that note, if Luke pulls himself to standing in his cot - how the bugger does he get down again without falling and cracking his head open on the side of the cot?

Amber, they generally go back down onto their bum. Even if he does fall down and hit his head he will be fine. Trust me, when they start walking there will be a lot more falling over and head hitting. It is horrible but we will survive it, and so will they!

Amber Luke will very quickly learn to fall down into a sitting position. Fraser's pulling himself to standing and most of the time manages to sit down from standing without a problem. We've had some almighty head cracks on the flooring though!

puree how does the kidde car seat buckle up? Is there anything that goes over their shoulders?

Can everyone help me celebrate? I've just cracked a beer! A paper I submitted in early May has just been accepted for publication with only minor revisions. This paper's been hanging around for years and I'm thrilled and relieved to get it finished up! Now I just need to spend saturday on corrections (boo!).

Also have been offered a student for a few months in the summer who wants to do an internship. The catch is they want to work unpaid, which is really rare in science, so everyone's speculating that they might not been any good. I do not want to be saddled with someone incompetent! (I do not have time!) but at the same time would love to have an eager student and have the most brillant project they could work on! Eek! I know it's not relevant to mumsnet but DH is not listening to me as normal and I wanted to tell someone!

Well done Aberdeen - minor revisions sounds great! With major revisions I just take the easy option and agree with what the editor suggests wherever possible - makes life easier and why sweat the small stuff, eh?
Do you want to ask your student if he/she would like to work unpaid on medieval Welsh literature? I'm highly amused that everyone is suspicious of people who want to work for free - we have the reverse problem in arts and humanities. Funny, because just today I was trying to get a potential RA, but he's being tempted by St Andrews.
Would it be possible to interview and ask a few questions of the student? Sometimes people can be really enthusiastic but lack, say, academic qualifications due to, say, personal matters, and just need the chance and a helpful supervisor. If it's that kind of situation, you could help and mould an eager type. Surely if they're that keen, you have something to work with? Apathy or laziness is the hardest to work with, I think.
Mind you, I may be talking nonsense because I don't know what area you're in and how competitive it is.

Systems - live there, can say the name in under 3 seconds.

Wow congrats abdn, must have been a v. good paper, well done!

Deb and whinegums the only thing that kept me on the chair was the thought of her getting dp's very very horrid sickness bug if she got in bed with us ... I couldn't have done it for sleep purposes alone! But since it did get her to stay in the cot afterwards I might have the strength to do it again for a night or two, if only as an experiment.

Dp is now worried I'll get it and he'll have to look after the kids, so is fixating on bottles. He wants me to sit down now and express 3 or 4 bottles for the fridge, just in case. Trying to explain a) I can't just get 4 bottles out at once, it's not like turning on a tap, b) I'll have to feed even if I'm ill if I don't want mastitis and c) she doesn't actually take bottles so even if he does need to feed her some ebm he will need to use a cup, has not got me anywhere. Think I should perhaps have involved him a little bit more on the feeding front before now!

Hellooooooooooooo!

I can't believe this thread has run to 22 pages in under 2 weeks and I haven't had time to read them. Will try and skim sometime soon.

RL been a bit mad, have been on MN a wee bit, but not enough to have a proper catch up.

Been having some worry about S's weight if anyone has the time to read here but apart from that all well, just very very busy. Tons to do, no time to sit down and get organised, but have been studying a reasonable amount.

Hope you're all well. Will try and catch up a weel bit.

Hello essie - thanks for missing me. One page down, 21 to go...

I can't believe I missed sponge getting a post withdrawn. How cool . Am sorry that you've been upset by some FF comments. I wont go searching for the thread (because they upset me too - like you Sponge, I still find it really difficult to reconcile with not BF but only if I think about it too much, so I try not too!).

Evening All,

Great news Aberdeen about your paper, and potentially the student.

Essie BBC News this morning had a piece about bilingual schools in (Ireland and Scotland as well as) Wales. They interviewed a Professor of Linguistics from Bangor, so I was thinking about Iestyn as I ate my toast

Peter spent all last night in bed with me. DH finally decamped to the spare room at 3 as he couldn't cope with the snotty heavy breathing (P's not mine). Today DH has taken more drastic action by decamping to Solihull for an overnight conference, so it is just me and Peter till tomorrow evening. Thanks for all your well wishes and advice about temperatures etc. The temperature went away at some point last night. Today he has just been extremely snotty, and periodicially miserable. Who can blame him hey? He can't really feed properly because of the congestion, so I have been pumping milk like never before. I am a bit worried about him dehydrating, but as he is still producing wet(ish) nappies, I think it's okay. Maybe he wont leak out of his nappy tonight !

I had a completely unnatural birth - induction, all the drugs, c/s. The only bit I avoided was ventouse or forceps. TBH I just feel grateful that we both came out of it alive. A friend had a similar labour to me though, and one thing that contributed to her PND was the sense that she hadn't given birth because of the c/s. I really think we need to remember how very lucky we are to be having children today and not 100 years ago. Why are we talking about childbirth anyway (I missed what set it off), are we all feeling broody again?

Sponge hope you got some sleep. Your post had been deleted by the time I got to it, but good on you girl! Sometimes I think that MN embodies all the worst elements of a girls' school: bitching; older girls sneering at younger ones; in crowds; the "right" way to do things etc. It makes me that in adulthood women can be just as horrible once they have the security oof cyberspace as they were as adolescents.

Oh, Ali, what were they saying about bilingual schools? Iestyn isn't getting bilingualism at the moment - he hasn't heard any English spoken since Sunday afternoon. (It still counts, he's bilingual, I'm only joking...right Systems??) Iestyn's also going to have electrodes in his head be a guinea pig for the Linguistics Dept's bilingualism research project.

Also totally agree on girls' school - although I never went to one. Same idea amongst the girls in a mixed school!

BDQ - did you say losing weight? Did you say dropping in the centiles? Iestyn isn't doing centiles any more. He's better than all that. I'd say - cause I've been told - that if he's pooing, weeing, eating and alert (not floppy, sleepy - basically not normal) then it's centiles schmentiles.

Essie, just that they are growing in popularity in all three countries, and that bilingual people have higher IQs because their brains wire up differently to adjust to two languages. Nothing you haven't said to me before.

Morning all! Great to see you BDQ and sorry you are worrying. I'd go with Essie's approach but send big hugs because you are worrying.

Abn carseat uses the adult seatbelt to fasten which has the added bonus that it's harder when you reach the 'clever toddler' stage for babypearls to undo her carseat whilst I'm doing 80 sticking to the speed limit on the M25. Still waiting for it to arrive but the moment it does I shall give you all the full review!!

Thanks everyone!!!

essie major revisions are a nightmare in my field because it means that I have to redo the analysis and rerun models and that can take weeks. This is just adding discussion - and like you, I'm happy to adjust to the editors demands!

Student sounds okay so I'll sound him out next week. My area is not that competitive because it's such a small field. There's only about 6 of us in Scotland with PhDs because that's all the country employs.

bdq Fraser's gone from the 80th percentile to less than the 9th. He's eating as much as he wants, with plenty of opportunity to eat more though so I'm not worrying. I went through this with DS1 though and did worry like crazy. As long as they are growing, however slowly, I think it's just their natural growth patterns.

Breaking news apparently babies who sign have better vocabularies than those who don't...will add that to the neverending list of things I should be doing with my baby.

I wasn't on yesterday - really shouldn't do that as it takes too long to catch up!!

Natural birth - well I had one sort of, I only had gas and air but then needed forceps because I was so knackered! My sis had an epi, had a little sleep, then pushed her baby out with no stitches or anything! So epis can be great. And the pain in labour is diff for everyone. I was obsessed with not having an epi but only cos I knew my chances of having a c-s were high anyway with twins and I didn't want to increase the risk. I was off my face on the g&a anyway so I wouldn't even call that natural.

Amber, the crawling and early waking may be linked, they go through sleepless phases when they go through developmental leaps. For standing in the cot Gina Ford suggests you practice with him so every time you put him in his cot put him in standing, then help him to lie down, that way he will learn how to do it himself. The only thing I can suggest with the 4.30am starts is leaving him to cry . You could sit with him while he cries, just don't get him out of the cot . I know it sounds really cruel but it does work.

Well done Aberdeen!

Sponge, did you have a better night last night?

Puree, I looked at the Kidde car seat too but found the seat belt a real faff (and it touched the seat buckle so no good). I never considered that a 5pt harness can be undone by the child! The little monkeys.

Well I will only whisper it cos it is just not fair on the sleep-deprived but I gave them finger food for their tea last night which was much nicer all round and has proved that I don;t need to get two bowls of sweet potato down their throats in order for them to sleep! They were waking once each in the night anyway so I thought I might as well try something different. They are 9mo now so they should be having a finger food meal I suppose. I still feel knackered tho

Grandma died yesterday morning at 6.30am but it was a blessing in the end.

Oh, and with signing, i really want to do it. I have a book and have learned a few words but the DTs haven't picked up on it yet (I am trying mummy and daddy first and when they start doing that I will add in the few more words). So don't worry Puree if you were doing it, it would probably be going right over C's head anyway!!

And another thing...! Theo is up on all fours now rocking so how long till he crawls? He can't be far off now surely!