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~ the musings of a left wing left hander with two left feet

If By Yes

Tag Archives: newborn

A Letter To Parents of Colicky Babies

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by IfByYes in Fritter Away, Life and Love

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

babyhood, colic, inconsolable crying, infant, newborn, normal, one month old, parenthood, second baby, second child, sleep

Dear Parent Of A Colicky Baby,

I know your pain.

I know how it feels to walk the floors for hours and hours every day, and night. I know how it feels when you read the definition of colic – crying for more than three hours a day, more than three days a week – and think, “there are babies out there who cry THAT LITTLE?”

I know how it feels to look jealously at couples in restaurants who are casually eating their dinner while their tiny baby slumbers peacefully in a car seat next to their table.

Meanwhile, YOU left your baby with a selfless friend or relative and you are trying to have a brief meal together to salvage your relationship even though you know that at this moment that your friend/relative is walking back and forth while your baby screams and screams.

Maybe you have said to each other “never again”.

Maybe you have already decided that your first born must be an only child because there is no way you can survive this a second time.

I know how that feels, too.

But.

Let me tell you about a different kind of baby.

Meet Fritter.

IMG_1937

She just turned a month old, and almost all of my photos of her feature her doing something very strange…

Continue reading →

The 2nd Labour Story Part III: In Which I Bond Very Quickly With A Doughnut. Yes, An Actual Doughnut.

16 Saturday May 2015

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

birth, bonding, doughnuts, gestational diabetes, hospital, new baby, newborn, second baby, tim hortons

A lot of women talk about that magic moment when they see their baby for the first time. I have a theory about it.

You see, I didn’t have that magic fall-in-love feeling when I first saw Owl. I was just like, “hey, look, a baby.”

Some people claim that a heavily medicated birth, such as Owl’s, interferes with natural bonding hormones and prevent that awesome gush of love that some mothers feel on the birth of their child.

But I don’t think that’s it.

You see, I have friends who have felt that rush of love despite an incredibly traumatic/heavy intervention birth, and I know people who didn’t feel it despite a completely natural birth.

Here’s my theory:

It has nothing to do with the kind of birth.

It has to do with the kind of person you are.

I believe that if you are the sort of person who believes in or has experienced love-at-first-sight (in the romantic sense), you will be the kind of person who experiences love-at-first-sight on the birth of their child.

On the other hand, if you are a more practical, slow-to-warm-up kind of person, like me, you’re less likely to fall head over heels in love the moment a squalling newborn is dumped on you.

It’s a shame, because I would love to have that rush of mother love.

Still, when I watch videos about natural birth, people always talk about that rush of endorphins that comes with it, and it made me wonder if maybe that really would help. Maybe my theory is wrong.

So when I was told that I wouldn’t be getting an epidural, the part of my brain that was still ME and separate from my body was actually pleased because this way I might get to experience the big endorphin rush.

Yeah, I didn’t feel any kind of rush when I was giving birth.

I don’t know if I ever have endorphin rushes. Maybe I don’t have endorphins. Maybe there were endorphins but I didn’t notice them. Maybe if there weren’t I would have hurt even more. I don’t know. But I definitely felt no elation, no rush. Just some anxiety because I still hadn’t seen my baby.

Finally they brought her over to me and laid her on my chest.

Continue reading →

I have insomnia myself, so I have no advice for him…

28 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

baby, breastfeeding, cry it out, crying, newborn, overtired, sleep

My mum went home yesterday.

Babby decided to give us an easy day by going to sleep relatively easily and at regular intervals throughout the day.

Perfect Husband and I were like “We totally rock.”

Then night happened.

Now, most of his 6-7 hour screaming jags have taken place in daytime, and nightime has actually been fairly regular with wakings every 1.5-3 hours and reasonably prompt sleep after feeding/diaper changes.

Not last night.

Today, my first day home alone with Babby, was mixed success. Morning was awful, afternoon was fine. I finally managed to get him to fall asleep at about 10:30 this morning and collapsed into exhausted sleep until 1:30. So that was good. Then he fed, had a diaper change, went in the Sleepy Wrap while we walked the dog, fussed a bit and then slept in the wrap for an hour and a half. Then he woke up, was fed, went back in the wrap, fussed a bit and fell asleep.

This evening was more difficult. It took us an hour to get him to sleep after his dinner meal.

Now, here’s the thing I’m having a lot of difficulty coming to terms with – he seems to need to cry to sleep, sometimes.

The other night we were taking turns walking the floor with him as he had been alternately crying and feeding and crying WHILE feeding for hours. Perfect Husband was flipping through a book I had picked up at the library, called The Baby Whisperer. Now, I had already discounted this woman earlier in the evening because she talked a lot about how “no baby needs to eat more often than every two hours” and saying that once baby’s needs are met, he should be put down to “foster independence.” Both sounds like total nonsense to me and goes against what the lactation consultants and child psychologists say (babies carried more actually have MORE independence later on in life, because they trust their caretaker etc). So I had given her up as a resource. But then PH said,

“Are his eyes staring as if propped open by toothpicks, not focusing on anything?”

“Yes,” I said, “the dog just sniffed his face and he stared right past him.”

“Is he arching his back when he cries?”

“Yep.”

“Then the book says he’s overtired.”

“He hasn’t slept for five hours. We know he’s overtired! What does it say to do about it?”

The book said to lay the baby the hell down and let him fuss himself to sleep.

“That’s cry-it-out! You can’t do that to a newborn. I won’t do that,” I said angrily.

“No, no, it isn’t cry-it-out. She says to stay with the baby and let him know you are with him, but he needs to sleep and anything we do will just continue to stimulate him.”

So against my better judgement, Babby was laid down in his moses basket, covered snugly, and then rocked and rocked and rocked. And damn it all, it worked. Within ten minutes he had settled down.

“The book says he’ll wake and fuss three times before settling down for good,” said my husband.

And damn it all, that’s just what the baby did.

He slept for nearly four hours.

Early the next morning, the same thing happened – he wouldn’t go down. So Perfect Husband took him from me, laid him in his basket, and sat on the edge of the bed, shushing soothingly, watching him and occasionally holding down his arms  when he started to flail wildly (because he flails in his sleep and then hits himself in the face, which wakes him up and makes him cry because all he knows is that someone randomly hit him in the face…), while my baby cried and cried. It was breaking my heart, and I kept wanting to take the baby from the basket, but Perfect Husband reminded me that we had tried that and tried that. It was his turn to try.

It felt like forever, but it wasn’t actually all that long. In half an hour, Babby was out for the count, having had his three drift-offs-then-wake-up-and-fuss episodes.

But I was a mess.

Perfect Husband kissed me and told me he was proud of me.

“I don’t like this. It feels like cry-it-out and he’s just a tiny baby. If we let him cry like this it’ll break his trust in us…” I sniffled.

“You fed him. You changed him. You rocked him. He was still crying. He was crying because he was tired, and we can’t force him to sleep. He needs to learn how to do that himself and we can’t help him. Rocking him and walking with him just seems to overstimulate him. We never left him. We were right there with him, and I even held his hands.”

I knew all of this, and over the last couple of days, PH has been proven right time and time again. He cries… and then he will sleep. I did make PH promise to ignore anything this woman Baby Whisperer says about breastfeeding. I picked up a copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding from the library as well, and that has comforted me, because it specifically mentions a growth-spurt in the second and third week, which explains his constant feeding which has been leading to this overtired issue. The constant feeding does seem to be dying down – and my breasts are fuller than they were so I think he was just working to bring in my milk. It’s just a matter of getting him to go to sleep, the poor little insomniac.

Sometimes I can nurse him to sleep, which is always my first choice, but other times he just pulls away from the breast and squirms and cries and that’s when PH steps in with his shhshing noises and his heavy hands pinning down those flailing arms. A friend of mine even sent me a link indicating that some babies are just like this – they need to have a good cry. And the way he just suddenly goes limp after ten or fifteen minutes of fussing shows that it IS exhaustion – not a matter of him crying himself to sleep. But the waiting through that ten minutes is breaking my heart. At least, today, he fussed in his wrap instead of in his basket, and for some reason that was easier on me. I don’t know why it matters, him crying his heart out in his basket or crying his heart out in a carrier, but I can tolerate the carrier easier.

But that doesn’t help at night, when I have to put him down.

There HAS to be a better way.


Sleep, baby, sleep...

Poor kid inherited my insomnia and my webbed toe.

I’m sorry, Babby.

No Sleep For You! You Come Back, 18 Years!

24 Friday Sep 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 30 Comments

Tags

baby, breastfeeding, cluster feeding, newborn, sleep, two week old

I’m almost done writing up the next part of the labour story, I swear, but it’s bloody hard to find a moment in which to work on it.

This kid doesn’t sleep.

Ever.

He is 16 days old and he doesn’t sleep. He suckles, and he cries, and sometimes he lies quietly alert and being all cure, before crying/suckling some more.

Now, I am not particularly disillusioned. I knew that having a baby would mean sleepless nights and a lot of screaming. But I did think that newborns, while waking up every couple of hours, would eventually go back to sleep for an hour or two at a time.

But when this baby  dozes off, I am constantly afraid that it is for the last time, and that the next wake-up, which will likely happen in the next fifteen minutes or so, will never, ever end. Even my mother is baffled by his constant wakefulness and insatiable hunger. On Facebook, people keep commenting on how alert he looks in his pictures. They’re telling us.

On Tuesday, he was awake from 5 pm until 1 am. On Wednesday he was awake from 2:30 pm until nearly 10:00 pm. On Thursday he was awake from 1:30 pm until 9:30 pm. Today he woke up at 12:30, and right now he has FINALLY gone limp and he is downstairs in his moses basket with my mother and husband hovering over him like he is a bomb ready to go off. He may wake at any moment.

If we’re lucky, he’ll sleep for a couple hours before he’s up and screaming for food again. My nipples, which were beginning to heal, are getting sore again.

I CAN HAZ BOOBAS??!!

One thing I will say about him – the worst of the feeding/screaming fits have mostly been during the afternoon/evening. He does often sleep for as much as two or even three hours together over the night and in the morning, although last night it took my mother and I from 2 am until 4 am to get him to go back to sleep for those couple of hours.

In the meantime, he’s learning lots. He has discovered his rattle, and he reaches for my shirt or my glasses when he is enraged. He’s working on rolling over. He has also decided to try and help me put him to the breast by clutching at the sides of my boob and exerting as much muscle strength as he can summon to bring the booba to his mouth. Unfortunately, he hasn’t worked out the difference between Push and Pull, so he actually sits there pushing the breast away while gaping frantically like a goldfish out of water, and eventually screwing up his eyes and wailing in frustration, at which point I snatch away his fists and plunk my breast into his mouth.

So basically he’s strong and fit. I, on the other hand, am a hollowed-out shell of a woman who has watched far more HGTV than any normal human should watch in a year.

Always-Awake Babby plots my demise

Can anyone explain to me why I feel guilty snatching half an hour to myself for a bath or to check Facebook, leaving the baby under the care of my mother or Perfect Husband? I mean, it’s not like he’s mine and only mine. He’s every bit as much my husband’s baby, and PH doesn’t feel the need to ask me if I can watch the baby for an hour while he reads cracked.com. But PH is happy to care for his son (if apologetic that he can’t help me with the constant-hunger issue), and my mother is delighted to have a chance to be useful before she leaves on Monday.

So how come I feel like I’m being selfish and asking them to do my job for me when I try to give myself a just few moments out of the rocking chair?

I’m Back! And so is Babby!

12 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love, Perfect Husband

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

birth, new baby, newborn, postdue

Hi everyone! I’ve missed you. This isn’t the labour story yet, because I feel that deserves a level of time and attention that I don’t have yet (visitor stream is dying down slowly, but the next one is expected in 10-15 minutes).

Just wanted to let you know that as PH has said, we have a healthy Babby with ten fingers, and ten toes, although two are freakishly webbed, a trait he inherited from me (that blew my mind – HE HAS MY CRAZY TOES). He looks like a cross between Muppet Babby Perfect Husband and a baby sea turtle. We aren’t sure if he’s an angel or devil spawn, because he kept us up two nights in a row with colicky toothless screaming but has been cooperatively eating and dozing for the last 36 hours. We’re not sure what awaits us tonight.

While you’re waiting for the gory details, some pictures! These pics are when he was only a few hours old and heavily over-baked in my oven (it was my first attempt at babby-cooking, okay?), so please excuse post-birth baby cone head, splotchiness, peeling skin etc. Also, PH is still deliberating on whether to let me use his son’s real name. I would happily tell you, since it’s a really generic name, but of course this is a two-parent decision. So a moniker may be in order.

New Babby

The new family

Perfect Husband approves of Babby

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