Half term fun

We have had a really lovely half term week with our little family. We spent most of the week in Southampton going to Paulton’s Park and the Isle of Wight. We also managed to go to the science museum at Birmingham Thinktank, and today our neighbourhood had Trick or Treating for the children.

Paulton’s Park was chosen because there was a dinosaur section (of course), but as we didn’t tell our son about it we managed to get him on some of the other rides too. They had decorated for Halloween really well with pumpkins absolutely everywhere. Our boy was really tired by the end of the day, so he must have enjoyed it.

I think he enjoyed the trip to the Isle of Wight more though. My husband was brought up in Southampton so was a regular visitor as a child. He has been trying to convince me to go for years (there or Crete) so we almost HAD to go. Our son was so excited to be on a boat over to another island and we had really lovely weather or the day, which helped no end. We stayed in Cowes for the day and after lunch headed to the beach. We were a little worried that R would be upset there was no sand on the beach, but as it was quite quiet we spent the time finding rocks and throwing them in the sea-he loved it! Our daughter, C, also loved touching the rocks. This was a lovely sensory experience for her-until she started trying to put them in her mouth! All in all we had a lovely day and it has convinced me that we would enjoy a holiday there.

We have been to the Science Museum at Thinktank several times as we live so close to the city centre. Last time we spent the entire time looking at a fossil of a crocodile, but this time while we visited the crocodile we also saw some of the rest of the museum. Particularly the science garden outside (which is free to enter after 3pm) where there are lots of hands on experiments to try. The day we were at the museum there were lots of children of all ages playing in the garden. Both of the children loved the water play out there.

More water play was found inside (R was ever so soggy by the end of the day!) in “kid city”, an area set up to look like a city street that has a doctors, a cafe, a garage in for children to play roll play games. My son has never enjoyed that area, except for the water, but I know I would have loved it as a child. He did, however, really enjoy sorting the rubbish in an exhibit about recycling. We spent a surprising amount of time there! And he tolerated looking at the robots on the top floor quite well -my husband likes them and wanted to go and see them.

Finally Halloween weekend and the end of half term. In our neighbourhood there are a lot of families with young children. Every year the residents association organises Trick or Treating for the children. It is on a Sunday afternoon and everyone goes together starting on our road. It’s safe for the children as non of them are over about 10 and there are lots of very little ones there. We also know exactly when it will happen and we are generally not disturbed by Trick or Treaters any other time. You also get to see all the neighbourhood children in their very cute costumes. I love it. This is the first year we have taken part as R slept through it the last couple of years so we just handed out sweets at the door. We now have a very tired boy who is working on his negotiating skills trying to get us to let him have more of his sweets!

Happy Halloween!

Some sleep, some sleep, my kingdom for some sleep

Neither of my children have been good sleepers. Rock bottom with my first was when he was waking up every 45 minutes throughout the night. This time around it feels like my baby is doing better, but in reality i don’t think she is. She is certainly a much worse daytime napper than my son was. However, I used to hold him for a couple of hours every day between 4 and 6. These days I don’t have that luxury as my son comes home from school at 3 and dinner needs to be made and eaten and baths to be had before bed.

We have much more of a routine now, scheduled around my son, but that has not translated into a better sleeping pattern.

So why does it feel better this time round? I think my expectations were far more realistic this time, and I know it will improve. I am also not spending all of my time googling obsessively “why won’t my baby sleep?” Instead I watch tv on my phone, or read books on the kindle so it doesn’t feel so bad. I also think that it makes a massive difference that I am not the only one waking up this time.

I breastfeed, so there is little my husband can actually do overnight. With my son that meant that he largely slept all night while I woke up many, many times and I felt so jealous sometimes, and resentful that I got so little sleep and he got a proper night’s sleep every night. This time, when our son wakes up, which is most nights at the moment, my husband is the one who goes to him while I am feeding the baby and he gets up early every morning to take the baby off and get our son up so I get at least an hour uninterrupted in the morning. We are a team again.

At some point the baby will start sleeping through the night. Roll on that day!

Pregnancy Loss Awareness Week

This week is Pregnancy Loss Awareness Week in the UK and people are being encouraged to speak out about it. Pregnancy loss is incredibly common, but you don’t really hear about it until you have suffered your own loss. I used to worry that I might have difficulty conceiving, especially as I was in my late 30s when my now husband and I started trying for a baby, but I never considered that I might lose a baby.

I found out I was pregnant for the first time just after my boyfriend moved in and we got engaged (the same day, it was a very exciting time)! We arranged our wedding date (I would be 5 months pregnant) and started house hunting-both he and I had put our places on the market and we moved into my house only because it hadn’t sold. We excitedly told our parents and our sisters, my work guessed early on and even the estate agent who showed us most of the properties we looked at knew I was expecting as she heard us talking in the one house about which room would be the nursery.

I was so happy. I had always wanted to have children and here I was pregnant, engaged, looking fora new house.

On June 1st, a Friday, I went to the toilet at work before heading out to meet my boyfriend. We were due to go away for the weekend to meet friends. I noticed some bleeding, just a little bit but enough to worry me. I was 9 weeks pregnant at the time. I had just had my scan date through. Not knowing what to do I met my boyfriend and we went straight home. At home there was a little more bleeding, so I called the 111 NHS direct number. I spoke to a doctor who arranged an appointment the following day with the walk in GP surgery near us for the following day and advised I stay in bed. The GP the following day put me on bed rest and arranged a scan at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit the following Monday.

Over the weekend I read a lot about bleeding in pregnancy and watched a lot of telly. I did feel reassured by some of what I read-I might have been doing too much and it was my body’s way of telling me to slow down. In my heart, though, I knew that it would not be good news as the bleeding continued.

At my appointment I still hoped we would have good news, but the sonographer said “I am sorry” and that was that. The baby had stopped growing at 6 weeks. We were led into a separate room and left for a few minutes to take the news in. I was given various options as to how to proceed. I chose to go home and let the miscarriage continue naturally and was due to go back a week later to check that it had completed.

We went home, cried, watched a film and the day passed in a bit of a blur. At one point I asked my boyfriend if he would forgive me for losing the baby. It wasn’t until the Saturday night that the miscarriage properly started. There was a lot of blood and blood clots but it wasn’t as painful as I expected it to be.

I took 2 weeks off work as the miscarriage really hit me hard. Some days were ok until I found myself crying in my kitchen over seemingly nothing. Suddenly there were pregnant women everywhere. What upset me most was the thought that the baby had died 3 weeks before the bleeding started and I had carried it around with me. In hindsight I realized that all of the pregnancy symptoms I had experienced had stopped at around 6 weeks.

I had to go back to the hospital two further times and my scans showed each time that there were still “retained products of conception”. On the final occasion a doctor examined me and tried to assist with removing those “retained products”. I was doing ok with it all right up until she asked me what I wanted to do with it, did I want the hospital to dispose of it or did I want to bury the remains. I had not expected that, I hadn’t prepared for it.

I did get pregnant a few months later and on June 3rd, just over a year after the miscarriage started, I gave birth to my wonderful son. He would not have been here if I hadn’t lost that first baby, and I cannot imagine my life without him, or his sister, in it now. But I do think about the baby that might have been on June 1st every year and on January 7th, which would have been the baby’s due date.

After the miscarriage I found out that a lot of the people I know have had one, in fact one friend was going through one at exactly the same time as me (we ended up having our sons 2 weeks apart). For me it was very helpful to know that I wasn’t alone, that it was really very common and I hadn’t done anything wrong or to cause it.

I also found it useful to talk about it, let people know that it had happened. Having said that I am sure there are still a lot of people who do not know that I had a miscarriage, and when I got pregnant again I didn’t tell people until after the 12 week scan and I was worried throughout the pregnancy until he came out.

Adult conversation

This morning we went to a party for one of my son’s school friends. This is the second week in a row we have been to the same soft play place, and this week he was a lot happier there. Last week he only really got into it about 5 minutes before we left and this week he played pretty much the whole time. He stuck with one of his friends and they held hands and played together and even gave each other a kiss. Beautiful to see!

My baby girl, seeing her brother having a great time with his friends, was desperately trying to get into the ball pool. So there were points where my husband and I were actually not holding either child! Amazing. We even got to have some adult conversations with the other parents. And there is a possibility that I may meet a friend tomorrow – more adult conversation!

I am lucky enough not to work at the moment, and we can afford for me to take a little time to build up a business once both children are in school. I am very happy that I can be home with the children now while they are little and for holidays and school pick up. I do, however, miss adult conversation with people I am not related to! Without the school run I can go for weeks without talking to another adult who is not my husband or my mother. So it is always exciting for me when I have the opportunity of having a decent adult conversation! This is a good week.

Little Things

I have forgotten so many of the little details from my son's first few months. So now I have those months again with my daughter I often can't remember what they were like. How old was he when he sat up for the first time, when did he giggle the first time? Thankfully because of smartphones I have A LOT of pictures of him and can often go back to find these things out.

The pictures can't tell me, though how it felt when he first hugged me back, or how lovely it was to snuggle up with him in the middle of the night when his Dad was sleeping and the rest of the world was quiet. (Rose coloured glasses talking there now, I know there were times when I woke his Dad up at 5 am crying telling him I could not sit up any more, I desperately needed some sleep!)

The pictures can't tell me how odd but wonderful it was to feel both of the babies moving around inside me. How I knew my son had hiccups while pregnant, how my daughter would have sleepy days and very active days. They can't tell me what it is like now to be able to have my hand on my baby's tummy, or hold her hand while we are asleep (I wish we had invested in a bedside sleeper when my son was born, I love it and will miss it so much when she can't use it any more). Or how wonderful it is to walk into a room and your baby's eyes light up because you are their world and they missed you, even though you had only gone to the toilet. That the same thing can also sometimes feel utterly exhausting and overwhelming.

I know that, once again I will forget all the little things about the baby's first few months. I hope, though, I hold on to the memory of these feelings for a while.

A difficult afternoon

I started writing this blog post the other day in the early evening after a rather difficult time after school. The school run is not at all easy at the moment with a 3 year old and a 5 month old and I rarely time my daughter’s naps right so that she sleeps on the way back home. Usually she will be strapped into her car seat crying and continues to do so all the way home. Thankfully it’s only a 15 minute journey, but it’s not pleasant with her screaming in the back. My son has to sit next to her while she is screaming away, and he makes his own demands (of course) like give me a drink, can I have something to eat, take this wrapper from me (ok so he uses far fewer words than that) and he doesn’t really understand why I can’t do those things immediately while driving. He is just 3. All in all it makes for a pretty unpleasant journey and it’s fair to say that I hate it right now.

So the other day I had one of those journeys home, and when we got home things did not get much better. The baby finally fell asleep and was woken up 10 mins later by a noisy toddler. The toddler was impatient (because, well, he’s 3) especially when I was doing things with the baby like feeding her. We potty trained over the summer, and largely he is dry now, except in the evening when he’s tired and he doesn’t want to bother using the potty. That’s when we get accidents. On this particular day he had an accident and 5 minutes after I had changed him he then had an accident involving pooh. Another change.

By this time the baby had become fed up with being put on the playmat and she wanted to stand up, so she was becoming more and more upset. It all culminated with my son drawing on the floor and the frame of his white board and me texting my husband to ask whether he was on his way home, and if he wasn’t to please head off. When he got back I went to hide in the bathroom and started writing this blog post, albeit with a much more sorry for myself, I am failing how do other people make this look so easy tone. I may have cried a bit.

After 10 minutes I went back downstairs and asked my husband to take the baby upstairs for 15 or 20 minutes so I could have some time just playing with my son. Immediately his behaviour changed and improved immeasurably. He got my undivided attention and we played happily for almost 30 minutes as the baby fell asleep with my husband. We then had tea just the three of us and spent a lot of time focused on my son. It made a huge difference to him that the baby wasn’t there during the meal.

Of course we have time for the two of us regularly, but it’s usually when the baby is asleep so I have one ear open for her and we can’t be too noisy. This time there were no noise restrictions as the baby was playing with Daddy not trying to sleep. My boy’s behaviour has been so much better since then as well. So just a small amount of time just the 2 of us seems to have made a massive difference! It’s something I think I need to do much more often.