When I think back on my childhood, I remember it fondly. For me, it was a time of great security, love and fun. If you ask me what I remember of my childhood lots of images spring to mind:

…the excitement as we loaded the car full of camping gear, with us piled on top of it in the back seat, impatient to get to our destination. We saw half the country this way. Now the climate here means that it’s likely a good many of these camping trips were wet and cold. But for some reason, I remember them as sunny and warm.

…the arguments over whose turn it was to pump the air mattresses. No electric pumps for us. Before we were allowed off to explore, we had to use the foot pump to blow up our beds for the night. Getting the campsite set up was a finely tuned operation for us. Everyone had their job as I recall.

…the frustration at being told to “go out and play”. Dad was never a big fan of children’s tv so our viewing time was limited. If it was dry at all outside, the tv was switched off and we were sent out to amuse ourselves. And amuse ourselves we did. There wasn’t a tree we couldn’t climb or a nearby field that we hadn’t explored. Epic games of swing ball wore bare patches on the lawn, competitive games of “52 Bonkers” centred around a drain pipe in the back garden. Manys the time I hid behind the oil tank waiting for the perfect opportunity to run home and be safe. I smile now when I think of all the fun we had because of being sent out to play so much. It’s one of the things I wish I could replicate for my children and part of the reason why I despair of the lack of green space around us.

…the sense of camaraderie as we drove to Mosney each year for the Community Games finals listening to “One Moment in Time” on repeat. I still can’t hear that song without being instantly transported back to those weekends. The stress, the tension, the joy, the glory! I was never good enough to compete at a national level for community games, but my brothers were. And still I felt I shared in the victories on those weekends. We were very much there as a family cheering each other on. We all looked forward to those weekends each year, one of the highlights of the family calendar.

…the anticipation as we got close to the top of a mountain (or was it just a big hill!) overlooking Rossbeigh beach. Each year we went camping there we would make the climb to the top and check under a particular stone where we had hidden some “treasure” the previous year. Our own personal time capsule.

…the thrill of a good book. Each week we would visit the library. If he wasn’t working dad would take us there while mam did the grocery shopping. I’d check out as many books as my library card would allow (and read half of them before we even made it home!). When I was young, mam or dad would read a book or a chapter to us each night. As I got older and read to myself, dad read the same books as me, and we’d chat about the characters and storylines we liked. Swallows and Amazons, The Tripods Trilogy, Watership Down, and so many more.

Thanks for all the good memories Dad. Happy Father’s Day!

The post Snapshots of a happy childhood appeared first on Mama.ie.

She’s continuing to have a series of sleepy days followed by a series of wakeful days. Two days this week, she had minimal naps during the day. Thursday was probably the most extreme. Between 8am and 11pm, she had three naps, each just approximately 30 minutes long. I would have expected her to be exhausted as a result, but she wasn’t. She seemed wide awake and alert, taking everything in. And then when she did go to sleep that night, she slept for a nice stretch only waking once for a feed.

In fact her night time sleeps are becoming more predictable than the daytime sleeps. She generally wakes for just one feed between midnight and 6am – often around 3am. It’s a quick feed with minimal fuss or winding afterwards. Usually the time between waking and being back in her cosleeper again is about 15 minutes total.

At the beginning of this week, we travelled down to Dunmore East, to take advantage of the good weather and stay with my parents in a holiday home they had rented for the week. I was a bit anxious beforehand about traveling so far on my own with the two kids but I needn’t have worried. Little Woman slept for the whole journey, and Little Man was as good as gold, entertaining himself with his toys and books and trusty iPad, and giving me regular reports about his sleeping sister.

The speed at which these newborn moments pass never ceases to astound me. Already those early feeding issues seem so far in the past. Pregnancy seems like a lifetime ago! Soon no doubt I’ll be saying the same about this small baby stage. So for now, I’m trying to make the most of it and take advantage of the sleepy baby cuddles whenever I can.

The post Eleven Weeks Old appeared first on Mama.ie.

I tried expressing another bottle for her this week but she was not keen on it at all. She gagged on it and spat it out at first. When she did eventually suck on it, she choked really easily so I think the flow was just too strong for her. I may try again next week and see how we get on. Perhaps with a different bottle type.

I’ve really felt we had great freedom this week. And I’ve definitely grown in confidence when it comes to feeding – which of course is contributing to this newfound freedom. This week alone I fed in friend’s houses, in a coffee shop, in the car (parked of course!), in TGI Fridays, in the doctor’s office, and in the park. I’ve almost given up on wearing breastfeeding tops and I’m relying on loose fitting t-shirts or tops with a string vest beneath them instead because I feel I can feed more discretely in the regular tops.

Little Woman continues to get bigger and stronger. I’m pushing it a bit to still have her in her 0-3 month clothes. Some 0-3 month clothes are only up to 11lbs. She definitely doesn’t fit those anymore. Others are up to 14lbs and she is filling the body of those, though she still has plenty of space in the legs of them.

I took her for her two month vaccines this week, a week late because we were away last week when they were due. My poor baby – I think it was the first time I heard her cry properly. I was fairly close to tears myself. Thankfully she recovered quickly and an hour later she was back to her usual happy self. She didn’t seem to have any major reaction to them.

Sleep-wise, there hasn’t really been a pattern during the days this week. She had at least one long nap and one short nap most days. But not at any particular time. The nights are different though. She seems to have settled into feeding once around 3am for a very short feed (from the time she wakes until she’s fed and back in her co-sleeper asleep again is usually about 15 minutes). Then she sleeps until around 6am, after which she may or may not go back again for a couple of hours.

Developmentally, we’ve had a few giggles and a lot more interaction. She loves to sit in her bouncer and watch whatever we’re doing. As long as she can see what’s going on, she’s usually happy.

The post Ten weeks old appeared first on Mama.ie.

We decided that a bit of DIY was in order today, and the sunshine was perfect weather in which to paint our front door. Of course, Little Man, seeing the paint brushes and paint, wanted in on the action, but I didn’t want to let him near the front door itself. I’m a big believer in getting kids involved in DIY and housework at an early age though, so I didn’t want to discourage him. I handed him a tub of white paint and a paint brush, and told him to paint the windowsill. It’s white already so I figured what harm could he do?

Really at this point I should have paid a bit more attention but I was concentrating on painting the door, and I figured I’d touch up the windowsill once he was finished. So you can imagine my surprise when Charlie came running out of the house asking what was going on. Turns out I may have said “windowsill” but Little Man didn’t know what that was, so he went with the next best thing and decided to paint the window instead. Lovely big white steaks of paint all over the glass. That’ll teach me!

*Thankfully I was able to scrub the paint off the window, and teach him what a windowsill was instead and he did a lovely job once he knew what he was aiming for! And in the meantime, we finished the front door and gave it a new lease of life. Quite a change from the fire engine red that it was before!

The post Crossed wires appeared first on Mama.ie.

The past week has been a great one. On Saturday night, Little Woman slept for 5.5 hours straight. On Sunday night she slept for 6.5 hours straight and then on Monday night, she slept for just over 7.5 hours, falling asleep at 9.15pm and not waking until 5.50am.

Of course the sleepy trend came to an end on Tuesday night when she woke for three feeds during the night! Talk about a shock to the system! It was just a blip though because since then we’ve returned to one feed a night, which seems perfect to me.

I think that excessive windiness may have caused the wakefulness on Tuesday night, because Tuesday evening was the first time I tried feeding a bottle of expressed milk to Little Woman. I expressed it first thing in the morning, getting 3.5oz in about five minutes following her epic sleep. It took me all day to work up to giving her the bottle though. I’m not sure what I thought would happen, but I guess it was just playing on my mind that Little Man developed such a preference for the bottle, which I think exacerbated a lot of our feeding problems.

I needn’t have worried though. No bottle preference here. It took a few minutes for Little Woman to drink anything from the bottle. At first she just looked at me in disgust and refused it. Eventually she drank some, but she choked easily on it and I had to be really careful. I tried to follow a paced feeding approach, because I’d read that it helps to prevent babies developing a preference for the bottle, but I think all I succeeded in doing was filling her with wind. It took 20 minutes for her to drink 2oz. By that time the milk had cooled down and she had no interest in it. For now I think we’re safe with our efficient and hassle-free five minute breastfeeds.

We’ll try a few expressed bottle feeds again next week and see how we fare.

This has been a really enjoyable week developmentally. Lots of smiles and even the occasional giggle to enjoy. I can see a definite improvement in her head control, now that I’m giving Little Woman regular tummy time at intervals during the day. I also think there’s a slight improvement in the shape of the back of her head. It’s still flat on one side, but less noticeable than before.

Her neck seems to be loosening up though and now she is happy to look to the left as well as the right. I think that alone will help her head to reshape in the months to come.

The post Nine weeks old appeared first on Mama.ie.

A couple of weeks ago I received a Snoodie for review. The Snoodie is a dribble bib that’s made of a soft colourful material, with an absorbent inner layer. It has two poppers at the back, which can be used to adjust the neck size of the bib.

I’ve always been a fan of the bandana-style bibs so at first I wasn’t sure about this one because it seems quite a bit bulkier than those. However, it looks very comfortable on, and because of the way it gathers around the baby’s neck, it does an excellent job of catching dribbles. I thought Little Woman looked very cute.

The Snoodie seems to be very high quality and I’m expecting it to wear well as I’ve washed it three times now and it washed well and dried quickly each time. Because of the way it is constructed, it retains its shape on washing, something I was very pleased about, because the bandana-style bibs often curled up at the front after a while. I think we’ll be getting a lot of use out of this in the coming months.

Disclosure
I received a Snoodie for the purposes of this review. However, my opinions and text are my own.

The post Product Review: Snoodie appeared first on Mama.ie.

So you can imagine how shocked I was as I sat in bed feeding Little Woman shortly after 4am today when those very same wardrobe doors that I had carefully closed a few hours earlier started to vibrate! I actually rubbed my eyes to make sure I was seeing it right. And then as suddenly as the shaking started it stopped. I was left wondering if I had nodded off for a moment and dreamed the whole thing.

By the time the sun rose, I had forgotten all about it, until I read about the earthquake in Wales. Apparently it happened at around 4.15am. I guess an earthquake does make a lot more sense than boogeymen in the wardrobe!

The post Then the earth moved appeared first on Mama.ie.

All week Little Woman has been feeding well, and gradually spreading out her feeds at night. In fact we had one night this week where she slept from 11.15pm until 5.50am. I felt amazing after it! That’s the longest stretch of sleep I’ve had since I was pregnant.

Those lovely stretches abruptly came to a stop this morning though, on the day when she officially turned 8 weeks old. Suddenly she wanted to feed at 4am, 5am, 6am, 7am, and 8am! And with the exception of a 2 hour nap when I went for a walk with her in the sling, that trend continued all day.

At 7pm I went to bed so that I could feed her lying down because I was wiped out from it!!

I guess a growth spurt at this point isn’t surprising though. We’ve seen a lot of changes in her this week. Each day she is a bit more alert than the day before. The little smiles are coming much more frequently and now they seem to be directed at us or at objects that catch her attention. She’s started to track people with her eyes too – particularly Little Man. She seems happiest sitting in her bouncer chair watching him move around the room.

We’ve been doing a lot of tummy time this week as well, and I’m seeing a big difference in the range of motion of her neck. She is now turning much more easily to the left, although she still has a preference for looking right.

I haven’t had her weighed this week, but I suspect she is heading for 11lbs. Judging by her clothes at least. I can’t see us getting another month out of her 0-3 month clothes. I think in another week or so I’ll have to pull down the boxes of 3-6 month clothes from the attic and start getting them ready.

The post Eight weeks old appeared first on Mama.ie.

While I was dealing with painful feeds in the early weeks – especially the feeds where I felt exquisite pain – I found myself turning to the Internet several times and looking for ways to deal with the pain. Most sites had much the same advice: “Figure out what’s causing the pain and fix it.” Good advice, but it wasn’t helping me. I had a fair idea that an incorrect latching-on technique was causing the pain and I was working towards fixing it, but healing was slow and in the meantime what I actually needed was advice on how to cope with the pain rather than how to fix it.

So now that I’ve emerged from the fog, and moved past the pain, I thought it might be useful to share the coping mechanisms that I used for dealing with the pain.

1. Identify and fix the problem causing the pain.
Yes – I know I mentioned above that this advice wasn’t what I was searching for. But the fact remains that it’s the most important piece of advice when it comes to problems with feeding. If you don’t fix the problem, then it’s likely to get worse.

2. If you can stick to one side per feed, do.
This tip is definitely not going to work for everyone. It is totally dependent on your milk supply. For me, my supply has always been good, and in fact oversupply tends to be an issue, so it’s quite easy for me to limit each feed to a single side, thereby maximising the break each side gets between feeds. At certain times in the day, when feeds are 3-4 hours apart, that means each side is getting a 6-8 hour recovery period between uses. This was vital to helping me cope with the pain because when I was feeding on the sorer side at least I knew that I’d have a good gap before I had to do it again.

3. Take painkillers.
Again, not everyone is comfortable with doing this. But I was at the point where I couldn’t physically feed unless I dampened the pain somehow. There is a danger that if you numb the pain, then you’ll end up doing more damage because you won’t feel it as much when the latch is bad. But I was happy that the latch was fixed and I was just waiting for healing to take place. So I took paracetamol regularly, every 6-8 hours, and I took Ponstan when I needed it, once or twice a day before a feed on the sorer side. I tried to time it so that I took the painkillers about 20-30 minutes before a feed. Some days I didn’t need painkillers so I didn’t take any. But other days I would have quit without them.

4. Have a plan.
Personally I couldn’t keep going if I didn’t have a plan for what I was doing to fix the situation. Blind hope just wasn’t cutting it for me. I had to feel that I was being proactive, that there was a plan in place. These plans were generally simple: apply lanolin before and after each feed, use MultiMam compresses, ask the public health nurse her advice, speak to the lactation consultant, etc.

5. Give the plan time to work.
Of course, plans are no good unless you give them time to work. So with each plan, I would set a duration for myself as to how long I would try it for. That way I could be sure I gave each option a reasonable chance.

6. Have a plan B.
Sometimes whatever you’re planning doesn’t work out. Like when I kept going in the second week because I thought all I had to do was get to speak to the practice nurse in my GP clinic and she’d be able to help me. So I kept going and going, and then it turned out she couldn’t help. If I didn’t have a plan B or a next step ready, that would have been crushing. Luckily I had decided beforehand that if she couldn’t help me
I would contact a lactation consultant immediately.

7. Give yourself a break.
Pain eats away at you. It brings down your mood and it can be all consuming. If you get to the point where it’s on your mind constantly – either because you are in constant pain or because you are constantly thinking about the next painful experience, then it is probably time to give yourself a break. At least it was for me. With Little Man, that break involved giving him a bottle of formula. And with Little Woman since I had milk aplenty, it involved expressing and syringe-feeding her a feed or two. Knowing that I had an alternative to latching her on if I needed it really helped keep me going. I didn’t feel trapped by the pain and that was really important for me mentally.

8. Set a limit.
I know some people believe that you should breastfeed at all costs, but I am not one of those. I really really wanted to breastfeed and I was determined to do everything I could to ensure that worked out. But I think there comes a time when you have to call it a day, both for your physical and mental health. That time may be an arbitrary time limit that you set or it may be a particular event. For me, I had one more plan left to try if the Jack Newman cream hadn’t worked out. I would have brought Little Woman to have her assessed for posterior tongue tie (since she doesn’t have an obvious tongue tie). And if that wasn’t the issue, then I was going to switch to expressing and bottle feeding instead. If necessary I would have supplemented with formula, though I’d have preferred not to because I always felt Little Man was left more unsettled on formula.

So there you have it. My tips based on my very personal experience of coping with pain while establishing breast feeding. As I’ve mentioned, not all of these tips are suitable for everyone. The only thing I can say with certainty is that this is what got me through. So maybe I have one more tip for you if you’re experiencing something similar: “Find what works for you and try it.” You know your own limits and you know what helps you. So trust yourself.

The post Feeding through the pain appeared first on Mama.ie.

I’m so much more relaxed about taking a baby-led approach to timing feeds and naps this time around, so if someone asks how often is she feeding, that’s a difficult question to answer. I can tell you, thanks to the Total Baby app that I use to track her feeds, that her average feed lasts 7 minutes and that there is approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes between each feed. But that doesn’t really give you the full story because I am certainly not feeding her every two hours day and night. She tends to cluster feed for hours each evening and during this time , she feeds every 30-45 minutes. Once she’s done, she then falls into a deep sleep, usually between 11pm and midnight, and she sleeps for 4-5 hours before waking for the next feed. That next feed is a very sleepy feed for the most part, and usually lasts about 20 minutes. Once it’s done, she usually falls asleep again for about 2-3 hours.

This isn’t every night, but it happens often enough that I recognise the pattern. Sometimes she’ll have a cluster feeding period for a few hours in the morning too and then have a big 3-4 hour nap in the afternoon. The first time that happened, I must admit that that temptation to wake her and feed her to try to ensure she slept that night instead was strong. But I forced myself to leave her be and what do you know? She slept a five hour stretch that night. That taught me to leave well enough alone and enjoy the lengthy afternoon naps when they happen instead.

We’ve been out and about quite a bit this week, visiting friends, going to the breastfeeding support group, taking Little Man to a birthday party, and meeting friends in a playcentre. Because of this, I’ve had a lot more practice at feeding in public and I’m definitely growing in confidence with it. I make sure I’m wearing clothes that allow me to feed discretely (because I’m more comfortable with that – not because I think it’s required) and at the start of a feed, I use a muslin cloth to give me a little bit of coverage while I get her latched on. It helps that she latches quickly and easily most of the time.

Now that we’re past the six week mark and feeding is established, we decided to introduce a soother. In particular, I wanted it for car journeys because she seems to hate the car seat and I’ve lost count of how many car journeys she has been upset for. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to be a fan of the soother however. She spits it back at me and then looks at me as if to say “Gross! What was that?!” We’ve tried it over a few days and have discovered that although she won’t take the soother when she’s calm, if she’s already upset than she will often take it and suck it for as long as it takes to calm herself before spitting it out. This is perfect as far as I’m concerned because I just want some way to calm her when I put her in the car seat, and I’m happy for her not to have it at any other stage during the day. So we’ll persist with it for now.

Earlier in the week, I noticed something that was concerning me. Little Woman was showing a definite preference for turning her head to her left. She doesn’t seem to have the same range of motion when turning to her right and she doesn’t do it as often. When she sleeps, she generally turns her head to face left, and I can see a definite flattening on one side at the back of her head. Thankfully her skull is still soft right now so from what I’ve read this isn’t a major cause for concern at this stage. I’ve started doing a lot more tummy time with her, and positioning her to encourage her to turn to her left. After a few days, I can already see an improvement in her range of motion when turning to her right.

Developmentally, the biggest change this week seems to be the increase in the number of smiles. They’re coming more regularly and quite a few times I’ve felt they were directed at us. They’re hard to capture though, so I don’t have a good photograph of her smiling yet. I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks though and watching that smile get stronger.

The post Seven weeks old appeared first on Mama.ie.