Barren Mare

Remember the sun will keep rising and setting

Wow. You are all amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your supportive comments and understanding.  I didn't even have to say very much, and you get it.  I heart the internets.

In reply to a few of the suggestions and recommendations so as to fill you in further as to our circumstances:

Reflux- I think, thank god, that this is probably not the cause of Botany's woes. I may be proved wrong on that yet, but I did some quick research and I am guessing that is not quite it. The gurning & wailing does come in the classic colic hour rather than after every meal.  Mornings are generally pretty good. And she does seem to eat well & be gaining weight- so I don't know. I will ask the doctor/health visitor, but my instinct is that it's more along the lines of traditional colic.  Whoo hoo. Who would have thought I would actually be glad about figuring it's "just colic". 

Probiotic drops- check. Having looked this up, I sent my not-in-laws scurrying off to buy these yesterday and we've started her on them. Fingers crossed it helps- it does sound like the Holy Grail of colic relief. 

Gina Ford- Gaaaah. I could write a whole blog post on this but won't, for now.  I have the "CLB" book which I bought not long after the birth. In a nutshell- I think there are some good ideas in there and I can see the idea of having Botany on some sort of routine is a good one.  But for the moment, it totally does not work. She won't eat & sleep at the scheduled times and it was starting to give me a nervous breakdown to read that she was supposed to be napping for 45 minutes and then eating at 5pm, etc.  All of which makes me feel more like a failure when she would not. I mean, she's asleep right now in her sling as of 8.30 am- was I really meant to try to joggle her awake until 9 am with the aim of a strict 45- 1 hour snooze until 10am? And what about the fact that she rarely if ever wants to have more than 20 minutes of sleep in the late afternoon before eating and crying some more- missing out the whole concept of getting refreshed for evening feeding then sleep. Also, this baby likes to be held- a lot- and putting her down on her own for a nap in a dark room simply isn't on the cards right now.

Especially with the feeding schedule so erratic, I don't think we have a hope in hell of complying with Ms Ford.  Maybe later.   

Vibrating chair- check. I have a great one. Works short term as a place to park her in but won't soothe her during a crying jag.

Pacifer aka dummy-  Yesterday was the first time I managed to get her to use one of these for more than 30 seconds. Normally she looks at me as if I have tried to shove a sand covered lollipop in her mouth and spits it out. But I was desperate to have more than an hour between feeds and as she frantically groped at her fingers, I stuck the damn thing in her gob.  And she took it.  I don't want to use it all the time but I do feel that for the sake of my sanity that we have got to have slightly longer gaps between at least some of the feeds and I  do suspect that she may be using me just as a comfort nibble quite a lot. 

What seems to be sort of working-ish-  Lots of burping during & after the feed.  Keeping her upright for as long as possible after she eats. Changing of the guard whenever possible- if I can't quiet her sometimes E. or his now-visiting mother can do it.  Trying to stop beating myself up over not having a clean, tidy house and a perfect contented baby.

Also, I am telling myself repeatedly that this is my job right now.  This is all I have to do- feed her, change her, soothe her.  I pretend I am on a shift- albeit a very long one- and that all I have to get through so many hours before someone else comes to give me a little respite.  I will keep chanting to myself that I am a super-elite IRONWOMAN (how much did I love that comment- thank you, thank you).

And that by getting through one hour at a time will bring us closer to the day when things are better- when I am not so tired, when she smiles back at me, when we can get through an afternoon without constant crying, when I can have more than an hour between feeding her. To the day- weeks from now or months or however long it takes- when the joy will creep back in and will stay here with us.

Until then, I hope you all stay with me. It feels so much better to know I am not alone.

One foot in front of the other

I wish I could say that everything is going great, that I'm getting into the swing of mothering, that every day holds new excitements and joys of raising this much longed for child. Unfortunately, it would not be wholly true.  I'm forced to acknowledge that I'm struggling much, much more than I bargained for, and I am not sure I am doing well at all.  With my parents' departure yesterday, my mood has hit a new low.

I love this baby, with every fibre of my being, and there are moments of pure delight and joy- but she is not proving to be the world's easiest to care for. I know it has affected millions of parents the world over, but the relentless crying after every feed from about 3pm onwards?   It's hard. It's really really hard.  She wants to eat every hour and half to two and half hours, and the feeds blur into one after the other, without a break.

And then there is the aftermath. 15 minutes or so after she is done nursing, the crying starts.

I've tried everything- rocking, ssshing, singing, feeding her more often, feeding her less often, carrying her in a sling, colic relief drop thingies, positioning, massaging her tummy, swaddling, no swaddling, extra winding during the feed, eliminating certain items from my diet, taking her for a walk in her pram- and still she bunches, knees up, face contorted, fists clenched in pain. Screaming screaming screaming.  We take turns gulping down our dinner so that one of us can go hold her while she cries on and on.

The only saving grace thus far is that she does seem to calm down by about 11pm or so (quite possibly y from total exhaustion) and will mercifully sleep at least several hours at a stretch through the night. She does also nap quite well during the day, at least some of the time. But I feel as if it is a forced march through the days.  I worry it is beginning to grind me down and we have only barely begun.  Even when someone comes round to help, to take her to give me a break, I can't relax. I can't nap when she naps, for I am on hyperalert for the screaming to begin.  When we go out, the anxiety takes me by the throat- will she scream some more and what will I do if she does?  And she usually does, and sometimes I can quieten her and sometimes I cannot.

I know it will get better, I know it will take time, I know I have to take of myself.  But I just wish my mother was still here.

Little Miss Insatiable

I desperately want to get on with writing the birth story.  However, Botany is on, roughly, a two hour feeding schedule.  Except on those frequent occasions when she seems to want to eat every hour. I am managing to fend off total exhaustion but I can tell you, it is kicking my ass just a little bit. I think they must have neglected to tell us during the breastfeeding class that you're meant to time it from the beginning of each feed, not the end- or else maybe they told us and I had my head up my ass in denial-land as to how that works in practice. In any event, given that she can take up to an hour to complete each of her milky meals, it basically means that I have have an infant clamped to my boob more or less permanently.

I had to laugh at the last set of comments- (by the way, thank you all for your encouragement and advice). A week ago or so, the idea of feeding her whilst using the loo seemed an amusing if slightly unreaslistic prospect.  Oh ha ha ha. How things change.  Particularly during the last couple days, during which she seems to want to constantly nibble her way through a growth spurt, I have managed to check email, go downstairs to let the dog out for a poo and eat my dinner with her latched on. At this rate, it seems only a matter of time until I take her into the bathroom with me.

On the upside, she is doing very well- going from her birth weight of 6lbs 15 oz to 7lbs 12 oz in the space of two weeks.  Which is, according to the midwife, yippy skippy hurray. So I guess all that food is being put to good use. She peed all of the scales today when they were weighing her, but I don't imagine that really tipped the balance too much one way or another.

More soon...for now, duty calls.

The first few days

Do you hear huffing & puffing?  That's the sound of me trying to scale the crazy learning curve that seems to come with a newborn baby.

I'm finding it a little hard to get a chance to go to the bathroom at the moment, never mind do much else; so when I finally do get around to it, the telling of the birth story is going to have to be serialised.  In any event, a lot of it is already a blur. That's possibly my brain's way of coping with the more traumatic elements. I confess I feel a bit messed up about certain parts of the experience. No doubt talking about it in due course will be helpful- bear with me though, as it has not been the easiest first week. The initial swirl of the hormone cocktail circulating in my system has begun to calm down, but for the first several days home, I found myself crying frequently over anything and nothing.

Matters were not helped by both E. and my dad coming down with a vile case of food poisoning over the weekend, leaving E. in particular totally unable to lend a hand with the baby. Just as my exhaustion peaked, the wee one began experiencing a bad bout of gassiness after every feed; leading to her screaming and crying until the small hours. Of course not having a clue what was going on, I kept interpreting her cries as hunger, feeding her every time I turned around, which naturally just seemed to compound the problem.  By the time she would eventually fall asleep, I would have become a gibbering wreck.

Anyway. We now seem to be back on an even keel for the moment. and I'm only occasionally freaking out with anxiety, interspersed with elation and delight tempered by hit-by-a-bus tiredness. God knows what I am going to do when my parents leave but we'll come to that later. For now, it's back to the climbing the curve, one steep slippery step at a time.