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 j4 | |
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37 weeks today. Baby is now officially not premature, so as far as I'm concerned she can come on out any time she likes (though I do have 5 more days of work and it would be useful to finish them -- it's going to be a scramble to get everything done as it is!). While her kicking and wriggling inside me is still kind of endearing (except when it's kind of painful), she's getting to be a bit of a heffalump and I'd welcome a chance to put her down for a few minutes. Everything aches a lot of the time; cycling is still possible but seems to make my bump very tense (apparently this is possibly Braxton Hicks contractions! Not sure how I'd tell for certain though). Bump is now so big it can actually be seen from space (true fact). We went to the free NHS antenatal class yesterday; it wasn't bad, there was lots of info, but it was all a bit haphazardly presented & so I'm not sure how confusing I'd've found it if I hadn't known most of it before. The midwife who was giving the course was very positive about home birth, though, and also answered a question I'd wondered about: home births actually cost the NHS less than a hospital birth (I had wondered if they were more expensive for them because the midwives had to come out to the home). Still ticking things off the shopping list: we've bought the reusable nappies (all the nappies we will ever need! That is, they adjust in size so you can use them from newborn to age 2-and-a-half-ish) -- we still have a handful of things left on the list but none of them are essential immediately; if baby arrived tomorrow I think we'd be able to manage. And friends/family have been wonderfully generous in lending/giving us things; I dread to think how we'd've afforded everything if we hadn't had so many lovely people around to help us out! I'm feeling a lot less worried than I was about the actual birth (worrying will not help anything & will probably actually make things worse) but probably worrying slightly more than I was before about looking after the baby (yes, I know, worrying will make that worse too, stress hormones get passed to the baby, I am already a bad mother). Pretty much every book on the subject that I've read so far can be summarised as "the way I did things with my children is the one true way, doing anything else will make your baby grow up stressed and unhappy and stupid and obese (if they even survive)". I suspect in practice I will just muddle through like everybody else does, finding things that more or less work most of the time. The plan to get the house in order (which should have been started about a year ago, but hey, better late than never) progresses too as we now have SHELVES in the front room! I wish I'd admitted to myself earlier that there was no way I was ever going to put shelves up myself; we finally got a carpenter in and so far he's doing an excellent job for a very reasonable price. One alcove done (and already filled with books), the other to follow next weekend. Sadly chickened out of going to a schoolfriend's baby's christening this weekend (it would have involved a very early start and a long car journey each way, and I just couldn't face the early rising/sitting/travelling/standing-aroun d) but had a lovely weekend here instead: jinty (and baby Aphra) called round with a gooseberry bush and a book on breastfeeding; timscience called round to give me a poem about BADGERS (thanks cleanskies!) and to borrow piano music; Duncan and Ruth (& baby Zoë) called round to borrow our Glee DVD (and reclaim a maternity top that Ruth had lent me but which I'm already too big for); and addedentry's oldest friend Pablo came up from London to visit (we took him to the Isis for lunch, & the weather was so nice we sat outside to eat ... and when we got slightly chilly we went in & sat by the fire). Times like this remind me how lucky we are to live so near so many friends, to be in such a nice area, to be able to stroll down to the river in the sunshine. Tags: baby, friends, ox4, pregnancy
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Evenings can be Grimsville - the grownups are frazzled too, after all. Bottling him down seems reasonable; is he all on liquid feeds at the moment? And does he have a preferred time for The Evening Meal? (Every child is different: mine was one of the "5:30 on the dot is best" ones; we could make him hold out until 6:00 but 6:20 and he was cooked and so were we, for the next 24 hours.)
Oh horror, anathema, Bad Parent Card Number 127 in a series of thousands, collect them all! - but if you want to and you're not on exclusive BF, it is possible he's hungry enough to warrant a spoonful or two of cooked and re-pureed oatmeal, or pureed and sieved millet or ditto quinoa, mixed with whatever liquid you're using (formula if that's what he's used to) in the evening. All non-allergenic, and complex carbs + calcium can be very settling.
I know you're inundated with well-meaning people proferring unasked-for advice.
And the truth is that some people just do have babies who sleep solidly for ten or twelve hours in the night, and some don't: for us, we reckoned six unbroken hours was "a night's sleep" and if he went for eight hours, we were ecstatic, and the son is still an instant and early riser, at age ten. he also still needs half an hour of settling-down-in-the-dark time. My SiL has one of each: two daughters, one was a good sleeper, the next one wasn't, and she reckons they'd have stopped at one if the first one had been like the second. :-)
The deal is that whatever you need to do to survive is what needs to happen. Your kiddo will not be off to the shrink at the first opportunity based on your need to sleep. I don't believe in controlled crying, because like you I don't think they should cry without being reassured, but it may be that if he's used to a pattern of behaviour that says "crying leads to extended cuddling" and he doesn't know that what he needs is to actually get to sleep, you might be accidentally not letting him find out that sleep is what he needs rather than an extended cuddle. does that make sense?
I feel for you, really, I do.
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From: jvvw |
Date:
March 14th, 2011 07:37 pm (UTC)
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Thanks for the suggestions. I'll experiment with time for that feed, hadn't thought of trying different times for that. That sounds worth doing.
Evenings are partly chaos because of the logistics of dinner, me wanting to go to bed as early as possible, my husband getting back from work around Owen's bedtime, and the fact that we currently keep him in the sling in the evening as not worth the risk of trying to transfer him elsewhere until his late evening feed. Added to this there's a good chance that one of Owen's naps during the day won't have gone to plan.
No solids yet, though he's four months in two days so could try some oatmeal and see if it helps. I don't think he's hungry when he wakes up - my husband can resettle him without feeding up until about 4-5am, but worth a shot. We haven't completely run out of things to try yet, but I'm trying not to change *too* many things at once.
I think if things haven't improved significantly in the next month, then I'll consider things like controlled crying but I know there's lots of physiological stuff happening to their sleep around now, so makes sense to wait until that is over. At the moment, it's only a couple of minutes crying for him to get to sleep but he is going to have to learn to sleep without the sling draped over his eyes and without me holding him. I also know from a couple of nightmare car journeys that he can scream from overtiredness for a jolly long time!
Very nice to speak to somebody else who understands! All the friends I've made here with babies the same age seem to have babies who sleep, though I figure that the other people with babies who don't sleep probably don't get out much!
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