101 ways to kill your baby

Wow. I thought pregnancy was a bit of a minefield: all those risks to which you might expose your unborn child.  But compared to the mild frisson I experienced when eating soft cheese or taking a hot bath, caring for the little mite now she is actually born is a terrifying white knuckle ride.

First there's the ever present danger of incorrect climate. Babies are rubbish at managing their own body temperature, which is why the John Lewis baby department - with its many blankets of different weaves - was invented. She must not be too cold, or she'll perish. Too hot, and she'll get too, well, hot. And too cosy and she will sleep herself to death. Given the recent weather, swinging from balmy spring day to frosty grey dampness, maintaining an even temperature in a drafty room is no mean feat. So we have a baby monitor that tells us if the room is too hot or too cold. It is always too hot or too cold. We are constantly running in there and turning radiators up or down, removing blankets, opening windows, and generally thwarting Lady P's lame attempts to sleep.

And sleeping is important. Overtiredness can lead to all sorts of other problems, and I don't just mean that it prevents us having a peaceful G&T. The best way to get her back to sleep is to cuddle her into submission. But that is the path to co-sleeping... and the risk of squashing her to death. We could swaddle her, as many people recommend, but apparently swaddling stifles the Moro reflex and puts them at risk of falling into too deep a sleep (and therefore cot death).

Once she's asleep, but not too deeply, and at the right temperature, you'd think we could relax. Wrong. We have to worry about flat head syndrome, and the potential for brain damage (or a weird shaped head, meaning she can never get a buzz cut. Hmm.). To avoid the flat head thing we need her sometimes to sleep on her side, or with a pillow - and therein lurks a suffocation risk.

Also, too much sleeping and not enough eating will make her floppy and jaundiced, apparently. So, on the rare occasion she is knocking out ZZZs for more than 3 or 4 hour,  I need to wake her for a feed.

You can't do wrong for doing right, as they say Up North.

Breaking all the rules: chomping on a suffocation device while lying  on a pillow with a loose blanket

After my post on advice I was given some excellent advice from our favourite New Yorker's wise sister - 'never try to make a happy baby happier'. With every day that goes by I see more clearly the value in this advice. She is so often screaming that when she isn't, we don't want to disturb the fragile peace.
So if Lady P is perfectly happy napping with a pillow in a cold room, or snuggled into our bed a little warmer than recommended, well, we let her. With frayed nerves, and watchful eyes, but still, we let her.

After all, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Labour: just like building your dream house

One of my favourite British TV shows, which I missed the most when we were in the US, is Grand Designs. (Gratifyingly it has become one of TLOML's favourites too.) Grand Designs follows interesting home builds - unusual restorations, eco-friendly new builds, and so on.

A Grand Design house (image pilfered from Channel 4)

Most weeks the people building their dream home liken it to labour. As in 'this house is our baby and building it is like giving birth.'

I have a new perspective on any use of birth as a metaphor. I now know that nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, is anything like giving birth. Giving birth alone is like giving birth, and it is like nothing else.

Having said that, I noted a couple of interesting parallels with the dream-home building process.

1. Naive optimism
The happy fools who are turning their grand designs into a home are always unrealistically optimistic. Kevin McCloud, the presenter, scoffs at their budget estimates and their idea of a reasonable timeframe. He is always right: in a dozen series I've never seen a home built on budget, or on time.

And yet the owners always think the impossible can be done, no contingency will be required, and the build will be weatherproof before winter. Just like I thought, when we arrived at the birth centre at 4pm, that I was very far along and would doubtless be delivering Lady P in an hour or so. (She arrived 8 hurt-y hours later) The same kind of naive optimism that lead me to ask the midwife, after a couple of pushes, 'do you think she'll be born on the next push?' (In the event I had about an hour of pushing ahead of me.)

2. Foolish pride
Often the owners decide to despatch with specialist support from professionals like project managers, quantity surveyors and even architects. And even when the windows arrive on site completely the wrong size, or the entire building team quits en masse, and Kevin McCloud raises his eyebrows and says 'Are you sure you can manage this build without help?' the foolhardy owners are too proud to admit defeat and hire in the experts.

Similarly, even when it became apparent that I had many hours of labour ahead of me, and the pain was hugely more than I had anticipated (for who could anticipate such pain?!), I bit my lip, banished thoughts of an epidural, and said to TLOML 'this pain is totally manageable'. Pure pride.

For what it's worth, I'm glad my optimism and pride won the day. Lady P was so alert, and calm, swimming up to meet us, and I felt pretty much 100% within a day or two of giving birth. So taking the natural (optimistic, prideful) path paid out for me. Still, if I'd know beforehand quite how much it would hurt and for how long, I wouldn't have been quite so bullish.

I'm like those chumps at the end of the Grand Designs episode, sitting in their dream home, laughing at the fact they went £100k over budget and they nearly had a nervous breakdown in the process, saying 'If I did it over again, I would do it just the same.'

They usually go on to add 'I'm not sure that I would do it again though.' That's where we differ... two weeks in and we're already confident we'll be doing this whole birth and newborn thing again some day. Only next time, I'll know how much pain to expect.

Good advice

I'm all ears again. Hoovering up advice like the rookie mum that I am.

So far my favourite two pieces of advice for surviving the first few weeks after birth are these:

1. Never stand when you could be sitting, and never be awake when you could be asleep.
Wise words indeed from the Wondertwin. It's true what they say about that whole giving birth and caring for a newborn baby: it really is rather tiring.

2. Never cancel your day's plans just because you had a bad night.
So if I planned to have a coffee with a friend, even if my sleep was decimated the night before, I should still make the effort to go. I may be grumpy, and look like crap. But at least I'll get out and about, which is a lot better than being grumpy and looking like crap and stuck in the flat feeling sorry for myself. My sister, who had twins and a c-section to contend with, gave me this advice. She knows a little something about sleep deprivation. So if she can make this philosophy work (not that I'm being competitive....) then I shall certainly try to do the same.

What's the best - or the worst - piece of advice you've heard, for dealing with life-after-birth?

A proper writing project

I'm glad lovely Lady P ran a little behind schedule. Not least because it gave her longer to fatten up, and me longer to rest.

But also because by being late, she allowed me to make a meeting, optimistically scheduled for 3 days after her due date - with my new literary agent. That's right, an actual agent. Mine! 'My agent': I love saying that. And I love my unborn child for hanging in there so I could meet the agent properly and kick start discussions about a real, proper, book project.

Two years ago, when I started blogging, it was as a means to an end. I had the idea that writing something, however frivolous and slimline, every few days, would be a good habit to get into. Spending that time at my keyboard would inevitably lead me to get my teeth into a 'proper' writing project - like a modern classic novel, or an incisive, moving, critically acclaimed and commercially successful short story collection. Or a fought-over, massively bankable screenplay. (Always good to set your sights high, right?)

What happened instead is that I enjoyed blogging so much I didn't have much time or energy left for other writing. The blog quickly became an end in itself, and a very satisfying one, at that. Dreams of making a career out of writing faded, against the bright reality of a well paid Big Corp job and the fun of writing for myself, in my spare time.

I guess the lure of the 'proper writing project' was always going to reel me back in. So in recent months my glamorous e-entrepreneurial friend and I have been working on a book. As we embarked on a quest for an agent I decided to raise my social media profile - hence my increased volume of tweets, Instagrams, Pinterests and Facebook posts. I won't say anymore about the book until we have a publisher and it is really real. But I can at least tell you it is bloody brilliant.

I don't know whether it's all the writing practice my blog gave me, my social media bleatings, or just sheer good luck, but we have managed to find a lovely, clever agent to represent us. Now all we need is a publisher... watch this space!

Nobody talks about Day Four

One does, as an expectant mum, hear a lot about how magical the early days with a newborn are. One also hears a lot about how challenging this time can be. (Of course, if you're an optimist you choose to hear the magical stuff louder than the challenging stuff.) 'The early days' or 'those first few weeks' are described as if they are one long contiuum of experience.

Not so. On Day Four, everything changes. There are lots of changes, some small and some significant. The pain of Day Four is that this is the day they all collide.

Even the poppers on a babygro are hard work on Day Four

Here's what happened to me:

1. The endorphins wore off. That post-birth haze of joy had probably been receding for days. By Day Four it had been depleted altogether.
2. Some other bad hormones come in and replaced the endorphins. Let's call them 'the crying hormones,' for lack of the scientific name.
3. The sense of marvel reduced. Just only a tiny amount, but still. Gazing in wonder at the incredible creature we have produced was a great pastime for hours and hours at first, but that could only last so long. We still love her to a terrifying degree, but the frequency with which we say 'oh my god look at her little mouth!' or 'isn't she beautiful' did lessen. On each day before, we had taken at least a dozen photos. On Day Four, not a single photo was taken.
4. The sleep deprivation kicked in. I can cope with two or three night's poor sleep on the trot. By Day Four my nerves were wearing rather thin.
5. The outfits run out. We had enough sweet, co-ordinated outfits to take us through the first few days, but the laundry could not be put off forever. Although we did consider just dressing her in a towel, it's not really a good look.
6. The friends who have been keeping their distance for a couple of days, to give us space, start a-calling and a-wanting to visit.
7. Last but absolutely by no means least, my milk, as they say, 'came in'. On top of all these other niggles and strains, suddenly instead of breasts I had enormous boulders. And Lady P, used to sipping a little colostrum with ease, suddenly was expected to suck a rock the size of a watermelon. She was furious. Absolutely, blood-curdlingly, furious. I was, frankly, scared of her.

I survived*. Most people do, it seems. Thanks to the Breastfeeding Hotline, Aptamil (contrary to the Breastfeeding Hotline's advice, but never mind that), a good chat with some friends, and a long hot bath (enabled by the doping effect Aptamil had on Lady P). And I chatted to some friends, who had survived this so-called magical time and kept their baby alive since then too.

And that's when I realised... everyone goes hits the same massive bump in the road. Some people hit it three days in, others more like five, but everyone hits it. And hard.

And yet no-one tells you to expect it. Maybe it's like labour, and you forget the specifics - which is why I wanted to write this post. It is my legacy to any expectant mums. Preparation is key. If I'd know Day Four was coming, I'd have stocked up on chocolate and made sure I knew how that complicated breast pump worked in advance.

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*In fact, Day Four now seems like a distant memory. Thanks to some good team work with TLOML, the establishment of the semblance of a routine, and a fair amount of faffing around with expressing and bottle feeding, we are now feeling a little more in control and a whole lot happier. I'm sure we'll hit some more bumps in the road ahead, but we're a lot more able to cope now. And back to taking dozens of photos every day.