Everyday Ramblings

The day after I finished antibiotics for a possible infection on the shingles (due to me scratching) I came down with a possible chest infection so moved onto another lot of antibiotics. With that plus having to keep Thomas away from other babies for a few weeks meant we didn’t really go out much in July except for David taking Thomas out in his pushchair whilst I just caught up on clearing up, a bit of cooking and reading at home. I got my head back into web developing with refreshing my main blog (StuffBySarah) and also upgrading the plugins that I wrote. I’ve had a lot of fun with it and realised how much I’d missed just playing with code.

We’ve also had a new appointment through to finish off the process of getting Thomas’s tongue tie cut as there’s still a bit to go. So a week tomorrow we’re off to Manchester children’s hospital to see a specialist who can do the division on infants up to 16 months old, as the lady in Chester could only go up to 6 months. I’m hoping that this’ll be it. Thomas’s feeding has improved a great deal but part of me still thinks, or at least hopes, that this last bit will simply help further. He’s a lot more settled during the day but he’s still not sleeping very well, and is very restless from about 4am onwards. He’s possibly just fallen into bad habits now, but we’re working on a variety of methods to help improve his sleep.

However, sleep aside, he’s doing extremely well. He’s happily clapping at everything, sitting up quite well with just the occasional fall backwards, and reverse crawling extremely well. He’s very very close to going forwards, and can manage one ‘step’ but then he starts pushing too much with his hands and goes backwards again. That said, he is quite mobile and quick at getting around so we’re in need of moving everything out of his reach before we find the DVDs across the floor, and books out and ripped open!

We’ve chosen to do ‘Baby-led weaning’, which is the method by which you allow them to feed themselves and stop when they’re full. We don’t puree food for him, and the only food I feed him off a spoon is yoghurt (I do try to give him the spoon but he ends up wiping the yoghurt on his hand and sticking the handle in to chew/teethe on!).

He certainly seems to be enjoying his food and has so far eaten everything put in front of him (and some things that weren’t!). Strawberries seem to be a favourite, but he enjoys everything going (such as the photo above of him eating pasta and sausages).

It’s messy, that would come at some point anyway, but it’s all good fun

Recipe:
100ml Milk
75ml Natural Yoghurt
1 tablespoon Rolled Oats (not Jumbo – trust me!)
1 ripe Banana
Squeeze of runny honey (optional, but I like it)

Just put in the blender, or jug (if you only have a hand blender) and mix. Very healthy, very tasty

A little background info. The hospital dated him to be due on the 16th December, I had him down for the 18th/19th. On the 3rd (at 38 weeks and 1 day), my midwife told me his head was at the top of my pelvis ready to engage but I presumed from this it hadn’t at that point. My blood pressure was also reading higher so on the Saturday we had to take a trip into town to get it rechecked, where it was back to normal.

Saturday night / Sunday morning, I got up about 1.30am to nip to the loo. On almost leaving the bathroom I felt a slight ‘trickle’ and the first thing that crossed my mind was that I’d lost all control of my bladder (a common concern when pregnant!). I went back into the bedroom and felt it again, and told David that my waters may have broken. I laid down on a maternity mattress sheet for about 20-30 minutes. I felt slight tightening sensations in my lower back, and on getting up my pyjamas were drenched, so yep, my waters had broken!

I called the labour ward who told me to come in and see them just to be checked over. We put all the bags, car seat etc. into the boot of the car and drove the 5 minutes up the road to the hospital in a hail storm (with freezing temperatures – yay!). Got into the labour ward, where I was taken into their triage room and checked over. Blood pressure was back up (not surprised!) and as most of my waters had come out at home there wasn’t a sufficient amount for them to confirm they’d broken. As I was 11 days early and there for my first baby of course I think they were a bit wary of whether I knew if my waters had actually broken (which looking back, I was 100% sure, but it’s hard to convince some people!).

I was hooked up to a BP monitor and a constant foetal monitoring system for the next hour, lying down on a bed in triage. Around 5am I was examined and told that the baby’s head was only 2/5ths engaged and there was no dilation of my cervix yet. On examining internally they also ‘dislodged’ my ‘show’ (go look that up if you really want to know what it is!), which then made it’s way out (see, too much information!).

I can’t remember exactly when, but possibly when I got back upright again, on having a contraction it felt like my pelvis was literally going to break apart. I had suffered with SPD (pelvic girdle pain) towards the end of my pregnancy, and at first I thought it was down to this but the midwife told me that as the head wasn’t fully engaged, with every contraction the baby was getting pushed down my pelvis, and that it was would ease off once he was engaged. I was given 2 paracetamol (wohoo!) and told to return at 11.30am for another BP check, or earlier if the pain got worse. We also put the TENs machine on that a friend had lent me before leaving.

So we drove back home, and I tried to go back to bed, propped up by several pillows. But with every contraction the pain was horrific. I don’t know if the TENs machine helped, however I do know that it at least took my mind off things ever so slightly! By about 7am I decided to try a bath, as everyone had told me about the amazing way water relieved pain. I also called my parents to let them know what had happened, but after a couple of contractions and me asking my Mum if it was normal to feel this much pain before labour had actually started she told me no and to get back to hospital.

So back up, dressed and David called for a taxi this time as I didn’t think I should drive us. Around 8am, before leaving the house, I had a mild contraction, plus the pelvis pain, and suddenly the urge to push (a bizarre feeling!). This is when I started to get a little scared as I was still getting pelvis pain so surely the head wasn’t fully engaged, which I didn’t think was normal full stop, let alone for a first pregnancy.

The taxi never showed up and by 8.30am we gave up waiting and I just said I would drive. I’d worked out I was having contractions about every 3 minutes so I got into the drivers seat, started the car and waited for a contraction. I got through it (TENs machine still on), gave the TENs booster button to David to click when the next one came on, and drove. I got past the two roundabouts before getting onto the straight road up to the hospital, put the car in cruise control right before the next contraction hit. It had gone before I had to use the pedals again so pretty well timed (note, there was no one on the roads as it was early on a Sunday morning, and if I’d felt I was a danger to anyone then I would have pulled over as it was a wide enough road to do so!).

We got back into the labour ward and straight back into triage. The shift change had happened so there were new midwifes on. Again back on the monitors and back on my back (the worst position to be in), but this time in a major amount of pain with my pelvis. I had so many wires over me, relying solely on the TENs machine to try and help ease the pain I was in, and started to get scared about what was going on. The previous midwife had said to me before we left that she reckoned they could probably say my waters had broken, however she never wrote this in my notes, so the new midwife again tried to check from a maternity pad and decided that it was just ‘wet show’.

They checked to see where the baby’s head was and it was 4 to 5 fifths engaged, so still not fully, plus she said that he wasn’t completely back to front, slightly to the side which was another worry. I told her how I’d wanted to push and she told me not to (easier said than done!). I then laid there for what seemed like hours whilst they monitored me. At about 10am they took me off the monitors and asked me to give them a urine sample. On standing up, a contraction hit and gravity took over. The pain in my pelvis was immense and I had to do everything in my power not to push. By this point, in tears, I told them I had to push. They got me to lie back down and examined me internally. Seconds later I heard ‘I can see the baby’s head crowning’, ‘Sarah, you’re fully dilated! We’d best get you into a delivery room!’.

So, here I was thinking I was no where near the start of established labour as I’d been led to believe the baby’s head wasn’t engaged and my pelvic pain would stop once it was, to in fact I’d gone through the whole of the first phase with 2 paracetamol and a TENs unit, oh and gritted teeth!

I walked (somehow, I really don’t know how now!) into a delivery room two doors down and finally got into the position I wanted on the bed, leaning over the back of the bed, and FINALLY got some gas and air (Entinox)! Plus I was now allowed to actually push which came with each contraction. I still had the pain in my pelvis and I still don’t know if it was from the SPD or not, but to be honest I didn’t care. At least I now realised that I had been in labour and wasn’t quite so scared anymore.

It took about an hour for the delivery. Unfortunately I’d forgotten everything I’d read about how to avoid tears etc. and after the midwife told me to ‘push through’ the burning sensation that you feel when the head comes out (and boy did it sting!), plus when the head started to come out with a contraction and then stopped midway, I didn’t come off the gas and air (which I should have), took too much in and blacked out briefly. On coming to it felt very surreal and all I could feel was the burning sensation and one thought came into my head, push through it, but I should have waited for the next contraction to do so and as I didn’t I had 3rd degree tears.

Thomas was born at about 11.20am (11.31am is recorded, but David said it was earlier) on the 5th December 2010. He weighed in at 6lb 12.5oz, and didn’t look battered and bruised considering he came down the birth canal. Due to my tears, I was then taken off to have surgery, plus I had to have a spinal anaesthetic (frustrating after going through the birth without painkillers besides those 2 paracetamol). It was quite hard to go through this. We’d just had a baby (a shock in itself despite the 9 months of waiting!), we’d had him 11 days early (a major shock, even though we knew it was a possibility, you still don’t think it’ll happen!), and suddenly I was taken away from both him and David for about an hour and left feeling quite alone, tired and completely shell shocked.

After the surgery I was taken into the recovery room. Thomas was brought in to me (taken away from David, and David now left all alone – not the best part of this day), but he was left in a cot next to me instead of given to me, which frustrated me a bit (especially as I couldn’t sit up and get him), especially when he started crying and the midwives in there just ignored him until I started too (hormones!) and one of them clocked what needed to be done!

Finally I was taken up to the maternity ward and into their observation section where David joined me again. I was kept there for about 6 hours until the spinal had wore off and I could walk again. Then around 9pm I was allowed to go to my own room and thankfully David was allowed to stay (they even gave him a recliner chair to sleep in!), and we stayed in hospital for 2 nights until they were happy that my aftermath was all okay and healing as expected.

So labour was fairly textbook, if you read the book quickly, it’s just a shame that no one believed I was in labour! At the time we were both quite unhappy about the lack of care and support provided by the midwives on the labour ward, but it’s easy to look back now and simply find the funny points (like having a contraction whilst driving to hospital!). Of course the outcome was worth all of this ten times over and yes, I’d go through it again for him

Already in the garden are strawberry plants, raspberry canes and a gooseberry bush. I planted out garlic back in October/November time too. We now also have potatoes, peas, carrots, lettuce, rhubarb (already had some of this in Easter), fine beans and tomatoes. I just hope that we get some decent weather to get some good fruit, veg and salad this year, especially as by the time it all starts to ripen, Thomas will be onto solids and will be able to try the various foods straight out the garden

Eventually, after a feed, a lot of singing (he likes Nellie the Elephant!), and a cheapo 60′s style dummy from the hospital shop, he finally calmed down and fell asleep. We then took advantage of him in his quiet/drowsy state and had the remainder dealt with quickly (although he still woke up but he was a bit less wriggly!).

He calmed down quite quickly after that, slept in the car on the way home and then fed and napped at home. At that point it didn’t seem like much had changed, although he wasn’t fighting the feeds so much. However from Saturday morning, he started to feed for England! We’ve averaged about 12 feeds a day (usually every 2 hours, sometimes every hour to compensate for a bit of sleep!) and he’s not screamed or pushed me away since. He does have a bit of a gripe if he has wind or is tired, but otherwise it’s a lot calmer and easier, and I look forward to feeding (well I do in the day, I wouldn’t mind a bit of sleep still!). He even has a big grin on his face when he knows he’s about to be fed, which is amazing to see

He had a 100% tongue-tie and his frenulum was quite thick too. It still annoys me that no-one picked up on it sooner, and also that my own stubborness, perserverance and lack of realising meant that I just put all of his feeding problems down to wind. I feel like we’re having to start all over again now, get him used to feeding, get him used to taking more milk in and therefore reducing the number of feeds a day, and hopefully get him back to have a decent sleep. Yes, in part that’s selfish as I want some sleep, but also because he’s still agitated and unsettled during a lot of the day, as he’s just not getting his full requirement of sleep each day.

However, one step at a time. His feeding is doing fantastic, and that’s a major step

The change happened over night. At first I thought it was because we’d just got back from a week away with a lot of travelling involved, but after a week I figured it could be down to his 3 and 4 month growth spurts, perhaps some growing pains. However, he’s still not settled back into his old sleeping routine.

After a bit of research on a few forums I saw a couple of suggestions to people about the latch and also the potential for the baby having a tongue-tie (where the frenulum between the tongue and the bottom of the mouth is too short to allow the tongue to move as freely as it should). I looked at photos online, looked at Thomas, and looked into lots more info on the subject and came to the conclusion that he may have one. So when we next took him to the doctors for a checkup, I mentioned it to her, that he didn’t stick his tongue out, that he constantly suffered from wind, especially at night. She commented that it was too early for a baby to be sticking their tongue out (despite me seeing at least two of the same age do so). She checked him, said he was fine.

So I figured it was just something that would start to right itself. They say that the wind that babies get should start to ease between 4 and 6 months, as they get more active. I just hoped it was sooner rather than later, for both our own sleep deprived sanity, and for Thomas, who would often spend up to an hour screaming in pain after his 2am (ish) feed, and often after at least one other night feed

Then last Tuesday’s events turned around for very much the better. I occasionally go to a baby cafe with a friend, and when I mentioned to her about my thoughts on him having a tongue-tie she told me to speak to the breastfeeding peer support lady who would be there that day. In a nutshell, after a quick chat and a check of Thomas, she confirmed he had a tie and that she could arrange for a referral to a local hospital to get it dealt with.

Looking back over the last 4 and a bit months, I realise now that a lot of the signs were there.

• When he was born he wouldn’t latch on. Quite common from what I understand, and it took us several attempts to get him to start to feed without us needing help from the midwives.
• For the first couple of weeks at least, when I would try to feed him it’d take up to 30 minutes to get him feeding. He’d often spend a lot of the time banging his head against me. At the time I thought it was wind, now I realise it may have been down to frustration at not being able to latch on.
• Since he was 5 weeks old we’ve spent most evenings with him suffering from severe wind. From 5-13 weeks he would cluster feed at night and at least an hour would be spent with him crying and screaming (not colic as we could calm him down, until I would try to feed and he would try to latch on, slip off and then scream again).
• Also since early to mid January, during the day I’ve found that at times he would appear hungry, but on trying to feed he would just start crying, and push me away. Yet with a bit of calming with a finger in his mouth, or a dummy (as much as I hate using one, it calms him down quickly), he’ll then often feed. Almost as if you’re reminding him how to suck.
• When he was little he would poke his tongue to the front of his mouth but no further. We’ve never seen him stick his tongue out.
• Finally, his weight gain has slowed over the last 2 months, although we only realised this on Thursday when I read through his charts. The health visitors recording the weight didn’t spot that he’d jumped down a line on the graph.

I realise that it’s not always easy to spot a tongue-tie, and because he appeared to be feeding okay, putting weight on etc. then no one questioned if there was a problem, and his constant crying before and after feeds, wind etc. we assumed was possibly normal. It’s quite draining and upsetting though, being screamed at several times a day for trying to feed your baby It’s also hard being out and about and worrying about whether he would ‘play ball’ with his next feed and not have a screaming session first (I’ve never been one to want too much attention drawn to me!).

However, my friend, who I go to the baby cafe with, did happen to spot and mention a possibly tongue-tie when Thomas was just 5 weeks old. I didn’t know much about it then, but why didn’t the GP spot this at his 6 week checkup the following week? Or the other GP check properly when I mentioned it, and realise that it was there and causing him a potential problem? It’s very frustrating that this could have been picked up sooner and dealt with a lot quicker.

Finally, to add injury to insult, yesterday we had to taken Thomas in to see his GP (the one who did the 6 week checkup), as he’s been suffering with a cold this week and we’d just wanted some advice over the phone, but the GP insisted on seeing him and checking him over. David happened to mention that his weight gain had dropped and he said that if it dropped further, we would need to top up his feeds with formula. I explained that he had a tongue-tie, that this was most likely the reason behind him not feeding so efficiently, and that I could express milk and feed that to him without a problem, yet he still persisted on suggesting to feed him formula. He even commented saying how breastfeeding was nothing to be proud about, it’s done around the world every day.

Yet I never made a comment to attract these opinions and comments, besides saying we’d rather not give Thomas formula if we can help it. However, his comments and opinions really felt a bit like he was saying big deal. I’m not about to ask for a badge or certificate that says, yay, I’ve managed to breastfeed my son for 19 weeks so far. I know there are a lot of other women out there that successfully manage it, so it’s nothing new. I also know of some people who couldn’t breastfeed, and actually have a lot of work to do with formula feeding. Not all formula fed babies go for 4 feeds a day and sleep through the night (like one I know!), some feed more often than breast fed babies (another I know of!). So I actually think that any parent that manages to feed and raise a baby should be proud of themselves. It’s not always an easy job.

I can see now, in hindsight, that maybe we have had it harder than most, but that’s not occurred to me until now. Thomas hasn’t suffered from colic (constant screaming/crying for using 3+ hours, pretty much every night of the week up until around 3 months), he’s a fairly chilled out baby (when he’s not feeding!) and for everything else, we’ve had it pretty easy with him. But the feeding has been hard work, that we’ve just dealt with and got on with it, and so I don’t care what any GP says. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far, just as any parent should be.

We’re just waiting on the referral to be dealt with and a date for the hospital to come through. It’s a quick operation to release the tie, and hopefully it’ll mean he can feed like he’s never fed before (!), and he’ll be more settled and suffer less. Here’s hoping

I’d asked the community health nurse, who came for Thomas’s 12-16 week visit, about infant resuscitation courses, as we’ll be starting him on solids at 6 months and naturally want to ensure we know what to do in the event of choking on some food, or of course anything he can grab once he starts to crawl (which will ideally be nothing of danger, but they always find something you’ve missed!). So I got booked onto this 2 hour class, which went through resuscitation for adults, children and babies, plus dealing with choking, cuts, injuries and burns.

I certainly feel a lot more confident in saving someone’s life now, so job done

My waters broke at 1.30am, on December 5th, but as I was a first time mum, 2 weeks early, and lost pretty much all the waters before I got to hospital, it seemed like no one believed me, or should I say, trusted me to know my waters had gone. So the labour wasn’t the best experience as I was kept on my back in triage for all of stage one, with just a TENs unit to help with the pain relief. It wasn’t until I was almost begging to be allowed to push that they checked me and discovered I was about to deliver. Less than an hour later along came Thomas

10 hours from start to finish. It probably would have been sooner had I been left to follow my own plan. But, he arrived safely and that’s the main thing