Tag: Newborn

Child 2, Weeks 6 & 7: The Hunger Games

I remember way back when, in the dim and distant past, when Thing 1 was a few weeks old, someone – maybe a health visitor, maybe a friend – told us that kids have growth spurts at ‘the threes’ – three days, three weeks, three months, and three years old. Actually, it may not have been ‘the threes’. It may have been ‘the fives’. Or ‘the sevens’. Well, it was some natural number, but the point remains the same. At certain periods of your kid’s upbringing, they’re going to be putting on weight and increasing in height at levels previously unseen, and as a result, they’re going to be HUNGRY, INSATIABLE BASTARDS.

For us, this hit during week six. Thing 2 was unbelievable. He was constantly hungry. He’d breast-feed for half-an-hour on each side then, instead of flopping off into a milk coma and sleeping for two hours, he’d be angsty and unsettled and root and root for another shot of milk. We’d make top-up bottles of formula to try and calm his rampant hunger, of which he’d take 3, 4, or 5 fl. ozs. He’d guzzle milk and formula at such a rate that his brain didn’t even get chance to receive the signal from his full, full belly that he could stop his fevered sucking, and he’d just continue until his steady possetting signalled that we should pry the bottle from his lips. Maybe, just maybe, after all that milk (and a hearty burping session) would he settle long enough to succumb to sleep. Until two hours later when he’d wake up in another hunger frenzy and the whole cycle would start again.

And this was reflected in his weight gain. He put on over a pound a week for a couple of weeks, slowly moving up the centiles. And he looks better for it, too – he now better fills his crinkly little baby face quite nicely. As we hit the end of week seven, his hunger has abated slightly now, and we’re back to a slightly more normal routine, although we still use a bottle of formula (usually 7 fl. ozs., most of which he drinks) if we really want to knock him out for a sleep, in a way that a breast-feeding session doesn’t. I ‘eagerly’ await the next growth spurt for more of the same ‘fun’, although I have no clue whether that’s going to be a five, six, or seven months…

The other major change Thing 2 has exhibited during week 7 is he’s finally giving something back, after seven weeks of selfishly taking our time, attention, money, and food with nary a nod in our direction. Yes, the kid is finally starting to smile. Now I’m not going to fall into the trap that naive new parents (and I include my five-years-ago self in that group) do when they mistake a grunting, gurning, attempting-to-push-out-a-turd grimace for baby’s first smile. No, these were genuine smiles, which is heart-warmingly awesome. Coupled with the odd bout baby babble, which certainly makes a pleasant change from the constant whinging and crying, having Thing 2 in our lives is finally starting to feel like a two-way deal. Even my Dad, the bestest father and grandpa the world has ever seen (in my most biased opinion), admitted that he found babies quite dull and uninteresting until they actually gave something back1. And I can see that. Whilst I obviously love Thing 2 unconditionally, some of the early work can seem incredibly arduous and thankless when you’re dealing with an mewling, pink lump. But when you start getting reactions from them, especially ones that can be construed as positive, everything changes. It’s now a game for the whole family, a task taken on with relish by Thing 1, to try and find the stimuli that make Thing 2 smile. Is it a tickle under chin, or a rub of the forehead? Or is it entirely random? Half the fun is finding out.

So weeks six and seven are all about development. The kid’s growing (and hungry with it), but not just physically – emotionally, he’s starting to respond, and to attempt to interact with us, in his own basic way. I’m trying to appreciate these early days, where the babbling is quiet and infrequent, as if he’s anything like his big brother, we soon won’t be getting a break from his incessant jabbering, singing, joke-telling, and nonsense talking from daybreak through to the evening. Mmm, stereo babble.

  1. Sadly, my Dad didn’t make the arrival of his second grandson, passing away only a couple of months before he was born. There’s precious little that makes me more sad than the thought of Thing 1 only having had five years of his Grandpa’s time, and Thing 2 never even crossing paths with him. ↩

Child 2, Weeks 4 & 5: NOT ANY MORE

It would appear that the sole purpose of weeks one through three of a newborn’s life is to lull the unsuspecting parents that This Is How Things Are Going To Be. For the record, this isn’t how things are going to be. The rules have changed. So little Timmy-Bob slept 18 hours a day, woke only sporadically for feeding, then drifted off again for more slumber, for most of the first three weeks? NOT ANY MORE. THIS IS NOT HOW IT’S GOING TO BE FROM HERE ON IN. Aw, cute little Bimbleflop used to make that adorable little scrunched up crying face when he soiled himself whilst quietly feeding. NOT ANY MORE. HE’S GOING TO BE A CRYING, SHITTING MACHINE FROM HERE ON IN. You and Fudgella got into a nice little routine, did you, where she’d wake just once in the night, at around 4 a.m., for a nice feed, a bit of bonding time for mother and daughter, before drifting off again for three more hours? NOT ANY MORE. THAT SHIP HAS SAILED, MY FRIEND. IT’S NOW SHITTING AND CRYING AND THEN SOME MORE SHITTING FROM 3 a.m. UNTIL MIDDAY.

Yup, things change after week 3. I had the best intentions of writing a weekly update of Thing 2’s development, the highs and lows and general day-to-day life. The first three weeks were regular enough, and without too much trauma, that I found the odd hour here and there to write. NOT ANY MORE. I’m back at work now, after three weeks paternity leave, and the time I’m now at home is spent firefighting the latest arbitrary and without-precedent behavioural quirk from Thing 2. He used to love sleeping in the carrycot in the lounge. NOT ANY MORE. Despite being in the deepest of slumbers, as soon as his back touches the excessively-comfortable mattress in the base of the carrycot, that’s it, game over – it’s screaming time. It would appear that his mutant X-Man power is detecting Mamas and Papas carrycots with his back, a power of dubious merit when it comes to saving the world alongside Wolverine and Professor X, and even less so when it come to MY WIFE AND I HAVING FIVE MINUTES GODDAMN DOWNTIME IN THE EVENING.

He’s now taken to not settling after his 7 p.m. – 8 p.m. feed. Previously, he’d happily flop off after his milk, eyes rolling, tongue lolling, ready to be put down for a nice long snooze until the 11 p.m. feed. NOT ANY MORE. It’s all tears and tantrums and anger and poop (oh, so much poop). This means pacing around and shushing, hunting for a clean dummy, or making up a top-up bottle of formula, hopefully something to calm him down, or distract him long enough from his shouting so he succumbs to sleep. Given we don’t get the opportunity to get our tea until after he’s settled post-feed, it can be 9.30 p.m. or 10 p.m. before we eat. That gives us about an hour or so before the cycle starts again, with a feed, and pacing and pooping and pleading. An hour a day downtime doesn’t leave much free time, after the pots are washed, the washing’s folded, and one of us has been to the late-night Tesco for some more nappies. A quick cup of tea, maybe one of the 48 episodes of Eastenders we’ve got backlogged on the Sky+, and that’s the us-time for the day. ¡Ay caramba!.

So, in conclusion, weeks 4 and 5 are tough. You’re forced to adapt your techniques and routines to your kid’s ever-changing quirks and idiosyncrasies, in a similar fashion to having to modulate the Enterprise’s shield harmonics in response to a Borg attack. Unlike the Enterprise, though, there’s no Q to help you out in the darkest of Borg-related times. It’s just you and your Worf, sorry, wife, as much patience as you can muster, and repeated chanting of second-time parents around the world: “It’s only a phase. It’s only a phase. It’s only a phase.”

Child 2, Week 3: The Witching Hour Begins

Newborns seem to sleep almost constantly for the first couple of weeks. Sure, they wake up sporadically to feed, scream, and shit themselves, but it’s mostly sleeping, up to 16 or 18 hours a day according to the NHS. Enjoy it while it lasts, because at some point (and this point was week 3 for us) your child will become a figurative bile-spewing ball of rage from the hours of 19.00 until midnight-ish.

Yes, as sure as long, sleepless night follows weary, endless day, your child will turn into a monster in the evening. Begun, the Witching Hour has. There’s neither rhyme nor reason to the child’s ire and distress. He can be clean, well-fed, tired, and making all the right noises about wanting to be put down for a sleep, yet as soon as his head touches the mattress, his back arches, his eyes scrunch, and out bellows a cry of ear-splitting proportions that the only conclusion you can reach as to the reason for this feral howling is that someone must have just stabbed him directly in the eye with at least a couple of rusty bodkins.

He mustn’t have fed properly, you say. Let’s give him another ten minutes on the ol’ boob. He settles happily into a bonus ten minutes feeding, before flopping off quite contendedly for at least 15 seconds, before suddenly and inexplicably realising JUST HOW TERRIBLE EVERYTHING STILL IS AND HOW MUCH THIS NEEDS SCREAMING ABOUT.

Ah, must be a soiled nappy after the last, bonus feed, you naively think. A quick change later, and he seemingly happily relaxes on your lap, eyes closed, for at most twenty seconds before the grim realisation of THE HORROR OH THE HORROR OF EVERYTHING OVERWHELMS ME AND I MUST SHOUT THIS TO THE WORLD.

You work through your mental my-baby-is-crying-what-could-it-be checklist at this point. Hungry? Nope, fed and bonus fed. Dirty? Nope, changed just now. Tired? Quite obviously. Over-tired? Possibly, but there’s sod all we can do about that. Hmm, maybe it’s colic. Yes! Colic! That one-size-fits-all label that explains this terrible, terrible, occurrence. You search the medicine cabinet for something suitable. Calpol? Shit, he needs to be two months before he can take this panacea. Gripe water? Nope, needs to be a month old, and we’re only in week 3. Infacol? Yes, Infacol! Oh, medicine, how I love thee, with your combining-small-bubbles-into-bigger-bubbles-to-make-them-easier-to-burp mutant power! Swiftly, you administer the medicine, and it seems to work, temporarily. Mr. Hyde recedes, and Dr. Jekyll reappears. Things seem to be going in the right direction. His eyelids are getting heavy. His breathing settles. You decide to put him down in his crib/moses basket and utter a silent prayer to $DEITY to please let this be the day where the kid falls asleep at a time that allows you to get your tea before midnight.

You gingerly place him in his bed, tuck a blanket round him, slowly back away from the crib, leaving a lingering hand on his chest for a few moments, and whispering an ever-quieter shush, all to calmly let him know he’s not alone, he’s safe, and he should embrace the welcoming arms of sleep. You’re almost there. Your hand moves away from his chest. The shushing stops. You stand up, partner next to you, and breathe a (quiet) sigh of relief, smiling at the imminent prospect of sating your hunger with whatever reheated remnants of last night’s dinner makes up tonights feast.

But no. Life has a different plan for you, sir (or madam). Because right about now, he realises that hey, that lovely warm body I was pressed against only a few minutes ago has gone, and that scent of Mum or Dad has been replaced by the scent of the washing powder-du-jour impregnated in the crib sheets (or the smell of milk sick, cos that’s just how it happens some days when you’re just too tired to change the sheets). AND THIS IS A THING THAT MUST BE SHOUTED ABOUT, INCREASINGLY LOUDLY, AND POSSIBLY FOR A GOOD FEW HOURS.

Y’see, the Witching Hour is a problem you can’t really win. It’s Kobayashi Maru. The only thing you can do is try to limit the damage the whole escapade inflicts on you before the feral beast in front of you finally exhausts himself from five straight hours of screaming and falls asleep, legs akimbo, in some particularly inconvenient place, like in the middle of the lounge carpet, or under the dining table. You only notionally win; the victory is Pyrrhic. You scoop them up delicately, under fear of partner-inflicted death should you wake them up now they’ve finally dropped off, place them in the crib, and try (and often fail) to refrain from commenting upon how cute they are when they’re asleep. Because you know exactly how cute they didn’t look, only half an hour prior, whilst spitting and howling at you like a cornered alley cat.

And you know that, in approximately 18 hours, you’ll have it all to go through again. Reassuring yourself that it’s only a phase – it is only a phase, trust me – helps you cope to a certain extent, but the only real way to deal with the Witching Hour is grit your teeth and suffer it.

Or gin. Bottles of the stuff. Morning, noon, and night.

Child 2, Week 2: It’s all about poo

Prior to having Thing 1, some friends of ours who already had kids remarked to us that their conversations, since the arrival of their kid, were dominated by discussions of poo (to qualify, the child’s). Colour, shape, consistence, frequency, smell. Laugh at them, we did, with our naive, we-won’t-be-like-that, soon-to-be-new-parents ways. But boy, the joke was on us. There’s virtually nothing in the early days of having a baby that takes up as much of a parent’s time as faecal analysis. A newborn wends it way through a spectrum of wildly different turds, with each day seemingly heralding an exciting new plop to contend with. The early-days, black tar ones sure are fun, what with their ability to cling to a baby’s arse like, well, the proverbial to a blanket. We then get the transition through dark green (what’s with that?), to brown, to mustard yellow, replete with fake seeds. There’re colours in between that I’ve missed out, but I think that’s because I’m repressing the horror of it all.

So week 2 has been all about poos, and constitutions, and nappy rash. The transition through the array of stinky messes has brought with it a good dose of nappy rash. According to our health visitor, exclusively breast-fed babies (ahem more on that later) can have up to a dozen soiled nappies a day, which is exactly what we’re finding. The poor lad is red raw down there, necessitating the reappearance of the equal-parts awesome/awful Metanium cream, a substance that has the power to both heal the most tender of back-ends, and also to permanently stain any fingers, clothes, towels, walls, and cats that may come into even the slightest of contact with it. So the Metanium has been liberally applied, and things are improving in that area (though our fingers are now permanently yellow).

Feeding has become quite regular, too, though an apparent growth spurt towards the end of the week has meant Thing 2 is one hungry child. To sate his increasing hunger, we resorted to giving him a bottle of formula for the 23.00 feed a couple of nights (please, don’t tell the health visitor). We made up 4 fl. oz. of Aptamil, of which he took nearly three, and subsequently slept like, well, a baby, for about 4½ hours. Result. Well, almost. The formula seems to give him dodgy guts – not just the immediate increase in wind from bottle-feeding, but discomfort and gripes a few hours after the fact, too. Liberal application of Infacol seems to do the trick, but it’s not pleasant for the poor kid, and failing to get the gas out of him and his stomach settled means that he usually has a crap nap, and then before you know it YOUR WHOLE DAY IS RUINED. Standard.

So we’ve just about survived week 2, though it’s been two steps forward, and one back. Routines taking shape, poos on the change, but increased hunger sated with the odd bottle of formula has led to dodgy guts and a sore arse.

Our friends were truly right. It is all about poos. Sigh.

 

Child 2, Week 1: Survival

It’s been five long years since there’s been a newborn baby in our house. Five long years where I’ve managed to forget most everything I previously knew about having a newborn baby in our house, and that wasn’t much to start with. But boy, is it ever all flooding back.

It all started with a planned C-section on Wednesday. This one went much more smoothly than Thing 1’s emergency C-section five years prior, off the back of being two weeks overdue, and six days of failed induction. That one was not a pleasant experience – exhaustion, pain, nausea: I experienced it all (arf). This time was a much different affair. We turned up at the hospital at 7.30; by 11.30 we were the proud parents of Thing 2, a boy, and by 15.00 the following day, we were home, bundle of screaming, pooping, joy in arms.

The brain is a clever old thing. It’s got the one-up on us at all times. I have  evidence: if our brains allowed us to remember what torture it is bringing a newborn home, and the ensuing first few weeks, we’d never do it more than once. As it is, our brains subtly drop those terrible memories of sleepless nights, black tar poo, and milky vomit (oh, that smell…) from our data banks, allowing us to drift back into those first few weeks with blissful thoughts of strolls in the park with the new arrival; fun mornings at the coffee shop, tiffin and latte in hand, marvelling at how peacefully the youngling is sleeping; and gentle nights, broken every three hours or so for a gentle feed, and a peaceful return to sleep for everyone.

No. This is not what happens. No, no, a thousand times no. Don’t believe what NCT tells you. Don’t believe your friends when they tell you that “little Fifi Trixabelle slept five hours last night, woke for a 15-minute feed, then slipped right back off to sleep for another four hours,” because they’re lying to you. Maybe it’s some misguided idea that bringing up a child is a competition and that admitting that the first week or so is pure survival is some kind of weakness that makes these people trot out these nonsenses.

As for Thing 2, things started out OK. He seemed liked quite a sleepy baby, so the first 36 hours passed without much incident. There was a lot of breast-feeding, and a few dirty nappies, but no semblance of a routine – everything in the first few weeks is on-demand (I’m a big fan of routines, but the first few weeks certainly isn’t the time for that). But babies can sense complacency. They can smell it on a naive parent. Just when you think that things are going nicely, BAM, it’s sleepless nights all round. The second night of being home, Thing 2 was up from 20.00 until 23.00, then 1.00 until 4.30, and only managed three hours sleep after that. Ick. We were exhausted, but it’s important to recognise that this is to be expected in the first few weeks. Newborns don’t respect the time of day, or whether you desperately need a shower after three days of slumming it in your tracky-Bs, or please-dammit-stop-crying-whilst-I’m-on-the-crapper-this-is-all-very-off-putting.

So the first week thus far has been survival. We’ve had a couple of good nights,  where he’s slept for two three-hour chunks, with feeds at either end and in the middle of those chunks; a couple of average nights, where it’s been every couple of hours feeding; and a couple of truly terrible nights, where he’s been up for hours at a time, unconsolable from messy nappy after messy nappy (and yes, I’m so enjoying the full spectrum change of poo colours from black tar to mustard (with seeds) to salmon paste), longing for a feed.

But we’ve survived. We’ve even been out, albeit only to the supermarket (for more nappy bags, natch). And I think that’s all you can ask for in the early days. We’ve been notably less uptight with Thing 2 than we were with his older brother at the same age – a combination of perspective that this is all just a phase that will pass, and that we can’t just drop everything to pander to his whims immediately, as Thing 1 still needs taking to school, or to karate, or his book bag sorting, or his tea making etc. – with the exception of trying to shield Thing 1 one from his new younger brother’s nighttime caterwauling. One crying child in the middle of the night is bad enough. Two would be a disaster.

So, the first week in summary: newborns create a lot of noise, smells, and mess, and your life might well be bordering on the terrible for this first week. They will, however, melt your heart a thousand times when, with a clean nappy and a full belly, they nuzzle up to you whilst you’re cuddling them, or gaze up at you with slightly crossed eyes and a quizzical expression that says, “Dad, I have no idea where I am, or what’s going on, but would you mind holding me and loving me and never letting me go?” And you’ll answer yes, yes, a thousand times yes, and you’ll pull them a little closer to you with a satisfied smile on your face.