I wanted to share the books that have helped guide us along the parenting path.
The Contented Little Baby Book
Does the idea of putting your baby on a schedule appeal to you? Do you like the idea of knowing that you'll have several predetermined chunks of time each day to yourself?
If so, consider checking out Gina Ford's book. She's a famous nanny in Britain, and lots of British (and now American) parents have adopted her ideas.
Most books say that you can't put a newborn on a schedule. However, we've had a lot of success. Sure, everything doesn't always go as planned, and sometimes he falls asleep earlier than he's supposed to or wakes up before he's supposed to, but we do our best to get back on track and usually can.
If the idea of a highly structured day is overwhelming to you or if you are committed to feeding your baby on demand, no matter the time of day, don't bother reading this book. But if you like the idea of only 5-7 feedings per day and of getting your baby to sleep through the night at a young age, check it out.
(For the record, Rooster is not yet sleeping through the night, but most nights, we get a 5-hour stretch, which is good for a 7-week-old.)
The Happiest Baby on the Block
This book frequently offers opposite advice from Gina's book. The author says that there's no way you can put a baby on a schedule until at least 8 weeks and that your job as a parent is to adapt your life to your baby and do what he wants.
The book focuses on getting your baby to stop crying, theorizing that a non-crying baby will sleep well. The author offers a few ideas that we know that Gina would pooh-pooh, but they work for us.
For instance, Gina says that the baby should sleep in his crib, as sleeping elsewhere will encourage him to develop bad sleeping habits that you will then have to correct down the road. However, she doesn't address what to do when your baby will sleep for only 30 minutes at a time in his crib. The Happiest Baby book tells you to let your baby sleep in his swing, all night if necessary, until 4 or 5 months or whenever he is ready to move back to his crib.
We put Rooster in his crib for each nap, and sometimes he sleeps there the entire time, but most of the time, he wakes up crying after only a half hour. At that point, we calm him down and put him in his swing, where he sleeps like a contented little baby for the rest of his nap (not always, but most of the time).
You do what you must to get sleep.
Another side note--at some point, you will have an inconsolable, screaming baby on your hands. And the tricks in the Happiest Baby book will get him to stop crying. Buy this book, learn about the 5 S's, and your baby will cry less.
What to Expect series
These books are great for the paranoid preggo and mom who wants to know every bad thing that could possibly happen and who wants to commit many hours to reading the books cover to cover, as the books are not designed to be scanned or used as reference material.
Are the books useful? Sometimes. Are they annoying? Definitely. You make the call about whether you can handle their overcautiousness.
The Baby Owner's Manual
If you have very little experience handling babies, consider buying this book. Most baby books provide theoretical information, but this book provides step-by-step instructions for all your baby-related tasks, from getting into breastfeeding positions to giving a sponge bath. Plus it's well-written, scannable, and fun.
Am I biased because I have written a few manuals myself (admittedly, not nearly as fun as this one)? Perhaps. But I suspect that this book is appealing to non-technical writers, too.
Baby 411
We bought this book on our Kindle, a decision that I regretted at first, as it's enormous and the Kindle does not allow for easy scanning. However, the Kindle has a Find feature, allowing us to search the book when we have questions about anything from cradle cap to thrush.
The book provides a lot of detail, perhaps too much. Reading it while I was pregnant gave me nightmares. Purchase if you want too much information about everything or if you want a comprehensive reference book.
Milk Memos
If you want to know how what it's like to return to work and still try to breastfeed your baby, consider buying this book. It will also provide encouragement if you are pumping.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Great expectations
B is frequently frustrated by my inability to play "Let's Pretend." He enjoys throwing out hypothetical situations to find out what I'd do in them. Invariably, I respond to his questions with more questions, probing for details, and in the end, my answer is usually, "I don't know," or "That sounds unlikely to happen."
My brain just doesn't process hypotheticals.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I had no idea what to expect from my new role of "mother," so I didn't think I had many expectations before entering this new role. However, I apparently did have some expectations, perhaps unspoken even to myself, because I am constantly surprised by my new role.
Here are a few areas that have taken me by surprise in the last month or so.
Fun
The secret that no one tells you is that the first few weeks of parenthood aren't much fun. People hide this knowledge in statements such as, "It gets better," or "It gets easier." What they're really saying is, "There are limited opportunities for fun in the beginning."
Sure, there are elements of fun and wonderful, particularly when your baby is cute and provides you with adorable photographable moments of cuteness explosions. But a lot of the time, it's diaper blowouts at 3 in the morning and the need to change the bedding and the diaper and swaddle blanket of a screaming newborn.
That situation probably doesn't sound like fun--because it isn't!
Now when people tell me, "Oh, the early days are so much fun," my answer is, "Actually, they're not that much fun." And it's amazing how the conversation changes afterward! Invariably, the woman (because men do not feel the need to pretend that newborns are a barrel of laughs all the time) lowers her voice and admits that she herself did not enjoy the early days that much, and then she offers the age when the fun actually begins (usually somewhere in the 2 to 4 month range).
I am doing my best to maintain an even keel until the fun increases. It must get better, or people wouldn't have multiple children.
Baby blues
They warned us in childbirthing class about the baby blues, and naturally, I assumed that I would be immune to them.
This situation illustrates the danger of inflated self-confidence.
The baby blues usually start a couple days after the birth of your baby and are the result of your hormones going haywire. You can go from laughter to tears within minutes and have very little control over your emotions.
I first experienced the baby blues when I nearly started crying while we were leaving the hospital. Make no mistake--I couldn't wait to get home. But actually walking down the hallway with Rooster in his carrier, knowing that we'd soon be flying solo with him, left me overwhelmed.
Many situations left me overwhelmed those first couple weeks. I cried...a lot. A couple times, I felt like I couldn't stop crying, a scary situation because the baby blues can turn into postpartum depression.
Now, four weeks later, my baby blues are mostly gone. I still get overwhelmed taking care of a newborn by myself while B is at work, but I feel like I am much more in control of my emotions. I think that my baby blues were very closely tied with my physical recovery, another unexpected result of this thing they call childbirth...
Lengthy recovery time
I did not expect to be in so much pain following the birth. I thought that lengthy recovery times were for c-sections only. Wrong!
In the days following Rooster's birth, I could barely get out of bed. I watched the clock religiously and requested my Motrin every 6 hours. Two weeks later, I was still taking Motrin and walking like a bit of a gunslinger.
A month later, I still have not fully recovered. During pregnancy, I thought that classifying pregnancy leave as a short-term disability was a little odd, but now I understand because I genuinely do feel like I am physically disabled much of the time.
It seems awfully unfair to have to deal with the physical recovery from birth at the same time that you have to learn how to take care of a newborn, but that's the way it is. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have B. Single mothers, you amaze me.
Breastfeeding difficulties
Breastfeeding is natural and easy, right? You and the baby instinctively know what to do, and your baby gains weight and thrives with very little effort from you while you still manage to get lots of sleep.
That's how it's sold, anyway. The reality was quite the opposite.
My baby didn't know what to do, he only lost weight, and no one got any sleep.
I've already written about this subject, so I won't belabor the point, but anyone who says that breastfeeding is easy is either extremely lucky or is lying.
Exhaustion
I knew I'd be tired. I just didn't know what tired really felt like until now. I leave a room to grab something and forget what I needed. I start sentences and stop speaking in the middle because I've forgotten what I was going to say. I forget how much milk I put in Rooster's bottle. I find my eyelids getting awfully heavy while I'm rocking and feeding Rooster.
Sleep is at a wicked premium in our house these days (for everyone except Rooster, that is). Getting 6 hours of sleep--not consecutively, mind you, total--in a day is now a luxury.
We are lucky that he wakes up only twice each night and that he is rarely fussy during the night. (He saves that behavior for me during the day.)
Apparently, it will get easier.
My brain just doesn't process hypotheticals.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I had no idea what to expect from my new role of "mother," so I didn't think I had many expectations before entering this new role. However, I apparently did have some expectations, perhaps unspoken even to myself, because I am constantly surprised by my new role.
Here are a few areas that have taken me by surprise in the last month or so.
Fun
The secret that no one tells you is that the first few weeks of parenthood aren't much fun. People hide this knowledge in statements such as, "It gets better," or "It gets easier." What they're really saying is, "There are limited opportunities for fun in the beginning."
Sure, there are elements of fun and wonderful, particularly when your baby is cute and provides you with adorable photographable moments of cuteness explosions. But a lot of the time, it's diaper blowouts at 3 in the morning and the need to change the bedding and the diaper and swaddle blanket of a screaming newborn.
That situation probably doesn't sound like fun--because it isn't!
Now when people tell me, "Oh, the early days are so much fun," my answer is, "Actually, they're not that much fun." And it's amazing how the conversation changes afterward! Invariably, the woman (because men do not feel the need to pretend that newborns are a barrel of laughs all the time) lowers her voice and admits that she herself did not enjoy the early days that much, and then she offers the age when the fun actually begins (usually somewhere in the 2 to 4 month range).
I am doing my best to maintain an even keel until the fun increases. It must get better, or people wouldn't have multiple children.
Baby blues
They warned us in childbirthing class about the baby blues, and naturally, I assumed that I would be immune to them.
This situation illustrates the danger of inflated self-confidence.
The baby blues usually start a couple days after the birth of your baby and are the result of your hormones going haywire. You can go from laughter to tears within minutes and have very little control over your emotions.
I first experienced the baby blues when I nearly started crying while we were leaving the hospital. Make no mistake--I couldn't wait to get home. But actually walking down the hallway with Rooster in his carrier, knowing that we'd soon be flying solo with him, left me overwhelmed.
Many situations left me overwhelmed those first couple weeks. I cried...a lot. A couple times, I felt like I couldn't stop crying, a scary situation because the baby blues can turn into postpartum depression.
Now, four weeks later, my baby blues are mostly gone. I still get overwhelmed taking care of a newborn by myself while B is at work, but I feel like I am much more in control of my emotions. I think that my baby blues were very closely tied with my physical recovery, another unexpected result of this thing they call childbirth...
Lengthy recovery time
I did not expect to be in so much pain following the birth. I thought that lengthy recovery times were for c-sections only. Wrong!
In the days following Rooster's birth, I could barely get out of bed. I watched the clock religiously and requested my Motrin every 6 hours. Two weeks later, I was still taking Motrin and walking like a bit of a gunslinger.
A month later, I still have not fully recovered. During pregnancy, I thought that classifying pregnancy leave as a short-term disability was a little odd, but now I understand because I genuinely do feel like I am physically disabled much of the time.
It seems awfully unfair to have to deal with the physical recovery from birth at the same time that you have to learn how to take care of a newborn, but that's the way it is. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have B. Single mothers, you amaze me.
Breastfeeding difficulties
Breastfeeding is natural and easy, right? You and the baby instinctively know what to do, and your baby gains weight and thrives with very little effort from you while you still manage to get lots of sleep.
That's how it's sold, anyway. The reality was quite the opposite.
My baby didn't know what to do, he only lost weight, and no one got any sleep.
I've already written about this subject, so I won't belabor the point, but anyone who says that breastfeeding is easy is either extremely lucky or is lying.
Exhaustion
I knew I'd be tired. I just didn't know what tired really felt like until now. I leave a room to grab something and forget what I needed. I start sentences and stop speaking in the middle because I've forgotten what I was going to say. I forget how much milk I put in Rooster's bottle. I find my eyelids getting awfully heavy while I'm rocking and feeding Rooster.
Sleep is at a wicked premium in our house these days (for everyone except Rooster, that is). Getting 6 hours of sleep--not consecutively, mind you, total--in a day is now a luxury.
We are lucky that he wakes up only twice each night and that he is rarely fussy during the night. (He saves that behavior for me during the day.)
Apparently, it will get easier.
Moo
We've had some challenges, our new family, during this "transition" period. One of the biggest challenges has been feeding our child.
I was committed to feeding breastmilk to Rooster, but he and I had some difficulties with breastfeeding. He had trouble latching, so I got a shield, which helped somewhat, but he still had a terrible latch that left me in pain. If I removed him, he wouldn't relatch, so I had two options--deal with the pain, or let him starve. I did my best to suck it up and deal with the pain.
At the hospital, we had several visits with lactation consultants. The visits were unpleasant at best, traumatic at worst, leaving Rooster screaming and no more able to eat than he had been before. Seeing my baby being manhandled in an attempt to get him to eat left me feeling resentful and angry towards these women and made me distrust lactation consultants.
I also felt like I was a challenge rather than a human being to them. "I'm going to get him to eat without the shield," one consultant declared on our last day at the hospital, grabbing hold of his neck and of me and leaving both of us in frustrated and in pain. (She did not succeed. I knew she wouldn't.)
It was the visiting nurse, who stopped by the day after we got home from the hospital, who put the final nail in the breastfeeding coffin. She brought her portable scale and weighed him, and he had lost weight since leaving the hospital.
"Feed him every two hours," she recommended.
Something you should know about this "every two hours" recommendation--it doesn't mean that you feed him, and then two hours from the end of the feeding, you start again. No, no, no. If you start feeding at 10 PM, your next feeding begins at midnight, even if your 10 PM feeding takes 45 minutes (or longer!).
Further complicating matters was that it took two of us to attempt to get both Rooster and me into the right position for a feeding, so B, Rooster, and I spent one horrible, sleepless night with lots of tears and screaming (mostly but not exclusively from Rooster). At the end of each feeding, Rooster and I were covered in breastmilk, but very little actually made it into his belly.
The next day, we started charging the breastpump. It took 24 hours to charge, so we all suffered another horrible, sleepless night during which I felt guilty for (gasp!) going 2 1/2 hours between feedings so that I could get maybe 30 minutes of sleep at a time.
Finally, the breast pump was charged. The first time I pumped was a glorious, wonderful experience. Rooster drank the contents of the bottle in about 5 minutes and was ready for more when he finished. For the first time in days, he looked like a content baby.
As for me, I felt free for the first time since his birth. "You mean," I asked rhetorically, "I can still feed him breastmilk, but don't have to breastfeed in public? Other people can feed him, too? I can leave the house and not worry about taking his food supply away? We'll know exactly how much he's eating? Sign me up!"
So for the last 3+ weeks, I have been pumping. In the online world, this setup is called "exclusively pumping," or EP, and seems to be most popular among women whose babies are born prematurely and can't breastfeed, and others like me, who attempted it but couldn't deal with the stress of the early days.
The situation is both the best and worst of the breastfeeding and bottle-feeding worlds. I already mentioned some of the benefits, but there are downsides, too, mostly logistical. Between bottles and breastpump parts, we have a ton of washing up to do, so we run the dishwasher multiple times per day. I have to find time to pump 6 or 7 times per day, and each pumping session lasts a long time, 20 minutes or more (the longest I've gone is 50). When I'm flying solo at home, I have to pump during his naps, but if he wakes up crying, I have to either quit or try to juggle a baby and a breastpump (an acquired skill...I am still acquiring it...).
And while I'm not exactly chained to Rooster, I am sort of chained to my breastpump, as I have to pump every few hours. During our road trip this past weekend, I pumped in a mall parking lot and in a parking lot just off the side of the road while B fed Rooster. I wouldn't call it a fun experience, and it's not one I'd like to have every day, but it's doable when you have to travel.
In hindsight, should I have persevered with breastfeeding? Maybe, maybe not. Even though it was overall dissatisfying and humbling, I appreciated the idea of it and even sometimes enjoyed it. But at this point, pumping is the path that I have chosen.
It's not an easy path, and I have on occasion thought wistfully of the free jar of formula we received at the hospital. My goal is to continue for six months, but six months is an awfully long time, so I approach the activity with a "one day at a time" motto. Every day I wake up and make the decision to pump that day. I'm glad that I've stuck with it, and I'm going to carry on for as long as I can.
I was committed to feeding breastmilk to Rooster, but he and I had some difficulties with breastfeeding. He had trouble latching, so I got a shield, which helped somewhat, but he still had a terrible latch that left me in pain. If I removed him, he wouldn't relatch, so I had two options--deal with the pain, or let him starve. I did my best to suck it up and deal with the pain.
At the hospital, we had several visits with lactation consultants. The visits were unpleasant at best, traumatic at worst, leaving Rooster screaming and no more able to eat than he had been before. Seeing my baby being manhandled in an attempt to get him to eat left me feeling resentful and angry towards these women and made me distrust lactation consultants.
I also felt like I was a challenge rather than a human being to them. "I'm going to get him to eat without the shield," one consultant declared on our last day at the hospital, grabbing hold of his neck and of me and leaving both of us in frustrated and in pain. (She did not succeed. I knew she wouldn't.)
It was the visiting nurse, who stopped by the day after we got home from the hospital, who put the final nail in the breastfeeding coffin. She brought her portable scale and weighed him, and he had lost weight since leaving the hospital.
"Feed him every two hours," she recommended.
Something you should know about this "every two hours" recommendation--it doesn't mean that you feed him, and then two hours from the end of the feeding, you start again. No, no, no. If you start feeding at 10 PM, your next feeding begins at midnight, even if your 10 PM feeding takes 45 minutes (or longer!).
Further complicating matters was that it took two of us to attempt to get both Rooster and me into the right position for a feeding, so B, Rooster, and I spent one horrible, sleepless night with lots of tears and screaming (mostly but not exclusively from Rooster). At the end of each feeding, Rooster and I were covered in breastmilk, but very little actually made it into his belly.
The next day, we started charging the breastpump. It took 24 hours to charge, so we all suffered another horrible, sleepless night during which I felt guilty for (gasp!) going 2 1/2 hours between feedings so that I could get maybe 30 minutes of sleep at a time.
Finally, the breast pump was charged. The first time I pumped was a glorious, wonderful experience. Rooster drank the contents of the bottle in about 5 minutes and was ready for more when he finished. For the first time in days, he looked like a content baby.
As for me, I felt free for the first time since his birth. "You mean," I asked rhetorically, "I can still feed him breastmilk, but don't have to breastfeed in public? Other people can feed him, too? I can leave the house and not worry about taking his food supply away? We'll know exactly how much he's eating? Sign me up!"
So for the last 3+ weeks, I have been pumping. In the online world, this setup is called "exclusively pumping," or EP, and seems to be most popular among women whose babies are born prematurely and can't breastfeed, and others like me, who attempted it but couldn't deal with the stress of the early days.
The situation is both the best and worst of the breastfeeding and bottle-feeding worlds. I already mentioned some of the benefits, but there are downsides, too, mostly logistical. Between bottles and breastpump parts, we have a ton of washing up to do, so we run the dishwasher multiple times per day. I have to find time to pump 6 or 7 times per day, and each pumping session lasts a long time, 20 minutes or more (the longest I've gone is 50). When I'm flying solo at home, I have to pump during his naps, but if he wakes up crying, I have to either quit or try to juggle a baby and a breastpump (an acquired skill...I am still acquiring it...).
And while I'm not exactly chained to Rooster, I am sort of chained to my breastpump, as I have to pump every few hours. During our road trip this past weekend, I pumped in a mall parking lot and in a parking lot just off the side of the road while B fed Rooster. I wouldn't call it a fun experience, and it's not one I'd like to have every day, but it's doable when you have to travel.
In hindsight, should I have persevered with breastfeeding? Maybe, maybe not. Even though it was overall dissatisfying and humbling, I appreciated the idea of it and even sometimes enjoyed it. But at this point, pumping is the path that I have chosen.
It's not an easy path, and I have on occasion thought wistfully of the free jar of formula we received at the hospital. My goal is to continue for six months, but six months is an awfully long time, so I approach the activity with a "one day at a time" motto. Every day I wake up and make the decision to pump that day. I'm glad that I've stuck with it, and I'm going to carry on for as long as I can.
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