Like a light going on.

The sleep thing? He’s figured it out (touch wood).  Just like the penny dropped, he’s suddenly become totally OK about ditching his swaddle and sleeping in a gro-bag.  OK about being put down, OK about dropping off to sleep, OK about sleeping, about going back down after a feed, the whole thing just shifted. They’re incredible, contrary little beings, aren’t they?

More food-related posting tomorrow.

vee xxx (off to touch more wood)

Food, glorious food!

Firstly, thanks for the commenty reassurance on our last post. We’ve ordered a new grobag, and are sure they’re the way forward!  Existere, we tried your idea, but our little Houdini managed to bust out within about 2 seconds. Now, he is asleep in his grobag, snoring loudly.

NO, WE DON’T UNDERSTAND IT EITHER. BUT WE ARE HAPPY!

Moving onto food, the Baby Led Weaning way. I’m not sure where to start! Maybe with the fear? Choking. As Whozat said, “Gagging is how they learn NOT to choke. It’s scary at first (and second, and…) but they’re in no danger.”

I suppose when you get used to it, it gets a lot easier. The first couple of times BB gagged were a bit scary, but when we learned that he could sort himself out (and if we decided to interfere by sticking our fingers in his mouth, that would NOT HELP because we would push stuff to the back of his throat or something), we kind of decided to trust him. It got easier from then on. Along the way, someone said, “Trust your child. They know what they’re doing.”  At first, that seemed insane… then we realised it was true. If we look freaked out when BB’s gagging, he’ll think there’s something to worry about, and then HE will freak out too. So, we just grin inanely while saying silent prayers. And it works.

The difference between gagging and choking? When babies gag, it’s obvious – they cough and you can see they’re having trouble with something in their mouth.  When they choke, though, they go quiet, with a panicked expression. Kids of any age can gag or choke anyway so it’s important not to leave them alone when they’re eating. We’ve also got a kids’ first aid book and have looked up choking, just to be on the safe side.

As for allergies, part of the point of BLW is that you start at 6 months, when the risk of allergies has gone down. The whole allergy alert thing was designed for people who feed their babies at 4 months – by the time they’re 6 months old, their digestive tracts should be developed, so if there are no history of allergies in their families, you don’t need to worry.

Before I start to sound like some kind of goverrnmental health campaigner, I’ll move on to food..!

As we found out this week, polenta is a perfect BLW food. I made some polenta fritters and cut one into long sticks for BB, which he relished, and there were definitely no choking worries because it was just made of cornmeal. Woo! Cucumber is also another good one – easy to cut into sticks and good for  teething gums (I read that somewhere), as is cooked courgette (zucchini) – both of which BB loves. In fact, I don’t think there’s much we wouldn’t try giving BB. I’m convinced that his shocked reaction to stuff with chill in it has been down to the “Surprise! It’s Spicy!” factor- how do you explain to a baby that his food will make his tongue tingle?  You can’t, but when they get used to it, it’s fine.

It’s brilliant to see him enjoying his food, sitting at the table with us.  Sometimes he really goes for it, and tries everything indiscriminately. Yeah, it’s messy, but if you embrace the mess, you’re OK.

It’s also amazing how strong his gums are!  No teeth, no problem.  Seriously, if we take a bite out of an apple or a pear, he’ll get real excited and gum the rest down to pulp. It’s fascinating!

One of the other best things about BLW is that it EASY. We don’t have to rely on it because BB’s still having all of his milk feeds as usual, so if he’s grumpy and throws his food on the floor, no problem. Also, we just give him food when we’re eating (off our plates if we’re eating out, or out of our pans if we’re at home) and keep BB-friendly snacks in the fridge. We don’t need to puree, so if we cook a bit of extra roasted veg – cut into sticks – for example, we can throw them in the fridge and bring them out the next day.

We’re not the world’s healthiest eaters, but we do cook mostly from scratch and BB can eat most of what we have (admittedly, his diet is healtheir than ours!)… except chocolate. I’m sure he wonders why his mums keep eating that brown stuff and not offering him any. We’re enjoying it until he starts demanding SAME AS MUMMIES!

So, hooray for BLW!

xx jay

Can’t live with it; can’t live without it.

I feel kind of bad, blogging for help about our sleep issues when I know others are having some MAJOR sleep problems, but BB’s having a real hard time transitioning from swaddle to sleep sack and we could really use some IVP expertise.

His love affair with the swaddle is fading fast, but he’s far from falling head over heels for any replacement.

Previously, we’d swaddle him, he’d calm straight down, sometimes even dropping off whilst we were still wrapping him, most times lying peacefully with his head facing the wall until he drifted off minutes later. No crying, no problems, a good, solid 8-10 hours sleep (barring any dodie-replacements), a feed, then another couple of hours before getting up. Lucky us, hey? We kept that one quiet, for fear of hate mail!

These days, he’ll mostly still happily submit to being swaddled and will usually still drop off ok, but he’ll wake after an hour or two and bust right out of his swaddle and thrash around for a bit, crying until I soothe him or feed him, re-wrap him and off he drifts again. Rinse and repeat all night long. Apart from the whole awake half the night thing, it’s also been stressing us that he’s in the cot with blankets – the swaddles we have are muslin (thanks again, Michelle and Jen!); brilliant but not warm enough on their own for our chilly Autumn nights. When he’s immobilised, it’s not a concern, but once he  frees his arms and starts rolling over, it’s a worry, even if we should be past worrying about blankets now he’s bigger, I don’t know.

We’ve tried him in his gro-bag with limited success. If we put him down in it, he doesn’t settle well and will chatter and scoot around his cot for ages, eventually losing his dodie over the side and crying. If we go with the swaddle first off, then, when he busts his swaddle, switching him over to the gro-bag, we have the same unsettled cycle starting up.

On occasion now though, he’s starting to resist being swaddled at all, which leads us to think we’d better address this properly, before we’re well and truly screwed.  We’ve started using the gro-bag more consistently for day time naps, in the hope it’ll get him used to it, but all that seems to have done is cock up his napping, reducing it from two hours to 30-40 mins and resulting in a grumpy, tired boy.

So, what to do? Go cold-turkey with the gro-bag and ditch the swaddle, put up with crap sleep for I don’t know how long in the hope he gets it eventually? Look into more serious swaddling techniques to make sure he just can’t bust out? Invest in an alternative type of swaddle/sack? Just put him down in a fleece babygrow (footed sleeper/blanket sleeper)? What kind of temperature should we be aiming at keeping the room at for any of these options? (It’s currently around 16-18C but can dip lower if it’s a cold night).

Help? We feel oddly lost on this one.

vee xxx

PS: jay will blog more about BLW tomorrow –  in the meantime, she wants me to point out that the wholegrain mustard sarnie also had cheese in it. Just so you know!

Loving BLW

I’m too grumpy to post. Tired, that’s why. So here’s something I made earlier and we forgot to post (i.e. it is now out of date, but who cares – I guess there are limits to food geekery?) – a pretty list of some of the foods that BB’s tried in their original, non pureed, forms thus far:

We’re loving baby led weaning! Who knows – we might even say something intelligent about it tomorrow. In the meantime, if anyone has any questions about how it feels to smile fakely while you watch your baby gag, fire away.

xx jay

PS: Thank you, Wordle, for making this post possible(!)

Tell me something I DIDN’T know!

Lesbians make better parents.

That’s all I have today.

vee xxx

Eight months old.

Hey, Snotty Nose!

Today you are eight months old.  To celebrate that incredible milestone, you have a VERY SNOTTY NOSE, which I keep wiping, much to your utmost disgust. Like all other children on the face of this planet, you HATE having your nose wiped. Well, I’m sorry but we have to do wiping, and you know why… because it helps us to breathe, that’s why. You also seem to be teething, which isn’t fun at all. Poor you!

We were wrong that your first sight would be TOAST. It was FINISHED! [Of course I filmed it! I am Geek Mummy!] We were SO proud and excited to see you do that. How very practical, too..!

You’ve started to try and pull yourself up on things, but haven’t quite got there yet, and have just worked out how to stick your tongue out, which is providing you with a lot of entertainment; us too.

This month, however, your favourite thing seems to be noise. When you’re not doing shouting – plenty of it, loudly – you’re shaking things that rattle and bashing other things together to make them clack. As I type this, you’re shaking your rabbit with a rattle in its tummy AND shouting for good measure.

The cat is horrified by all of this and is currently squeezed on top of the Sky box, glaring at you – nothing new.  Your Mummy Vee and I don’t mind at all, though.  We think it’s so cute that when you shake things, you have to wave both your hands even if you’re only holding something in one hand, because you haven’t worked out how solo hand movements go yet. Bless.

I’m hard pressed to think of my favourite thing about you at the moment, but it’s probably how your hair is so long that it actually covers about an inch of your ears – or it would if it was darker and we didn’t push it behind them, but anyway, SO cute.

Love you the world over!

xxxx mummy jay

Stupid question #2

Ok, so the first night with BB in his own room was not so bad. I can see how this new arrangement could be good. I mean, I didn’t actually get much more sleep last night than I did when he was in with us, but I could have done. I could have done if I hadn’t been lying awake wondering whether he’d choked on his dummy. Or strangled himself with his swaddle. Or suffocated on his little quilt. Or simply just stopped breathing.

On the plus side, when I did hear him stir a couple of times, I didn’t feel the same urge to leap straight out of bed and over to his cot. I left him to it and good job too, because he settled himself straight back off to sleep without my interference. Which makes me feel pretty stupid for all the leaping I’ve been doing these past 8 months.

And now you’re wondering how the hell I heard him stir in the first place, right? What do you mean, I’m not supposed to have the baby monitor right next to me on the bedside table? It defeats the point of the exercise? Mmm, yeah, maybe. I mean, it’s not like we live in a mansion. He’s no more than 10 steps away, bedside to cotside. I’ll hear him ok without the monitor, right? Right?

vee xxx

The nursery and the nursery

I just realised that when I said we would be posting about nursery,  the non-Brits who read this would think I meant BB’s bedroom, which is what vee blogged about last night anyway.  I didn’t – I meant nursery as in daycare, i.e. the place where you leave your kid for X number of hours while you do other stuff like go to work or clean your crazily dishevelled house. (See!  We aren’t as organised as you might think we are!)

ANYWAY.  I just wanted to say that we’ll be looking around a couple of nurseries next week so that BB can go in a couple of times a week and we can do the above mentioned other stuff. It’ll be good for us and – most importantly – good for him, because he will get to realise there’s a world outside our house and things like that. The two nurseries we managed to get appointments for are looking good, too, as one of them is attended by kids from at least two two-mummed families, and while we don’t yet know if this is also true of the other one, it strongly advocates outside play, and as we’re fans of fresh air, that suits us fine.

We’ll see.

I am quite sure BB will be fine – it’s me I’m worried about … we haven’t left him with many people to date.  We’ve done it twice, in fact; when we went for a date when he was asleep, and a couple of weeks ago when we left him with vee’s mum and I broke into a totally irrational cold sweat when she took him round to see her neighbour and was gone for more than, oh, about 45 seconds. I need to get a grip, I know.

So lets move on and admire my handiwork, as I put up BB’s cot in his room – HIS ROOM! – this evening, watched patiently by the lad himself. In fact, lets go the whole hog, totally copy K, and admire his entire bedroom (or nursery, if you are so inclined).  I hereby present a panoramic view, excluding the door and window, in case you were wondering(!)

He’s in there right now, asleep. On his own. For the first time.

Eek. I know it was the right thing to do, and he will be fine.

But, eek.

xx jay

The end of an era

Tomorrow, BB will be moving into his own room. I mean, I know it’s not like he’s leaving home or anything, but the thought makes us both a little sad, nevertheless.

He’s roomed in with us from birth – first in his moses basket, then his crib and now his giant cot that takes up lots of room and causes poor jay to stub her toe or bark her shin on the end of the bed as she squeezes round to her side.  We decided early on that co-sleeping wasn’t going to work out for us, but we’ve loved having our boy right next to us through the night.

And now it’s time to move on, we think.  It seems that we’re disturbing him regularly when we retire for the night and sometimes again during the night when one of us needs to go and pee.  A waking usually means a quick feed to help get him off to sleep again, which is no huge thing (lucky us), but once you couple those extra night-feeds in with the fact that he needs dodie-replacement services several times a night (due to being swaddled) and his new determination to swaddle-bust at all costs unless he’s super tired that’s a whole lot of fidgeting and restlessness and in-and-out-of-bedding and unnecessarily early mornings.

Also, I’m a mother hen, I know, and some nights every stir and moan and shuffle and sigh has me on edge. I lie awake wondering if he’s going to drift off again peacefully or if he’s going to wake up fully and whether there’s any anything I could or should do to promote the former and prevent the latter.

People, I feel like a total heel moaning about the fact that my sleeping baby’s noisy sighing is keeping me awake when I know that so many of you are dealing with major sleep issues right now, but we’re both getting really tired.

We’re really hoping that moving him to his own room will help him sleep better, undisturbed by noisy mothers with weak bladders, will help me sleep better, tuned out a little further from his nocturnal rustling and will help jay sleep better, no longer lurched out of sleep by her demented, neurotic wife leaping in and out of bed every five minutes.

Still, we’ll miss him.

vee xxx

working from home… and other stories

Thank you all so much for the brilliant advice on our Bedding Issues!!  We had no idea that the “pram suit” we own is actually a “footed fleece sleeper”.  Well, blow me.  Heh.  So that is another thing to put on the To Do list – empty the box of clothes which are the next size up, and experiment with the pram suit footed fleece sleeper. Oh and buy another grobag.

Random Things That You Learn As A Parent:

1)  Only very few people use blankets for babies – everyone else uses giant babygros with fleece.

2) Nobody told us that you have to empty boxes of clothing like, every 3 weeks, and wash 40 new garments, categorise and part with another 40, and then umm, acquire or buy MORE, to put in the box at the top of the baby’s wardrobe, so that 3 weeks later you can do the whole thing all over again because your baby grows and grows and grows. Am I weird to find it stressful?!

Random Things That You Learn As A Homeworking Parent:

1) Trying to do the above clothing dance is near impossible, and you will end up with a huge pile of too-small clothes in one corner, a box of becoming-too-small clothes at the top of the wardrobe, and a child who is really a bit too big for many of the items he wears, however much you kid yourself otherwise.

Yes, we work from home.  I do full time, while vee gets to leave the house to work sometimes. We provide certain online services which usually have tight deadlines and short attention-requirements, which means we can usually BB-swap and shuffle quite well.  When vee leaves the house I either watch him sleep via a webcam while I work in the next room, or abandon any attempts to work, rescue our awake boy and do mummy type things.

It’s great for many reasons, but sometimes it leads to complete disarray. Like at the moment. For reasons too boring and complicated to explain, my desk is hidden beneath piles and piles of books and whatnot, and our office is a temporary home to too many random items which need permanence elsewhere in our house (or outside it, for that matter). Like a sofa bed, for example. And a huge blue screen with the main aim of annoying me by threatening to fall on top of our desks, or actually doing so.

And in my opinion, a cluttered workspace is a cluttered mind.

So in the next few days, we will be decluttering our home and clothing our baby. Oh, and working sometimes.

Fun.

Tomorrow, we will post about nursery.

xx jay

Dumb question

Ok, I know everyone is snowed under with trying to keep up their own NaBloPo tally and by reading everyone elses posts, let alone finding time to comment, but I have a dumb question for you all…

If your child is not swaddled and not in a grobag type thing, what kind of sheets/blankets do you use, when can you stop worrying about suffocation or strangulation with said sheets/blankets and how the hell do you keep the damned child under them, where it’s warm?

Until we’ve figured this one out, he’s back in the swaddle! It’s true you can’t do them too tight, right?

vee xxx

swaddling suckage.

In a nutshell: BB has decided he has had enough of the swaddle.  However, in a display of Fickle which provided a terrifying glimpse of what he’ll be like as a teenager, he cannot sleep without it.

So we have brought out the grobags, resulting in BB having a grand total of 40 minutes’ nappage today; by which point he has usually had 3-4 hours’ worth.

Any sleepvice for baggy-eyed mummies and cranky teenage baby gratefully received!

xx jay

Fail

Yeah, ok, so we didn’t get a post up yesterday. Only a week in and we’re NaBloPoMo failures. I can live with that.

We DID manage to get BB to his very first Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night fireworks display though, despite shitty weather and Extreme Tiredness (ours, not his). Did he enjoy it? No, he slept through it!! Well, he slept through the display for kids, anyway. We whisked him off before the really loud ones got going and stopped on the hillside on the way home in the car and watched them from a safe-for-the-ears distance. He did wake up for those and got wide-eyed with awe before dropping off again on the drive back.

Today we’d having visitors over for Sunday lunch and birthday cake. I’m a great believer in extended birthdays!

More later (in the spirit of catching up).

vee xxx

Happy birthday, vee!

Dear vee / mummy vee,

Today’s the day you were born, a long time ago
And we thought it’d be nice to write you a poem
To wish you a very happy birthday indeed
Does it matter that our poem isn’t very good?
No, we didn’t think it would.

Because you are nice and you’ll smile and say
“How lovely! Ha ha!” anyway,
So we wish you a very, very, very
Happy birthday!

All our love,

jay and bonus ball xxxx

mine host

Today, we hosted our local lesbian parents meet.

Yes, we voluntarily opened our clean and tidy house to maybe a dozen adults and their queerspawn. It’s the only time we’ve ever been on time for one of these gatherings and it was fun. Despite the mess.

See, now that last sentence makes me sound like some kind of neat-freak and truly, I’m not; neither of us are, but holy hell, I had no idea how much havoc a bunch of preschoolers could unleash within a confined space in such a short period of time! They got crumbs in places I’d have confidently said they couldn’t possibly reach. They spread more toys across the floor than I thought we even had. And practically every piece of left over food was unsalvageable because it had one or two teeny tiny bites out of it before being abandoned. Ah, but they were super cute and they had a great time and we got to chat to our friends and scoff whatever goodies the kids hadn’t got their hands on – what could be better. We’re totally up for doing it again soon.

Oh and as an extra bonus they all sang happy birthday to me and the kids helped me blow out my candles too, which was sweet. It’s not my birthday until tomorrow, but hey, any excuse for extra cake, right?

vee xxx

Sleepless

This NaBloPoMo thing is hard; my brain currently feels like a sponge, and while I have quite a few things I’d like to blog about (and another 20-odd days to blog about them! woo!), right now, all I want to do is sleep.

As I told someone the other day, I think the number one rule to being a parent is: Sleep As Much As Possible.

Sigh.

So, in the absence of energy, I suggest that anyone who’s seeking entertainment (here? surely not!) plays this game – one of my all time favourites.  As I would say to BB, it’s very, very good for ladies – and probably men too.

//mindless ramble censored//

Thank you and goodnight.

xx jay

whirlwind

Apparently, I’ve just been tasked to do the world’s quickest blog post, in order that I can get the washing up done before sitting down for some much needed telly time with my sweet wife. Naturally, as soon as I was set this task, my thoughts scattered to the four winds and I am now scratching around for something to post about. I suspect you’l be getting a lot more of that this month. With a bit of luck, you’ll all be too busy writing posts of your own for the NaMo challenge that you’ll never find the time to make it over here anyway.

With time so short, I’ll just share with you the fact that I am very grateful my child has no teeth yet. But dear, sweet Lord, he can gum hard. I swear he almost drew blood when feeding earlier. I live in fear.

Oh, and the people who came looking for advice about infants peeing all over the bed – I’m sorry, I only have experience of puke (see point 7). I don’t have anything to say about XXX boob pressing either, but I’m kind of intrigued.

vee xxx

Is it Monday?

It feels like Friday. No, not in that “hooray! it’s the weekend!” kind of way… more the “OMG I can’t believe it’s only Monday. I’m knackered already!” kind of way.

But it’s all good, I suppose. I’ve just come back from boxing (Yes. I box. I was coerced into it by another lesbian mummy, if you must know, and it’s great fun!) and am half watching a programme about fish, while vee is working in the kitchen.

Somehow, today the three of us managed to cram in visiting with vee’s parents, driving 100 miles home, working, walking the dog, boxing and – um – a spot of Christmas shopping. So that is why I am knackered already… the reason vee is working at nearly 10pm is because some of our clients are, ahem, rather demanding, and I’m totally demanding-client-ed out already.

This week we are hosting our lesbian parents group meet, too. I’m quite excited about that, though my main concern is what happens when the three year olds get bored of running from room to room and playing with the stuff on our hall table (because, for some reason, our humble hall table is of irresistible interest to all the three year olds who’ve been here)?  Yes, we have some colouring books, paper, pens and toys and stuff for them, but not a lot.

Any tips for quick entertainment fixes for under fives would be gratefully received! Preferably not involving paint, though.

We said we’d do NaBloPoMo. We didn’t say we’d make our blog unmissable reading.

xx jay

Token post…

So yes, NaBloPoMo has started, and we haven’t got our badge up or anything like that.  We haven’t even done a proper blog post – this cannot possibly count – but this IS a post, so it counts for NaBloPoMo.

Um, yeah.

I would type more mindless meanderings but we are literally heading out of the door to go and see vee’s parents.

More tomorrow (!)

xx jay

Almost NaMoPoBloWhatsit time again….

….and yep, we’re in. We figure our blogging could do with a bit of a jumpstart. I do, however, anticipate plenty of this kind of thing being posted. Is that cheating? Regardless, those kids in the article? How shocked to they look to have found out how old their dad REALLY is? Cute!

Not as cute at this though, natch!

vee xxx