Things They Don't Tell You About Babies

• You can get your baby into a routine; baby will sleep and feed on a set schedule… just long enough for you to rest on your laurels. Then baby will laugh at you, and piss all over your schedule. Often literally. Repeat ad infinitum. S is 9 months old and still playing this game!

• Remember that hilarious meme about preparing for parenthood? Funny, wasn’t it? A lot of it is true. As S gets older, dressing her takes longer, and often needs to be repeated throughout the day, as she manages to pry her socks loose and remove trousers during nappy changes.

• When they are first born, babies are very cute and cuddly and lovely and all of that – but they are also a bit boring. All they do is feed, sleep, poo and cry; they don’t interact much until they are a little older. At that point, parenting becomes a bit more rewarding.

• Sometimes, babies just cry, and you can’t always figure out the reason. You check their nappy, you offer them milk, you rock them, you cuddle and coo, and still they cry. It might not seem like it, but it’s still worth you sticking around to cuddle them a bit more. I am very lucky that S doesn’t cry much at all; but she does still have days where she’s just a bit sensitive, and the slightest thing will set her off.

• You don’t need money or fancy toys to entertain and engage your baby. I keep S’s clean nappies in a wicker basket, and she will sit and stare at it for ages. At the moment her favourite toy is an empty bottle with some cous cous in it.

• One of the best ways to avoid nappy rash is to just not put a nappy on the baby. I try to have at least half an hour each day where S just lays on her play mat with no nappy on. This also allows her much easier access to her feet, and she finds it easier to move around, roll over etc. She lays on a blanket, so that any little accidents are soaked up and don’t make too much mess.

• In their first few weeks of life, babies usually get acne. They’ve spent 9 months in your uterus in a sterile environment, and now all of a sudden their skin is exposed to the open air and all these germs and things… and they get spots. They don’t look too fantastic, but you can’t (and shouldn’t) do anything about them. Just leave them to clear up on their own, and punch people who make oh-so-hilarious comments about starting puberty early.

• When they are born, babies’ gag reflex is right at the front of their mouths – a clever way Mother Nature devised to ensure newborns don’t swallow anything but milk. As they get older, their gag reflex moves back to allow for foods to be eaten.

• As baby becomes more mobile, there will be at least one face-plant off the bed/sofa/chair. Baby will cry and have a big bruise, and you will feel like the world’s worst parent – but don’t worry, every child does it. Apparently it’s how they learn not to go head first off shit.

• It doesn't matter how often you cut your baby's nails; they will still be razor sharp, baby will still scratch her own face and leave nasty scars, your face/chest/arms will still be shredded by them on a regular basis. And, as an added bonus, often when you attempt to trim said nails, baby will wriggle at the last moment and you will nick their skin, causing a minor cut with a lot of blood and probably tears from both of you.

• Weirdly, though, their toenails hardly ever need cutting.

• When babies are sick on you, it doesn't smell so bad - it's just milk... until they start on solids. Then their sick smells like proper sick. And if you drew the short straw and got a sicky baby, you will smell like sick too.

• They outgrow their clothes like ninjas. There is no warning: one day their clothes fit, the next day you have a fairly urgent shopping trip on your hands. 

• You might think your baby is not able to roll/crawl/walk yet - but never assume anything is safely out of their reach unless it is on a very high shelf. I'm fairly sure ninjas learn their skills from babies: they pretend they can't move, and once your back is turned they're off running around, grabbing at everything they can get until you return. Like that sketch from Little Britain.

• Babies can't see terribly well. Their eyes don't work together very well so they tend to see double, or just blurry lines. That's why we naturally accentuate our expressions when speaking to them, and why they like to look at simple, monochromatic patterns. And faces. They're programmed to like faces.

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Buddhism for Mothers?

You know when you have an argument with someone, or they’ve irritated you in some way, and you just don’t feel like talking to them? So you don’t. Because you don’t have to.

Having a baby is a whole different kettle of fish. The other night, S was clearly knackered, but would (could) not sleep. I was also knackered so in the end, tired of the draft coming from her flapping her gro-bagged feet in her bouncy chair, I took us both to bed. I would have fallen asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow… but S had other ideas. I tried begging, I tried pleading, I tried rocking her, cuddling her, feeding her. I even tried putting her in the cot I’ve finally installed at the end of my bed (whatever made me think that might work, I cannot tell you – sleep deprivation causing dereliction of mental capacity probably). This sort of situation tends to make me panic. Not in the way you might think, though. My panic has more to do with the fact I have no control over this situation. Usually, if I do not like the situation I am in, I can get up and walk away – and I normally do. When I can’t just remove myself from something that I don’t like, it makes me quite agitated. When you are a single parent, you are often stuck in situations you have no control over, and no immediate way to resolve. There’s nobody to take over the rocking and cooing so that you can go to sleep; you just have to suck it up, pretend you’re not mortally tired, and get on with the rocking.

This is yet another of those things nobody warns you about. I don’t mean the tiredness (though really, no amount of explaining can prepare you for that); I mean the whole idea that you are no longer your own person, you can’t just go to sleep when you want to, or go for a walk when you feel like it, spend all day in bed, whatever. Obviously, single parent or not, your life changes dramatically when you have a child. But when it’s just you looking after them, the change is that much more noticeable. If the baby is crying but you need the toilet, you have to make a decision: do I comfort the baby, and hope she calms down before I get to the dangerous stage of needing the toilet, or do I leave the baby to cry and hope she doesn’t get to the house-screaming-down stage of crying before I flush, wash and return? S spends a lot of time sitting in her Bumbo seat in the bathroom doorway.

As I’ve jokingly lamented in a previous post, you can’t reason with a baby. You can tell them, “I’m just going to get a drink, and then I will feed you” but they won’t understand; all they see is that you are walking away, while they are very hungry. Similarly, the other night when S was clearly very tired but not sleeping, it was very frustrating for me not to be able to explain to her that if she just went to sleep we would both feel a lot better. I couldn’t say to her, “fine; you stay awake and play with your toys, but I’m going to sleep.” I also couldn’t say “for the love of God would you just close your damn eyes, I’m dying here!!” – tempted as I was. Also the next day, when my eyelids felt like sandpaper and I was far from on top form, there was little point in my saying to S, "sorry mummy is not moving quickly enough for you; perhaps if you had let mummy sleep last night..."

Every evening, I put S to bed upstairs and then creep quietly back down. Lately she has taken to waking again within an hour, and I have to go back up to her. Sometimes she takes 10 minutes to settle back down; other times it can be an hour, or she doesn’t settle at all, and bang goes my evening. It’s hard to do, but I find that if I just go back up and lay there with her, and don’t look at the clock or think about the dinner I could be eating or the TV show I could be watching, or the mountain of washing up that’s waiting, or the clothes I need to put away or the million other things I could be doing – it doesn’t feel so bad to be stuck there. I sometimes even enjoy laying there quietly for half an hour in silence, with no distractions. It’s an exercise in just accepting things as they are, without fighting against something I am powerless to change.

When I first had S, I downloaded a lot of parenting books onto my Kindle. One of them was called “Buddhism forMothers.” I think perhaps I should read that one.

Things They Don't Tell You About Breastfeeding

This post deals with all the things nobody really seems to mention about breastfeeding, until they happen or you ask. If you are not breastfeeding, or do not intend to breastfeed, that is entirely your choice, and this post is not intended as a way of judging that decision. 

My view is that breast is best, and I feel very strongly that all babies should get that benefit whenever possible. Please feel free to skip this post if it is not relevant to you.

The current World Health Organisation recommendation is exclusive breastfeeding for at least the first 6 months. Some people don’t agree with this and do things differently, and they are completely within their rights to do whatever they choose – mum always knows what is best for her baby. That said, I do feel a lot of women give up breastfeeding early because they don’t have enough information on it. So here is some information.

• Breastfeeding is better for baby than formula. This is not a debatable point; all scientists etc agree. It has benefits for mother and baby alike, including protecting you against cancer, and passing on your immunities to your baby. It also helps you to create a bond with your child unlike any other.

• If you decide you want to breastfeed your baby, try to read up about it a bit beforehand so that you are prepared. Although it is “the most natural thing in the world,” a lot of babies will have trouble latching on. And it hurts like buggery to start with. It doesn’t mean you’re rubbish or not cut out for this sort of thing or whatever else. Expect every single member of the ward staff to come in and offer you advice, and probably grab your boob as you try to feed as well. You will lose all modesty where your boobs are concerned.

• If you are planning to breastfeed, I cannot shout loudly enough that you should buy some Lansinoh lanolin cream. It’s a little purple tube and it costs about £12, which seems extortionate, and you may be tempted to think you can do without something that’s so expensive. And then, three weeks into breastfeeding when you’re crying out in pain every time your little bundle latches on, you’ll be prepared to pay ten times that amount for one of those little purple tubes. Incidentally, Lansinoh cream is magic and works wonders on just about every kind of skin ailment. It is the work of the gods, I tells ye.

• It would also be prudent to purchase nursing pads, as boobs tend to leak a lot, especially in the early days. There are a lot of different ones out there, and it’s down to personal preference, but I found the Lansinoh ones were the best. And they actually stick to the inside of your bra properly so that you don’t lose them or find them floating about your neckline mid-afternoon.

• One thing nobody tells you (I wasn’t aware until I started researching this post) is that it’s recommended to feed your baby within the first 6 hours, so as to establish your milk ducts to their full potential. Don’t panic if you can’t though; it’s not the end of the world, just useful to know so that you can at least try.

• If you’re breastfeeding exclusively, you just kind of have to accept that your life is not your own for the next however-many months. A breastfed baby will need to be fed more frequently than a formula-fed one, and will not sleep through the night (unless you are very, very lucky). This is because breast milk is so efficient, it fills your baby’s stomach, and is then used up very quickly. Formula will sit in their stomach for a while before it is used up, meaning baby doesn’t get hungry and wake up.

• No matter what anyone tries to tell you, if your baby is exclusively breastfed, it really can be exclusively breastfed. You don’t need to feed baby cooled boiled water or juice or anything else. If the weather is hot, your boobs will know about it, and your milk becomes more dilute so as to be more thirst quenching. When your baby goes through a growth spurt and begins to feed every half-hour, that doesn’t mean your milk is not enough and you need to get some formula or baby rice. Your boobs notice the baby is feeding more frequently, and increase your supply, so within a day or so, there’s more milk with more calories there for the first feed, and baby doesn’t get hungry again for a few hours.

• There is no food or drink known to man that is as nutritious and calorific as breast milk. Even when baby starts solids, it will still be getting most of its sustenance from your milk until solids are properly established, around a year old.

• Your boobs are magic. They work on a “demand and supply” principle, meaning that if your baby feeds regularly, your boobs will increase their milk production to accommodate that. Unfortunately, this does mean that you can’t “cheat” by expressing milk for someone else to feed baby while you take a nap. Your boobs can’t tell the difference between a pump and a baby, and will just assume the demand has increased. You are likely to be woken by full, engorged boobs waiting for a baby to feed.

• If you have problems establishing breastfeeding – and you most probably will (everyone does), don’t give up just yet! Find out where your nearest Children’s Centre is (your health visitor can tell you) and go to a breastfeeding support group. It sounds odd, and it kind of is – but you can usually guarantee a cup of tea or coffee, a room full of mums in the same position as you, and some experienced helpers with boatloads of advice and support. When I went there was even jam on toast.

• Regarding breastfeeding in public – this is now covered under anti-discrimination law, and staff/proprietors cannot legally ask you to leave or not to breastfeed in their establishment. A lot of women prefer to wear a scarf or something else to protect their modesty, but apparently you don’t actually have to. I’ve never tested that theory though.

• Some women have a particularly fast letdown, and when their little one latches on it can come too quickly and make them gag. There are a lot of different ways to deal with this, so if you find you have this issue, it’s probably best to speak to your health visitor or midwife. Some tactics include changing the way you hold the baby, frequent burping, more frequent feeding, or hand-expressing until the flow slows down.

• One thing I wasn’t aware of before I had a baby and actually thought about it – there is more than one position for breastfeeding. On TV and what have you, you tend to see a woman holding the baby across her chest – but many women find it easier and more comfortable to feed baby whilst holding baby under her arm (like a rugby ball), or (my personal favourite for night-time feeding) laying down. As long as the baby is getting milk and is comfortable, it really doesn’t matter how you’re holding them. When they get older, they will choose their own position, often with one hand grabbing at your clothes, or (S’s personal favourite) clawing at your mouth and throat.

• Regarding feeding positions – bear in mind that you will be doing this several times a day, potentially for the better part of a year. Sometimes, especially in the early days, baby can feed for 45 minutes or more at a time. It’s important therefore, that you are sitting comfortably and not leaning or straining. Use a lot of pillows to prop yourself and baby into a comfortable position. Your back will thank you.

• Something I wish I’d been told (perhaps I was told, but I wish someone had told me it every day for the first month) is that breastfeeding can take 6 weeks to establish. A lot of women try their level best at it, and give up after a few weeks because they find it so hard, not realising that if they’d just hung on in there a couple more weeks things would have become a whole lot easier. I you intend to breastfeed, it’s best to just give your life up to it for the first 6 weeks and accept that you won’t be doing much else but getting used to it. If you need to, switch the phone off, lock the doors, and just sleep whenever the baby does. This phase doesn’t last forever, I promise.

• Until breastfeeding is established, it is weird, uncomfortable, exhausting, time-consuming and completely alien. I was imagining giving birth to a baby and feeding it straight away and everything being peachy. It doesn’t happen like that (unless you are very lucky). It does hurt to start with, your nipples do get sore, you do wonder what the hell is going on. In order to get your milk supply up, your baby does spend a lot of time feeding. I remember a good few evenings where I was literally stuck to the couch from 6pm to 10pm with barely enough time for a toilet break between feeds. I was at a loss until someone explained it’s normal, everyone goes through it, and it doesn’t last forever.

• Once you get through the initial bedding-in stage, breastfeeding really is the lazy person’s option. No sterilising, no panic if you’ve forgotten to buy formula in this week’s shop, no getting up to warm a bottle and checking it’s the right temperature while your baby screams in your arms, no having to remember to take a bottle if you go out, perhaps two or three if you’re out for a while. Baby’s hungry? Find somewhere to sit, and open your shirt. You don’t even necessarily need to find somewhere to sit; I know a lot of women who breastfeed with their baby in a sling, while they carry on with their day. The most difficult part of breastfeeding is finding clothes to accommodate your boobs whilst allowing easy access.

• Breast milk is magic. Not only does it have the exact right nutrients in the exact right amounts to feed a growing baby, changing as the baby develops, it is also good for minor first aid. (bear with me on this, I know it sounds a bit odd). You know when your baby scratches her face with the nails you forgot to cut, and you feel like the world’s worst mother? Spread a little expressed milk on it, and it will be gone in no time. It can be used in ears to protect against an ear infection when baby has a cold, on nappy rash, eczema, mosquito bites, grazes, rashes, you name it. It is also good on acne, adult or infant.

• If you breastfeed exclusively, it can delay the start of your period. This can last anything from the first couple of months right up to a year of age, perhaps even longer. An added bonus for those of us who really don’t enjoy such things (is there anyone who does?)

• The down side of breastfeeding is that you can’t get someone else to do it for you, while you go and have fun (or sleep). The up side is that you get to sit and cuddle your baby several times a day. It’s not something you can do whilst doing the washing up, cooking the tea, ironing hubby’s work shirt or much else except watch TV and have a little drink. Make the most of having a cast iron excuse to sit down and have a break.

• When babies are very small, you have to hold them in position and help them latch on and make sure your arm doesn’t drop or they fall away from the boob and get upset that their food supply has disappeared. When they’re bigger, you just point them in the vague direction of your boob, and they sort themselves out. S is 6 months old now, and pretty much starts to undress me when she gets hungry these days.

• Another thing breastfed babies do when they’re older is use feeding time as a time to practise things like grabbing, raspberry blowing, poking, and other loveliness. Just recently during night feeds S had taken to feeding from one nipple while she grabs and pinches at the other, which is not very nice. It is quite fun to watch them practising their other skills though, and only a problem if you’re just giving them a quick feed before you go off out somewhere. That is the time they will spend 20 minutes blowing raspberries before bothering to actually have any milk. Try to enjoy it; they’ll be moody teenagers before you know it.

• Breastfeeding helps you get rid of the baby weight! I don’t know why they don’t shout this one from the rooftops, seriously. It uses up extra calories from your body, so as long as you’re not shovelling a slab of chocolate down your throat at every meal, you do just lose weight from sitting on the couch watching daytime telly. It does mean that you can often find yourself ravenously hungry and horribly thirsty though, especially if they’re going through a growth spurt.

• One thing that’s obvious once it’s been said, but still needs to be said, is that your diet will affect the quality of your milk. Your body can only make milk from the materials available to it. Obviously if you’re struggling to look after a tiny baby, your diet does tend to go out the window a little bit. But once this concept dawned on me, I started to pay more attention to what I was eating and drinking.

• Breastfed babies can often go a long time between poos – another bonus! This is something a lot of people have never heard of, and it is not the case for all breastfed babies. Before starting solids, S would only ever poo every 5 days. If she went longer than 5 days, I would start drinking lots of orange juice, and that would speed things up a bit. Strange but true – your drinking orange juice will help your baby poo.

So there we have it: a rather lengthy post of all the things I thought might be useful to know about breastfeeding.

Apparently only 3% of UK women are still breastfeeding at 5 months, which is a sad statistic that we can hopefully improve if we all share our knowledge and personal experiences.

This post is part of a group of Things They Don't Tell You About... posts. The others are:

Things They Don't Tell You About Pregnancy
Things They Don't Tell You About Childbirth
Things They Don't Tell You About Motherhood
Things They Don't Tell You About Babies

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Things They Don't Tell You About Motherhood.

Following on from my last two posts on things you’re not told about pregnancy and childbirth, this post is all about the things they don’t warn you about afterwards: both immediately after the birth, and generally in motherhood.

This is what "utterly shell shocked" looks like.

In the hospital:

• Babies tend to sleep a lot for their first 24 hours, and don’t really need any feeding or much of anything else. Take advantage and get your head down.
• One major thing a few people said to me was that you don’t automatically feel a heady rush of love for your baby as soon as it is born. That can take days, weeks, even months. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad mother. Rachel Cusk wrote a good book about this sort of thing called A Life's Work.
• Something nobody can ever prepare you for, and a lot of people don’t mention, is the complete and utter shock. Personally, I was shell-shocked for a good couple of months after S was born, and thought I must have something wrong with me. Turns out, the only thing wrong was that I’d just given birth five weeks early and was in shock. Who knew. Certainly not her father, but that’s a whole other blog post.
• The longer you spend on the postnatal ward, the more different opinions you will hear presented to you as fact. It is worth remembering here that midwives and health visitors are mere mortals the same as everyone else and ultimately in the end, it’s your baby, and you know best. Unless you’re planning to hang baby out the window by his toes, in which case listen to the midwives.
• The postnatal ward is often very busy and horribly understaffed. This can mean that if you need help with something, you need to assert yourself to get it. Don’t be afraid to push your buzzer to get a maternity assistant or midwife to help you with something.
• When you go to the ward, you hear all the babies screaming and think there is no chance you will get any rest here. My experience, and that of several people I've spoken to, is that you suddenly develop an ability to fall asleep very quickly, and to sleep through all the noise and the lights being on, but the minute your baby stirs, you wake up.
• While you are on the ward, don’t feel that your baby must spend all non-feeding or changing time in its little plastic fish bowl. Certainly when I was in hospital, I initially felt a bit like “you’ve played with it, now put it away.” It took me a while to realise S was my baby, and I could just sit and hold her if I wanted to. In fact, after one of the NICU nurses told me it would be beneficial for S to be stripped to her nappy and put down my top, I had her like that as much as possible for as long as possible. I’m sure that did a lot to help both of us through a fairly difficult time. (Also it’s pretty funny when the ward staff come in to check on you and look down into the fish bowl before squeaking, “where’s your baby?!”)

Your body:

• When you are pregnant, your abdominal muscles can sometimes split in order to allow your belly to expand. You know sometimes you see women with a little lump above their belly button? That's a little hernia. A lot of the time, you give birth and your muscles knit themselves back together and everything is peachy. Sometimes they don't knit back together quite so quickly, and you can find yourself in a position, 3 months post partum, with a gap as wide as 4 fingers between your muscles. That tends to hurt when you lift things. You will probably need physio to sort it out, otherwise it will just get worse and worse. There are some truly horrific photos on the internet of women who can fit their entire fist between their abdominals. Not pretty.
• Once you've given birth, your uterus sets about shrinking itself back down to how it used to be before. It feels like period pains. If you breastfeed, the first few times you feed your baby will cause your uterus to contract more and it will hurt. It hurts for some more than for others. For me, the first few times I fed S I wondered whether perhaps part of the placenta was still in there and needed to come out.
• Listen to the midwives. Do your pelvic floor exercises. You can never do too many.
• Even if you have had a C-section rather than natural birth, you will still get lochia. What is lochia, I hear you ask (I heard myself ask it in the hospital) – it’s another thing nobody tells you about beforehand. It’s bleeding. There will be a lot of it, and it will go on for a long time. You can buy maternity pads specifically for this job; they are big and unattractive, but they do the job and are more heavy duty than your standard pad. Also, one thing I wish I’d thought of in hospital – in an emergency, a nappy can double as a maternity pad (obviously not done up!)
• Remember in the pregnancy post, where I said your pelvis can go a bit squiffy? Well sometimes after you've given birth, it sticks itself back together a bit crookedly, and you get a pain between your legs when you do random things like take a step to the left too quickly or kick something. You can go to a physio and get it put right, though - but while they're fixing it, it can feel a lot like they're just trying to break your pelvis.
• When your milk comes in, it feels like someone has sneaked in and injected concrete into your boobs. They swell about 6 cup sizes, and feel solid, hot and painful. It eases eventually. Also one very important point here: even if you have decided not to breastfeed, your milk will still come in. It’s important that you don’t try to express any off in an attempt to alleviate the pain, as that will just make your body think someone is drinking the milk, and it needs to produce more.
• Be prepared for your hair to start falling out. Not going bald, just all the hair your body kept hold of while you were pregnant will start to deposit itself all over your house. And wrap itself around your baby’s fingers. It’s normal. Don’t worry about it unless you genuinely do start to look a bit thin on top. And try to check baby’s fingers for a build-up every day or so.
• While you were pregnant your body had to amend your metabolic rate to allow for the fact you needed more calories. Once the baby is born, your body resets itself, and tries to figure out how many calories you need to live on a day to day basis. In some people, this can change dramatically. I am one of the lucky ones, and when my body reset itself I ended up losing weight. For a lot of people, it can go the other way, and they find it very hard to lose their pregnancy weight.
• Related to the previous point: your body might well go back to the same weight it was before, but it will most probably never be the same shape. Your fat redistributes itself in different places, and a lot of women find they are never again comfortable in their pre-pregnancy clothes. A few people have commented that their body didn’t go back to feeling like their own for quite some time, especially if they were breastfeeding.
• When it comes to losing pregnancy weight, try not to bend under pressure. One mantra I learned from a Davina McCall dvd is: “9 months on, 9 months off.” Don’t even go near your pre-pregnancy clothes before your baby is 9 months old. It will just depress you.
• Whether you breastfeed or not, it’s the pregnancy hormones that will ruin your boobs. And when I say ruin… imagine two battered Tesco carrier bags, half-filled with wet sand.

Other stuff:

• If you decide not to breastfeed, be prepared to feel judged. If not in hospital, certainly when you are out and about. There is a lot of pressure to breastfeed these days, and people do seem to sit in judgement of a woman producing a bottle of formula from her changing bag. I’ve known people who would avoid feeding their baby a bottle in public because they felt they were being stared at. Then again, if you flop your boobs out to feed your baby, they also stare – you can’t really win with this one I’m afraid.
• People you don’t know will stop in the street and chat to you about your child as if they’ve known you for years. They will also offer advice. Lots of it. You will be judged for everything you do, everything you don’t do, and everything you consider doing. People who don’t even know you will tell you exactly what you are doing wrong.
• Once you have your baby, and have gotten over the initial trauma, you find you have a ridiculous level of empathy you never realised existed, for all other women going through pregnancy and childbirth.
• Motherhood also makes you stupidly paranoid. You’ve probably sat and watched TV shows about women who worry too much about their children and wrap them in cotton wool and thought, “oh how terrible, I’d never do that” – but when you have your own, it’s really, really difficult not to. I check S to ensure she is breathing approximately 50 times every single night. And then there’s the paranoia over whether they are warm enough, cool enough, crying because they’re in pain or just because they’re a baby, are you giving them too much medicine or not enough, should you call the doctor or is it just a little cold. When your baby is actually ill – even if it’s only a bit of a temperature or a cold, it is terrifying in a way you cannot imagine until it happens. Nothing prepares you for the horrible thoughts that rush through your brain when your baby does something as simple as sleep a little longer or a little deeper than you expected.
• Always check the back of your top (and your shoulders, and your sides, and your knees) for milky sick before leaving the house. Similarly, try to avoid wearing black. Your best option is a top with a pattern that will disguise the sick patches because by day 3, you will be so over changing your clothes every time you get puked on.
• It sounds strange, but for me becoming a mother has given me a mental strength I didn’t think was possible. I push myself more when exercising now; where previously I might have stopped because it hurt, now I know it really doesn’t hurt, and I can deal with a lot more. This also transfers into everyday life: things that would have stopped me in my tracks and ground me down don’t tend to bother me so much. Don’t get me wrong, I still get upset, but I bounce back a lot more quickly and have a much stronger faith in myself and my abilities. After all, I have successfully grown and given birth to a human being with arms and legs and eyes and a head and everything. Turns out I’m pretty awesome. (I am aware that sounds really daft, but just you wait until you are staring your progeny in the face. You’ll understand it then)
• Think you’re tired now? Pah! You do not know what tired is. Come back when your baby is 2 months old and we’ll discuss it then. You will get to a point where you are able to function almost perfectly normally on as little as 2 disjointed hours of sleep a night. You will consider it a “good” night if you only wake up four times. You will become intimately familiar with the overnight TV schedules, and you will forget the word for “cheese.” Try to think of it as character building. Once you just accept that a good, 8-hour night’s sleep is a thing of the past, you will feel better. And you will still be capable of playing peek-a-boo and laughing with your baby as if you’re perfectly well rested.
• Are you squeamish? Not any more, you’re not. Once your baby has been sick on you a few hundred times, and you’ve dealt with your first couple of poonamis, you just sort of become immune to it.
• Babies get baby acne. Your baby has been in your belly, a sterile environment, for 9 months. Now all of a sudden she’s out here in the big wide world and exposed to all these germs and air and things. As far as I know, all babies go through a week or so where they get lots of little spots on their faces. I didn’t know this though, until it happened to S and the health visitor told me not to worry about it. Don’t be tempted to pick the spots though (who would?) as babies’ skin scars very easily and it could cause lasting damage. They clear up on their own after a week or so.
• You will have at least one moment in your child’s first few months where you just want to scream at them, “what is the matter! Why are you crying! Tell me how to fix this damn you!!” it doesn’t make you a terrible person, it makes you a human. Just so long as you don’t actually scream at them. Usually just having the thought is enough to make you check yourself, and then they invariably look at you or smile, or do something cute, and you forget there was ever a problem.
• Before you have a child, you know in a sort of abstract way that your life will change, but nothing prepares you for the utter carnage that is your first few weeks at home with a newborn. There is no point in my even trying to tell you how different things will be, because you will not comprehend it until it happens. When it does, think back to this post and remember how I tried to warn you.

This post is very long, and I’ve probably still missed off an awful lot of things that would be useful for a new mum to know. If you have anything to add, please feel free to do so.

While I was writing these posts, I came across a lot of information about breastfeeding. So much, in fact, that there will be another post tomorrow about all the things they don’t tell you about breastfeeding.


This post is part of a group of Things They Don't Tell You About... posts. The others are:

Things They Don't Tell You About Pregnancy
Things They Don't Tell You About Childbirth
Things They Don't Tell You About Breastfeeding
Things They Don't Tell You About Babies

Thank you for reading! If you have enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends using the buttons below!

Things They Don't Tell You About Childbirth

Following on from yesterday’s post, I have been compiling a list of things “they” don’t tell you about childbirth. If you are of a nervous disposition, or a man, you may wish to skip this blog post. The world won’t think any less of you for it.

• One Born Every Minute is a good show, but they only air about 10% of the births they film - the producers openly admit that the majority of births on a day-to-day basis are too boring to bother with. When they put their show together, they're looking to make entertaining TV, not a realistic portrayal of what most births look like.

• They don’t always tell you what’s going on. Sometimes they make notes and busy themselves around you, and you’ve no clue what they’re doing.

• Sometimes if you’re overdue and the doctors are impatient for you to give birth, for whatever reason, they will call you in for a “sweep.” There’s no nice way of putting this: they put their hand inside of you and sweep their fingers across the opening of your uterus, in the hope they will irritate it into doing something.

• Labour hurts, but it’s bearable. Being induced hurts more, but it’s also bearable. For the most part. That said, always try to avoid being induced if you possibly can. It’s the difference between a gradual build up into a lot of pain, and the sudden onset of a lot of pain.

• One thing I wasn't prepared for was the amount of blood when my waters broke, both at the time and in the hours between that and giving birth. I was expecting, well, water. But there was a lot of blood. It wasn't very pretty.

• When your waters break, it’s not like someone just empties a bottle of water and it’s over. There are “front” waters and “back” waters and all sorts of other things, which basically means you might have a massive gush, but you’re also likely to just have a constant trickle for a good few hours. Also, your waters might not break at all. Sometimes the midwife/doctor will break them for you when it becomes clear they’re not going on their own. Some babies are born "in the caul" - where the amniotic sac has not been broken during birth. This is very rare though.

• One thing I didn’t realise, is that they put you in a room with one of those gym balls and a bed, and just sort of leave you to it. I mean, you can be left in that room for a couple of hours at a time between visits. Turns out it might be the biggest thing going on in your life, but to them it’s just another day at the office. Look on the bright side: if they're not hanging around, they aren’t worried about you!

• There tends to be a lot of pressure not to have pain relief. I’ve heard women comparing notes, boasting how far they got before they had any pain relief. Everyone is different; everyone’s pain threshold is different. When your child is 18, nobody will remember whether you had every drug available to you or not.

• That said, a couple of people have told me they have suffered ongoing back problems from having an epidural.

• Furthermore, I have been told bad things about Pethidine: specifically, that it is not an adequate pain killer, it makes the baby drowsy for the next day or so, and that often women who have been given it don’t remember holding their baby for the first time. I have no personal experience of it though, and everyone is different with these things. My advice if you're considering it, would be to ask someone whose opinion you trust: your midwife, a friend, the GP.

• When you get to the bit between "ouch these contractions quite hurt" and "owwwww push push push" you are sometimes sick. Perhaps people already know this, but I didn't, and as I sat on the toilet whilst puking into a bowl the midwife was holding, and having a rather painful contraction, I thought perhaps there was something wrong. The midwife laughed and said, "no, it's just labour." Nice.

• Not pushing is harder than pushing. A lot harder. I remember a stage in my labour where they lay me on my side and told me to “just not push” for a while. My response was “I don’t understand how to not push, my body is just doing it!”

• After about the fifth time, you just accept that the midwife can just fit her hand in there without assistance, and that it's probably a good thing, considering what is to come. You lose all ladylike modesty and just nod when a new person comes into the room and wants to have a root around up there.

• When the baby’s head is coming out, it stings your wee hole. You have to just suck it up, and carry on pushing – but that area can sting and feel bruised for weeks afterwards.

• One friend said to me, “don’t eat anything solid for the last few days of pregnancy, unless the baby is not the only thing you want to push out!” It’s true; while your body is busy trying to push a baby out of one hole, sometimes it pushes other things out of other holes. Just keep reminding yourself that midwives deal with this all day, every day, and won’t think you’re disgusting. They probably won’t even mention it.

• After you give birth to the baby, you have to give birth to the placenta. And there's not much to look forward to where that one is concerned. Unless you are interested to see what has been providing sustenance for your baby for the past 9 months. Mine looked like a great big tray of fresh liver, and the people in the room did indeed spend a fair amount of time admiring it.

• There is a way to put a "clip" on the baby's head, while it is still inside of you, so that they can monitor its heart beat. I have no idea how, and it freaked me out more than slightly, but when they are born you can't tell it was ever there. Magic.

• Sometimes, because they have been squeezed out along the birth canal, babies can have a fairly funny-shaped head. This is why babies’ skull bones are not fused together until they are a little older. Trust me: they go back to normal head-shape eventually.

• When it’s all finished, and you’re holding your little bundle of joy, don’t be alarmed to look up and realise the room looks like a crime scene. Birth is messy. A lot more messy than any TV show, even One Born Every Minute, would ever have you believe.

• Once you’ve given birth, if there are any tears or stitches involved, a warm salt bath can apparently be amazingly soothing for them. I’ve no personal experience of this, but several people have told me.

• If you end up having to have an emergency C-Section, I’m told there is little more terrifying in life. By the time they decide a C-Section is the only course of action, the baby can often be in distress, and this means they don’t always have time to explain to you what is going on. I have also spoken to someone who works in theatres though, who quoted me a ridiculously short time for how long it took them from the woman being on the labour ward to them having her in theatre and the baby out. She was very pleased with that one, and rightly so too.

• No matter what anyone tells you is right or wrong, possible or impossible, every single pregnancy and birth are different. Nobody can tell you that your experience was easier or worse than theirs, or that you should have done this or that differently. If they try to, walk away.

• One thing I found interesting while researching this post is that all women in the EU have the right to choose where and how they give birth. That doesn’t just mean the option to have a home birth, but about what goes on in a hospital birth too, whether they want a C-Section etc. You can find out more from Freedom for Birth here. 

This post is part of a group of Things They Don't Tell You About... posts. The others are:

Things They Don't Tell You About Pregnancy
Things They Don't Tell You About Breastfeeding
Things They Don't Tell You About Motherhood
Things They Don't Tell You About Babies

Thank you for reading! If you have enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends using the buttons below!

Things They Don't Tell You About Pregnancy

The list of things "they" don't tell you about pregnancy, childhood and motherhood is possibly the longest list in history. I'm fairly sure that if a lot of those things were taught in schools, we wouldn't have a teenage pregnancy epidemic because teenage girls would be too grossed out at the thought of such delights as piles, accidental peeing and being covered head to toe in milky vomit.

This started off as a bit of a jokey post, but as I wrote it, and asked friends for their input, it became clear that actually there are a good few things it would be really handy to know about. In fact, the list of “things” got so long, it’s too big for one post so I’ve broken it down into three. Today’s post therefore is a list of things that might be handy to know about pregnancy:

• Relaxin: it’s a hormone that does what it says on the tin: it sets about making your bones and joints more flexible, so as to allow your pelvis to widen for the baby to come out. Sometimes it does this a little too enthusiastically, and your pelvis goes a bit wobbly. For me, this meant wearing a large, white, elasticated belt around my hips whenever I was walking any distance. For others, it means quite a lot more pain and discomfort, possibly even crutches or a wheelchair. Ever seen anyone on a soap dealing with this? No, of course not. It’s not glamorous enough, just bloody annoying.
• As well as causing all the hip problems, relaxin also causes all your other joints to relax. This can cause the bones and muscles in your feet to spread out, and your feet to grow. It can also mean your oesophagus relaxes, and you get acid reflux. A lot.
• Shhh… don’t tell anyone, but the pregnancy glow is a big, fat, ugly myth. I spent the first 6 months of my pregnancy waiting for it to kick in, before realising it probably wasn’t coming.
• Bleeding and leaking fluid: sometimes, this just happens. When it does, it freaks you out and causes massive panic. Then you speak to the people in the know and they invariably say "oh yeah, don't worry about that!" (NB. if you are pregnant and have this, still speak to the people in the know. Don't take my word for anything; I'm far from an expert in these things)
• You can no longer trust your own mind. I don't know about anyone else, but my hormones were largely all over the shop from one day to the next, and I found in the end that I just didn't really trust myself to make any proper decisions.
• That said, any time you are even vaguely emotional, people will pull a “knowing” face and blame it on your hormones – even if you are angry or upset for a valid reason.
• Say goodbye to a decent night's sleep. I've not slept more than about 4 hours at a time since the middle of my pregnancy. The good news is, you just get used to it after a while. And then when you’ve had the baby and you don’t need to pee every five minutes, you get up with the baby instead. And then sometimes, the baby is asleep but you just wake up because you’re used to it.
• Your immune system is lower while you are pregnant, which means you are more prone to coughs and colds. And there is hardly any medication you can take for them. It’s basically just paracetamol. If in doubt, assume you can’t take it. Buy lots of tissues.
• When you are pregnant, people think it’s ok to just come up and touch your belly. Even people you don’t know terribly well. It’s also open season on commenting on your size.
• If you go overdue, the world and his wife will have only one greeting each time they see you: “not had it yet then?” Which is exactly what you don’t need to hear, when it’s the first thing you think every time you wake up, and you’d really rather have had it by now yourself.
• A lot of women really don’t enjoy pregnancy, for whatever reason. It doesn’t make them bad people. Society dictates that we should all be perfectly calm and happy and glowing throughout, and people get confused when that’s not the case. Quite often their confusion manifests itself in assumptions about your suitability as a mother. Ignore them, they are idiots.
• One thing a friend said to me fairly early on: if it can go wrong in your body, now’s the time it will go wrong. Prepare for everything to cease usual functioning.
• A lot of pregnant women have bleeding gums. And not just “oh what’s that on my toothbrush there” but proper massacre in the sink, as one lady put it.
• You will become very forgetful. Baby Brain is real. And it only gets worse. My daughter is now 6 months old and I regularly miss something on a dvd I’m watching because I forgot to pay attention; I rewind it to watch again, only to find I’ve forgotten to pay attention again. Eventually I just give up!
• Babies get hiccups before they are born. It feels weird.
• For me, pregnancy improved my body image to no end. Having spent my entire adult life worrying about wearing clothes that might be too tight and show my gut, I now relished the fact I was supposed to have a big belly, and wore lots of figure-hugging tops.
• Your belly will most probably get pretty hairy. It’s normal.
• Personally, I had some very strange dreams while I was pregnant. The one that really springs to mind was one night when I dreamed the baby was kicking, and managed to split my stomach and kick its way right out of me. Very disturbing.
• Early on in pregnancy, my GP told me that she was sure pregnancy hormones just kick in and make you go all chilled out and happy at a certain point. I thought she was mental, but suddenly, when I got to 23 weeks, I found that I could not find a shit to give about a lot of things. Even facing the horrible stresses I faced, I was still relatively calm. If I hadn’t been under such ridiculous stress, I could quite probably have been comatose.

I've probably missed a fair few points here; feel free to leave comments below with your own experiences.

This post is part of a group of Things They Don't Tell You About... posts. The others are:

Things They Don't Tell You About Childbirth

Things They Don't Tell You About Breastfeeding
Things They Don't Tell You About Motherhood
Things They Don't Tell You About Babies

Thank you for reading! If you have enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends using the buttons below!