Age = 11 weeks 4 days

For the past week or so Linus has been drooling a lot, which is new for him. Could this be the start of the infamous teething?

Age = 11 weeks

Along with seeing lots of Nana and seeing the other rellies at least once a week, Linus and I are also starting to get a few regular appointments to stop us from becoming dedicated homebodies.

Plunket

We have already had two out of four Plunket “New Mums” sessions. There are ten mums there, and by some strange coincidence all ten of the babies are boys. All of the babies there are between two and four months old, so it’s really interesting seeing how different they all are.

I’ll also be seeing a Plunket nurse or Community Karitane (whatever that is?!) on a semi-regular basis. I’m not sure how often these appointments will be – I guess they’ll gradually get further apart as Linus gets older.

La Leche League

I’m also probably going to try to go to La Leche League meetings every fortnight. They officially alternate between “meetings” and “coffee groups”, but I’ve been to one of each now and they’re very similar in reality: the meeting simply has an agenda, but it’s still very informal.

I’m not going to LLL because of any particular problems with breastfeeding, but the people there seem quite interesting and helpful, and it’s a nice change from the Plunket and antenatal groups because the women at LLL are in a wide variety of situations. I’ve met women with grown children, women with school-age children and toddlers, and other new mums (I met a tiny 12-day old baby yesterday!). This gives more scope for me to get advice from more experienced mums and, as I found yesterday, to give advice (from my vast 11-week-old pool of knowledge!) to less experienced mums. It’s also valuable to get a different point of view from Plunket’s.

Mums and Bubs Movies

My antenatal group has had one reunion so far, but nothing regular has been arranged. However I’m going to try to go the “Mums and Bubs” session at the local movie theatre every month. We went last Wednesday, and I invited the rest of the antenatal class. Only one of them made it this time, but hopefully in future some others will come along.

I expected the session to be fairly chaotic, and didn’t think I’d really get to hear any of the movie, but after the initial twenty minutes of mayhem, everything settled down and it was fine. Because the session was almost exclusively babies (as opposed to toddlers or kids), there was only the occasional disruptive cry in spite of the cinema being nearly full. Besides, they have movies so loud these days (ouch! fogey alert!) anyway you’d need a jackhammer to drown one out.

However next time I go I’m going to take the bus. Parking was an absolute nightmare *cringe*.

Age = 10 weeks 5 days

Just Deserts

It serves me right. Let me quote:

“…over the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling much better about life with Linus.” (26 April 2006)

The little dear suddenly decided on Saturday night that 7:30pm – 11:30pm is an altogether disagreeable time, and that he’ll express his displeasure every evening by crying and crying and crying. (This change in temperament unfortunately coincided with a visit from Lisa and John. Bug grizzled all the last time Lisa visited too – she must think Linus is a terror all the time!)

It’s obviously hard for us to deal with him crying, and old Dr Spock nailed it when he described the feelings of parents in this situation:

“You feel sorry for him in the beginning. You feel increasingly inadequate, because you’re not able to do anything to relieve him. Then as the minutes go by and he acts angrier and angrier, you feel that he is spurning you as a parent and you can’t help feeling mad at him underneath. But getting angry at a tiny baby makes you ashamed of yourself, and you try hard to suppress the feeling. This makes you more tense than ever.” (p181, Baby and Child Care)

To tackle this, I’ve decided it’s easiest to accept that at the moment we need to spend the entire evening seeing to Bug. We have to make sure he hasn’t got any reason to cry (temperature, hunger, wet nappy, etc.), then we have to just live with it (earplugs seem to help Daddy) until he stops suddenly and inexplicably. His habit after he stops seems to be to try to inveigle his way back into our good books by grinning, gooing and gaaing at his as if the past four hours never happened. And damn him, it works!

Well, that’s where I’m at this morning; tonight baby, me, and everything else will probably change and I’ll decide on an all-new strategy. But that’s learning!

A Positive Note

It’s swings and roundabouts, though (for me at least – Daddy seems to be getting the short end of the stick at the moment). Either Linus or I has decided that the day will work best if we all wake up at the same time (7am-ish), then Bug has a feed, then he goes down for a nice long nap (yesterday I had to wake him at 11am or he might have slept all day).

This gives me time to do all sorts of things that until now I’ve only managed to do about 50% of the time, like have breakfast with my husband (sometimes even make breakfast for him), have a shower, and get dressed in a calm and organised fashion (rather than just grabbing the first non-pyjamas I can find!). It’s a great start to the day, especially if get time to do some housework as well.