Tuesday 28 May

Blog Every Day in May - Bad advice

After a lovely sunny Bank Holiday, the weather has turned appropriately grey for returning back to work while the kids have their half-term holiday. Much as I enjoy having them home, it is always a struggle to get everything done and you feel nothing gets done as well as it should do. Fortunately it's only two days as I have a day off this week as well.

Bad advice... it's not really bad advice as such but some words which were meant to be useful but weren't at all at the time. As I've mentioned on this blog before, my son was a hefty 11lbs at birth. The labour itself went well, his birth was a little hairy and he entered the world looking rather purple, but he was fine and soon recovered. I'll never know if it was because he was a big baby or whether I was more confident, but we took to breastfeeding much more easily than I'd done with my first born. He had a good feed pretty soon after he was born and all seemed to be plain sailing. As with most new mums, I was feeling a little fragile on day three and four, when the first excitement of having a newborn again was beginning to wane, everything was aching, lack of sleep was taking its toll and baby decided to feed All.The.Time. We chose that day to have one of our first visitors, who actually was a lovely person, but when I told her how much he was feeding, she said 'yes, that's boys for you, always hungry, always feeding, you'd better get used to it'. I had to choke back the tears - yes I was feeling a bit emotional, but I was used to my easy-going little girl, had no idea what it was like to have a boy, and he was feeding a lot and he was a big boy... Of course you ask visitors if they want to hold your precious bundle of joy but when she left, all I could do was sob 'my baby smells of her perfume'. I can laugh about it now but it seemed like the end of the world at the time.

Enter my lovely midwife, who'd guided me through both my pregnancies and delivered first born (she was on leave during second born's birth or she'd have delivered him too). She took one look at me, one look at the baby, asked if he was feeding all the time and I burst into tears as I nodded. 'Perfectly normal, he's stimulating your milk supply, he'll settle down in a couple of days'. Which was, of course, exactly what he did.

I still bump into my midwife from time to time, although she is now retired, and one day I'll get round to telling her this story.

My 11lbs baby who's growing up into a lean mean muscle machine