The exact expected rollercoaster ride

This is so what I was expecting!
Sleeping and eating
These babies are amazing, they really know (instinctively) how to push your buttons and what your absolute limit of exhaustion and being able to cope is. Then they show you how wonderful they are and you forgive them…. until the next time!

We have had some really shocking nights. We’ll do a feed around 10 or 11pm, then put the baby down. On these bad nights, he tends to settle quite well initially. Then around 1am he wakes up and that is it until half past five in the morning. He will feed, burp, posset, cry, wriggle, feed….. etc etc for 4 1/2 hours. Sometimes he sounds frustrated and really does have tantrums, other times he just grizzles and moans. A couple of nights like that in a row are very hard to cope with, and he tends to seem to push right to the limit, then have a sudden good night to surprise us!

Last night was his best night ever (after a rocky start). He “cluster fed” (as above) on and off from about 7pm until 11:30pm, then he finally fell asleep. The next thing we knew, it was 4am! That is officially his longest ever night time sleep since we started feeding on demand. Once he went down, he then didn’t awake again until just before nine. What a hero! He even was chilled out enough to let me go off and express some milk this morning.

It also seems the cluster feeding is working. I believe the idea of it (isn’t apparently to make me tired!!) is to help increase my supply- and it really seems to have done that. I expressed 120ml (which is a whole feed) in about 15 minutes this morning! Very efficient! And had enough left to feed him straight after and he’s still settled 2 hours later. Amazing.

I know this is unlikely to last and just as we get complacent, he’ll revet back. However, it’s so welcome to get just that little bit more sleep. I feel so so human. I even went into deep sleep and dreamt last night- for the first time in 5 weeks!

On the bottle
One of our aims now is to get baby taking a bottle of expressed milk. This is not only to make my nights a bit more pleasant and to mean that if needs be, I can actually go out when a feed is due, it also is really important to help daddy (and potentially others like grandparents and uncles/aunts) bond with baby too.

Thursday we tried a bit of milk from the bottle and baby was having none of it. We know that he DID know how to take a bottle during weeks 1 and 2 whilst we were trying to get him feeding better but it seems he had forgotten/ prefers the breast. Baby did not play ball- daddy was downstairs trying to feed him and I was upstairs trying to grab a nap… Eventually daddy brought him up, and he then took the milk whilst I was in the room (then I BF him after).

On Friday night, I went out. This was every bit as terrifying as I thought it would be. I was an hour late due to baby needing a feed (a long one) and sicking up a lot of the feed, then after I had been out an hour, poor daddy sent me a text to say he was putting the baby in the sling and coming up to see me to help baby sleep. Baby was refusing the expressed milk and screaming, so the sling was the only option. It worked! Baby slept like a dream in the sling. And I got to walk home with daddy and baby which was nice. 90 mins out was better than nothing!

Last night, we had a bottle of expressed milk ready to do, and then with the evening cluster feed, we never got around to using it. Excepting the baby to wake up about 1am ish, we said that daddy could do the next feed. So at 4am, baby got the expressed milk. He wasn’t super- keen on taking it and grizzled a bit but superdaddy persevered and got it all in him. Baby didn’t fall asleep so I gave him a little breast and after that he slept well.

We will keep persevering with this!

A LOT of text- apologies. Have a picture!

All the ladies from the Mumsnet Sept 2013 due date thread have now had their babies so we had a mass-celebration friday/ sat night (to suit). We all had a glass of champagne (or other favourite tipple) and posted a picture onto our facebook group to celebrate. I, and another lady also put together some fun awards to the gang- I really enjoyed it! What a lovely bunch of ladies!

Funnies

Thank mother nature for wonderful people!
I’ll update the holy-goodness-mumsnet-women-are-a-bunch-of-bitter-hags later, but the WONDERFUL ladies from the September 2013 thread have pointed me towards this bizarre and hillarious website PregnantChicken.com.

In particular this post which made me guffaw on the train today:

Porn for Pregnant Ladies…. except the title and some topless men Safe For Work!

Scaring me now

Another blog post to be written from bed……the shame! But to be fair I have actually achieved some things this weekend so all can be forgiven… right?

Saturday we had a lazy start to the day, and watched some telly, skyped some relatives then cracked on with some housework. I think the downstairs now looks presentable to guests. Which is a good thing really as we decided a bit last minute to see if some friends that we hadn’t seen for ages were around (they were) so we invited them over to dinner. We’d already decided to blast some cobwebs away so walked up to sainsburys and back whilst mentally concocting an interesting vegetarian dinner and desert.

Had a lovely evening with friends eating olive bread dipped in cherry balsamic, roasted mediterranean veg with home made harissa paste, couscous and salad, topped off with a home made pear and almond cake (nice one husband).

Sunday we managed to clear up the carnage from saturday night’s cooking experiments, then Husband went for a run and I decided to join him on the bicycle. It was snowing.

When we got back I decided I had the energy to trim the front hedge, but I only managed half before wimping out as I was so cold.

Since then I have gone back to bed to watch a film, and browse the internet.

Today mumsnet has been scaring me with “houserules”- a chat thread in which people discuss the rules of their house. Obviously most of these women or people have children already so it’s understandable they have a few more rules than we do. Most people seem to count wearing shoes in the house a crime, letting pets into bedrooms an utter sin, and NOT EATING AT A TABLE AS A FAMILY the end of humanity. I let the cat have the best bit of the bed (usually about half our king size), wear shoes where I like (I’ll be vacuuming) unless they’re really muddy, and although we eat good home made food, we tend to eat it in front of the telly. Whoops. We’re heathens.

Who could deny him the best bit of the bed?

What are a sensible list of houserules?

Boo

Thanks to the lovely Lucinda on the HG thread of Mumsnet for the great analogy of Nausea and Vomiting in Pregnancy being like a game of snakes and ladders. You move forwards some, you move back. It seems to be luck related and is never predictable. So true.

Too tired for anything right now.

Net Mums

Net Mums (as I mentioned before) is a great source of knowledge and opinion but there are some things I find really really weird about it.

The first thing that I find weird is the incessant abbreviations. I understand that when typing conversation with strangers on the internet, that people want to make things easier for themselves. I also get that there’s a need for a special secret language to help the feeling of togetherness, but it feels so impersonal! Each current child is described as DC1 or DS (i,e Darling Child #1 or Darling Son) and husbands are described as DH (you see where this is going?) or DP.

The other thing is the fierce competitiveness. I suppose in some ways this isn’t a surprise, because women tend to be a bit erm…. scary in the face of proving that they work the hardest/work the longest/do the most around the house/at home/with children/ get up the earliest/have the most responsibility……

I read a thread last year which was about how often these women did things about the house. The one that terrified me was the woman who claimed that she changed her tea towels three times a day! THREE TIMES A DAY! What the holy hell was she doing with those tea towels? And no-one questioned it.

Bonkers.

Please don’t let me turn bonkers when I become a mummy…….

Less positive note

This week has defeated me already, I’m sad to say.

Although I understand on a logical level that pregnancy (like any change to your body or health) affects people differently, however it’s hard not to feel weak, wimpy and pathetic when the symptoms seem to be affecting you in a way that you can’t bare whilst others are up, working, looking after children and probably being cheerful too.

I’ve ended up having to take some time off work with the sickness as I’ve been heavily nauseous from getting up time to the moment I fall asleep, and yesterday I started vomiting too. I’ve tried most of the recommended “treatments”- from ginger ale to dry crackers, to eating small snacks frequently rather than large meals. I’ve tried only eating exactly what I feel like (whether that’s a snicker bar, 4 apples or macaroni cheese), I’ve tried eating plain, high carb low fat snacks. I’ve tried eating first thing before getting up in the morning. I’ve tried being busy to as to distract myself, I’ve tried sipping fizzy drinks, I’ve tried only eating food luke-warm rather than hot. Nothing is working. Or if it does- it’s very short lived- a maximum of ten minutes of respite of feeling relatively normal.

So tomorrow I’ve got a Dr appointment to see if there’s anything they can do to help. I guess an option is anti-emetics but a)I don’t want to put any drugs into my body if I don’t have to and b)I’ve heard that they aren’t so brilliant anyway. I’ve also ordered some travel sickness bands which some people have said help and hopefully they will arrive tomorrow.

In short, I’m feeling utterly rubbish and very pathetic about it. Luckily the internet-fountain-of-all-knowledge-that-is-Mumsnet has come to the rescue with lots of opportunities to discuss symptoms with others in the same position as me. Sounds like there’s a few others out there feeling as crappy as me, without the medical confirmation of something more serious like hyperemesis gravidarum (the more severe version of morning sickness).

To add to that I’ve managed to very quickly loose about 2kg in the last week or so which under normal circumstances would be great (as I’ve been gently losing weight since July last year), but I have been a bit worried under the current circumstances. A quick google tells me it’s pretty normal and doctors don’t normally concern themselves with it which is good news, but I still feel nervous about the combination of the nausea, vomiting and weightloss.