1. I now consider myself to be **an expert in nappies**. This startles me, and is probably startling you right now. When I was a father to be, I didn’t see how one could possibly find the process of changing a nappy enjoyable. Boy, was I wrong. Not only is it something that I can do with aplomb, despite my lack of breasts, it is also very edifying to inspect the contents and scribble down a few notes about what was found therein. Colour, consistency and quantity are all important indicators to the kind of nutrition that the baby is receiving. I always assumed that any nappy-related post on this site would be comical and glib, not intense and sincere.
2. [Karen][] allows me a few hours a day to myself. She posits, and I think I agree with her, that if I can get 2-4 hours good sleep per day, then my subsequent alertness will more than make up for her being on baby watch alone for a while. I have noticed, to my eternal peplexation, that when I close my eyes (either to curl up in bed or to lather shampoo into my hair in the shower), that **I picture myself as a baby**. I imagine that I am Bernard-sized, or at least Bernard-proportioned, turning over in bed, or stood at the North end of the bath massaging shampoo into his hair. I muse on the parallels between the water that made it to the house without leaking somewhere along the way; and the supersperm that was first to the egg without giving up somewhere along the way.
[karen]: http://uborka.nu/rise/
As [Karen has mentioned][], he isn’t the most adept feeder in this household. While she busies herself expressing, it tends to fall to me to hold the cup to his lips. Though this is great for father-child bonding, I worry that it is at the expense of the mother-child bonding which is more important right now. I put this to one side – we’ve got to get food into him, and we’ll do whatever is necessary in order to accomplish this.
[karen has mentioned]: http://www.uborka.nu/rise/2006/06/status-report/
8 replies on “Surprises”
I’m sure the last thing you want just now is yet more well-meaning advice but I just wanted to check you’ve got the breastfeeding helpline numbers and/or access to a counsellor (if not give mea shout and I’ll dig them out for you), and to reassure you, if it can reassure, that M was a completely rubbish feeder for the first 5 days then, once my milk came in, she suddenly got it.
We have LLL and NCT numbers, great health visitor, and faith (except at 2am).
Yeh, we got pretty low at 2am too in the early days. And at 3am, 4am, 5am. I think it took ten days to a fortnight to really feel that we (i.e. mostly Hels and Tom) had got the entire feeding thing sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s when we found the shutting-the-door-on-the-baby-to-go-and-take-five-minutes-with-a-cup-of-tea policy to be so very useful in terms of sanity preservation, as sleep deprivation began to impair our sense of perspective, our patience and our ability to complete sentences, either with or without swearing. Our problem was less to do with persuading him to feed than it was a case of demand and supply being mismatched. Perserverance and tea saved the day, but you know that already.
Just noticed – cup? not bottle with teat? Does that work? I can’t say that we considered anything other than a bottle/teat when going through the expressing periods.
Cup works really well, though you do get a little spillage here and there. The theory is that the teat action and nipple action are very different, so lots of teat usage makes him less able to consume from the breast.
However, we are at this very moment experimenting with use of a bottle for just one feed per day – the nightly feed. We’ll let you know how it goes.
Bottle of breastmilk, that is. There are so many options, and so much support available. If only I had time to post.
You mean you are busy, Karen? With six months "holiday"?? (sorry – just putting in the sort of comment that we got from one or two people – mainly non-parents – who couldn’t believe that we didn’t have time to return calls/go to parties/clean the house when Tom was very young).
We heard the "using a bottle/teat confuses the baby and puts them off the breast" argument, but I can’t say that it proved to be the case with Tom. We used bottle/teat when Hels was severely engorged and poor Tom was bouncing off the boobs, and we found that he was able to switch between the two without any bother – which became useful in that it allowed H to express some milk so we could take a bottle to parties/the pub/etc without H having to pop out a nork (something which H was a little embarrassed about at first, but became more comfortable with as time went on). We did find that he got a little lazy (milk flows more freely from a bottle than from a breast), but a little encouragement worked.
It was also useful when we started the transition to formula in preparation for H’s return to work, as he didn’t really notice any change. But then he’s an adaptable little soul, taking nearly everything in his small stride.
Graybo – how old was Tom when you first gave him a bottle, out of interest?