Diary of a Second Time Mum - Breaking All of My "First Time Mum" Rules

8th July - 2 weeks old

Dear Diary

Sitting here feeding (yet again!) contemplating the past two weeks with the new man in our lives, I realised how calm, relaxed and laidback I've been this time round. This reflection also got me thinking about the strict and stringent rules that I had set for myself as a first time mother and how completely ridiculous they were. Also how those rules had no bearing over how my daughter is today.

I can proudly say that 2 weeks in, I have already rebelled and broken the following rules:

• My child will not have a dummy (I requested one be brought to the hospital on the second day after the first night was spent sleepless with an unsettled baby. And wouldn't you know it, he wouldn't take it. But having it there as back up was reassuring in a way)
• My child will be breastfed, not formula fed (This one went out the window on our first night at home. He wouldn't settle and seemed to be hungry no matter how much I fed. So I cracked open the tin of formula I'd bought before he was born, mixed up a bottle, and wouldn't you know it ...... he wouldn't take it! Again it was reassuring to know that I had another option)
• My child will sleep in its own cot/bassinette (This rule was broken I think on the 3rd or 4th night home. Little Mister loves to be held and it's been awfully cold. There's something wonderful and cosy about snuggling close with your baby that I missed out on with my daughter, seeing as though she spent her first few months in the brace correcting her hips. I have been sleeping half sitting up to make sure he's safe. His favourite place in the world is snuggled into  my chest between my boobs like a little koala bear :)
• My child will wear cloth nappies (This time around I knew disposables are the way to go. During the newborn phase who really has time to wash pooey nappies! I do have a confession to make though ... during the crazy "get everything ready because baby is coming soon" stage, I did diligently wash all the cloth nappies and stack them neatly in the cupboard. A couple of days later I came to my senses and realised I was off in some fantasy world and immediately packed them all back into the garage. Maybe some day .....) 

It feels good to know that I can be flexible and adaptable adjusting to the circumstances as they arise, rather than being imprisoned by the notion of right and wrong. If I've learned anything, it's that there is  no right or wrong, there just is.

Some days you just need to do whatever you can to get through the day and if that means spending the day in your pj's on the couch giving your little one snuggles because that's what they need in that moment, well that's what's happening that day. The housework can wait. The dishes can wait. The outside world can wait. Because right now I am really enjoying getting to know this new little man we've been blessed with and I'm sure soon enough there'll be time to tend to life's other menial tasks!

Until next we meet.

Sending love

Shanelle

xxx

Diary of a Second Time Mum - 9 Things I've Been Reminded of About Having a Newborn

3rd July - 9 days old

Dear Diary

9 days into this gig and here is a list of things I'd forgotten about newborns but have been well and truly reminded of:

1. Feeling like a ninja preparing for an exclusive mission each time I get dressed with pads everywhere (breasts, knickers and in the top of my knickers to protect my wound). The guy in the Libra ad does have a point .....

2. How long a feed takes & how frequently a new one needs to eat and that their feeds are timed from when they began their feed not when it was finished, so your sleeping time is dramatically reduced!

3. Forgetting to go to the bathroom before settling in for a marathon feeding session and then having to cross your legs and think about something else for the duration of the feed!

4. The innate ability to do everything one-handed while feeding, nursing, settling, typing, making a cuppa, undoing and doing up of maternity bras ......

5. How quickly time seems to evaporate while you stare at them endlessly when you should be sleeping because your baby is.

6.  Breasts that produce milk at the most random of moments, most of all when you get out of a hot shower or hear your baby cry.

7. When getting 3 hours of continuous sleep feels like an entire night of slumber.

8. Having supersonic hearing and sixth sense that makes you jump up and check your baby whenever you hear an odd noise or checking anyway because you haven't heard any noises for a while. Our boy seems to be a grunter!

9. How much love you can have instantaneously for the new little human who has arrived and taken over your world by storm.

I'm sure I could add many more to this list. These are the ones that have stood out  for me so far and right now I am eating into precious sleeping and resting time. So if there are any important ones I've missed or overlooked, feel free to comment below.

Until next we meet!

Love

Shanelle

The Delicate Art of Finding Yourself - Guest Post from Gayel Stewart-Aires (Modern Mummy Mayhem)

When we become parents for the first time, we are pretty schooled up on how to care for our newborns.  There are books, magazines, brochures, products, blogs, websites yahdee yahdee yahdaa and we feast on all of them.  We want only what is best for this brand new life we have created and we will stop at nothing to give it all.

We pull all nighters when they are ill and chug back the caffeine the next day to keep going.  We carry them on our hips, twist, turn and pick things up regardless of how sore our backs have become.  We shower in seconds. Forget to brush our teeth. Rarely exercise and often finish off their scraps instead of eating whole nutritious meals.

For some of us, we run on autopilot during the years with young children.  For others it is routine, routine, routine.   For nearly all of us though, we forget that we need to continue on caring for ourselves, so that we can care for these precious little inventions, our babes, our children.

I have 3 children.  Ages 11, 9 and 3.  After my first daughter, I was gobsmacked at how little she slept, how much sitting on the couch breastfeeding I had to do and how little time I had for myself.

Nobody ever told me about this.  Nobody ever told me either, that the smallest of chores I once did without thinking, would become very hard to complete.  Nobody ever told me that this stuff could send me crazy.  Even worse though, was the fact that nobody ever thought to tell me that I needed to be finding time for myself as a matter of priority.

That I needed to nurture my soul and not just my Daughter.

So unknowingly, I worked really hard at being a Mum.  I later worked really hard at being a Mum of two daughters and then a single Mum of two daughters and full time employee.

My diet was atrocious. I rarely exercised and my smiles were forced.  I did nothing for myself that made me happy.  My kids on the other hand thrived.

Years later I met my now Husband and together brought into the world a little boy.  A little boy who is now 3, and who has suffered from Gastro Oesphagael Reflux Disease since he was born.   To suggest this has turned our world upside down is an understatement.

By the time he was 6 months old I was exhausted.  Life was like groundhog day.  Relentless.  Hard and never ending.

It was about then that I realised that it was sink or swim time.  I could no longer sustain ignoring my own needs.  I had to start carving out small parcels of time for things I enjoyed.  Initially this was really hard but I started to simplify things.  I enjoyed taking pictures, so off I would go outside, with the baby in the carrier, snapping away.  Looking for small detail and beauty.   It was a small escape for small amounts of time, but it was glorious.

Our little boy spent 2 years screaming.  I spent 2 years appeasing and soothing those screams by carrying him around and breastfeeding him.  On the bad days, I would look in the mirror and not even see myself properly.  On the good days, I would steal back some time.  I ate up any information about blogging and social media that I could find, took photos and then started my blog.

Eventually, my health did begin to fail though.  I lost a lot of weight and had some unfavourable and scary test results. I thought I was caring for myself but I wasn't really.   I was being too haphazard in my approach.

It was only at this point that I truly realised my own self worth.  The one thing that I threw away the day I brought home my first child and never regained.

With the never ending support of my Husband, I made a pact to exercise more, eat better and do a few things that made me happy, consistently.  Not just a few hours here and there.

A year later now, I sit here writing this piece, feeling that for the first time ever I am comfortable in my own skin.  I have more energy and I smile truly from the inside.  There is nothing forced about who I am.  I am me and I know exactly who that is.

Not just my children's mother.

It isn't just that I have suddenly become happy either.  It took a lot of hard work.  It took what felt like selfishness initially (but wasn't really), sacrifices, good planning, the willingness to ask for help and consistent commitment.

It is a delicate art, a game even, finding time for yourself when you are Mother.  The benefits are enormous and the disadvantages to ignoring these needs of yours is frightening.

So from me to you.  Please please, don't give up your self worth.  Don't stop doing things you love and enjoy.  Those things that you love, make you who you are.  When you are who you are, you are most happy.  The crappiest of days can be weathered when you know who you are.

Some days this advice may all seem too impossible, other days it may only be a few minutes you can offer yourself.  But honestly, once you shift your mindset off being entirely focused on those you love and include yourself too, you will rock this life home my friend.

I PROMISE.

Gayel Stewart-Airs

www.modernmummymayhem.com

Silent Screaming

As the weeks wore on, my feelings about myself and motherhood weren’t getting any better. I loved my baby, yet I didn't love me and how I felt. Constant anxiousness, racing heart, tight chest and shallow breathing were my new friends. I felt like I was drowning. I felt so out of control that I had to control everything I could.

When I was feeding our baby girl, her feeds were timed. Ten minutes on each breast, I recall being the magic number and the rule I had. I hated feeding. It was so uncomfortable. I hated not being able to move and hated even more those moments when I needed to go to the toilet but was in the middle of a feed and not able to take her off the breast knowing all hell would break loose if I did. So I carried on, hating it.

I wondered what was wrong with me. I didn’t get the warm and fuzzy feeling that I’d heard many mums talk about when they were feeding their babies. I felt so relied upon all the time and that scared the living daylights out of me.

There were days when I couldn’t shift the anxiety. I couldn’t bear to hear our girl cry. If I did, I would start too. There was so much sadness in my heart. My favourite hangout when she was sleeping was in the bottom of our walk-in robe with the door firmly closed. Enveloped in darkness, I felt safe. My external environment matched how I felt on the inside. I remember silently screaming. So many fears and emotions running rampant, I just couldn’t get them out. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what the consequences would be. And so they stayed inside me and the internal screaming continued to get louder and louder.

But the feeling in my chest just wouldn’t let up. I can clearly recall the day that I realised my world was falling apart. It was 7am in the morning and I’d already done 3 loads of washing, hung them on the line,  baked a chocolate cake, some monte carlos and had an apple pie on the way. It was as if I had a momentary out of body experience. From afar I saw myself doing what I was doing and said to myself, “This is freaking crazy! You are not okay and you need to talk to someone about this. It can’t be normal!”

It seemed like forever until it was 8.30am and I could ring the doctor’s surgery to make an appointment with my GP. Finally I got through.  The receptionist must have picked up that things were not good with me; she managed to get me in straight away. As I got off the phone, I felt relief. The tears were streaming down my face and the feeling of hopelessness and imperfection came bubbling up again. In my heart I knew I was doing the right thing for myself and for our baby girl.

Sitting in the room with the doctor, I managed to tell her what I had been going through. I felt safe with her and trusted her. Through the tears I managed to tell her my story, how I hated breastfeeding, how I felt like a failure and how I wasn’t cut out for motherhood. She turned to me and said, “If the mother is happy, then the baby is happy. If you being happy means stopping breastfeeding and moving to formula, then so be it”. It was really that clear cut and simple.

I was with her for a long time. I talked. I cried. I shared my pain. She just sat and listened and offered me tissue after tissue. She then looked at me and said, “I think you may have postnatal depression, with what you’ve experienced with the birth and everything else that you’ve gone through”. In a sense, there was relief. What I was going through was abnormal and yet again, I wasn’t alone. Now I had a label to add to the collection, and it definitely wasn’t Chanel.

Together we came up with a plan. Start weaning baby off the breast and get her onto formula. Then we could start to take care of me. She gave me options. Once baby was weaned I could go onto medication and see a psychologist. I was to see her every other week as well, so she could keep track of my progress. I left with a fistful of pamphlets about post-natal depression, it’s causes and it’s treatments to take home to share with my partner, phone numbers for Lifeline in case I needed someone else to talk to, phone numbers for playgroups because I needed to start mingling more with other mums and her own personal mobile.

As we left, that familiar sense of failure came back. I had felt so completely safe and trusting in the doctor’s office. Yet as soon as I was back in reality, I felt totally out of control. I had no idea how I was going to explain to my partner what was going on with me and what was happening in my head.

That night I had a discussion with my partner about my visit to the doctor. I had always struggled with knowing the “right” thing to say. When I was younger, I would spend hours having conversations in my head, just to ask my parents a simple question like “Could I go to the disco on Friday night”. Communicating my feelings to my partner was a huge risk and I was terrified of how it he would accept it.

I was able to tell him about our trip to the doctor and her recommendations. He told me there was nothing wrong with me; it was all in my head. Darn tooting right it was in my head!!! He wasn’t in favour of me going on medication, but said if that helped, then so be it. He agreed that the breastfeeding was upsetting me and wanted to become more involved in that side of things. I couldn’t help but feel that I had let him down too, that on some level I had failed his expectations of motherhood.

And I guess this is where it all fell down for me. I had the picture in my head of how it should be and what the right thing was and the wrong thing was. There was no room for someone to throw a spanner in the works and change the course of my pre-planned events. Over time I’ve learnt to loosen my grip on control and have learnt to go with the flow more. To just relax, take a deep breath and trust that things will work out the way they are meant to.

 

High Flyer

Boarding a flight with a week-old baby was not something I had ever thought I would be doing. I also had never imagined that I would be travelling to the Royal Children’s Hospital to seek out treatment. But I was and we did. And we survived.

Getting on that plane, suitcases being loaded underneath, having no idea of how long we’d be away for, what would happen or what we were in for, was one of the scariest things I’ve done. My need for certainty was incredibly high and my anxiety levels were off the radar. It took a lot of deep breathing to remember that everything was going to be okay, that we would get through whatever was about to come our way.

The flight to Brisbane went by without a hitch. I was able to feed our girl during take-off and landing. No crying baby here. Only a mum who suddenly realised that everything she did was now on show, judged and that her most private anatomy was no longer her own. Breasts that had a mind of their own and were producing milk like there was no tomorrow to keep up with the demand of a newborn. The human body really is amazing. It always knows what to do and when to do it. We get into trouble when we overthink and overanalyse things. Sometimes you just need to let things be.

We checked in at the hospital for our appointment and were sent upstairs for an ultrasound of our girl’s hip. As we navigated our way through the corridors, I soon realised how lucky we were. It was heartbreaking to see other children who were much worse off than our little girl. We started to think that things were going to be okay. We were going to make it.

In the ultrasound room, we got chatting with the sonographer and told them about the experience we’d had in the other hospital. They kindly advised us that the bones of babies can’t be seen by xray until they are about 6 months old. WTF! I started to wonder why we had gone through what we had back there and was incredibly relieved to know that we were somewhere that knew what they were doing.

After meeting the orthopaedic doctor, he checked her out and consulted the ultrasound images. He confirmed that her right hip was dislocated. He told us that it is quite common in breech babies, female babies and first-borns. Yep, we had the hatrick! Treatment is usually a brace fitted on the body to hold the baby’s legs abducted while the ball joint grows into the hip socket for a period of 3 – 6 months. My partner and I looked at each other, bewildered at the simplicity of the treatment, yet overwhelmed with the brace the doctor had just produced from nowhere.

The brace was fitted there and then and suddenly our baby was a boxed package. Picking her up for the first time it was like picking up a robot and trying to cuddle it. It was awkward. Where was our baby! Newborn nappies no longer fit. We had to be careful about the outfits we chose for her to wear. She couldn’t wear skirts or pants or dresses. Thank goodness for wondersuits! That was it, we could go home. “Come back in a month” the doctor told us, “we’ll change the brace because she will grow”. 

Off we went back to the airport. I was exhausted, mentally, physically and emotionally. I was going through the security scanner carrying our girl and we kept setting the alarm off. Finally it dawned on me that her brace had metal in it and that’s what was setting the alarms off.

Back home that night, the wheels started to fall off. My breasts were so sore and tender from the constant feeding, my nipples had started to bleed and the ends of them were hanging on for dear life. I hadn’t heard about nipple cream and definitely hadn’t read about any of this in the pregnancy books! I sat on the edge of our bed tears streaming down my face, in so much pain, feeling helpless, that I had a crying baby depending on me for food and the one way I had of getting that to her was failing. I hadn’t brought formula, because my rules said that I was going to breast feed. I hadn’t brought a breast pump, because honestly I had no idea about them. Somehow I managed to get through the night.

The next morning, my partner had me on the doorstep of the shops as soon as they opened. We left laden with formula, nipple cream, baby bottles and a breast pump. Looking back now, I wonder why I wasn’t more prepared. Obviously I had no idea of what I could have been in for and no one ever mentioned to have these things on hand ….. just in case.

I’ve come to realise that in life it’s healthy to have more than one way to reach an outcome, more than one way to fulfil a need.  Someone wise once said to me “If you only have one way to reach an outcome, you’re screwed”. You’ve got to have options, more than one way to get to where you are going. Because sometimes you don’t know what you need until you need it.