The skin I’m in

Been involved in some conversations recently about body image, and trying to practice a little self love. I find it utterly remarkable, whilst unsurprising, how difficult women seem to find it to say anything positive about the way they look. Now I have been in the overweight BMI category for as long as I have known about BMI, and to be perfectly honest, I’m ok with that.

I come from a family of food lovers, and I am the thinnest of them. As a young child I was perpetually ill and dangerously underweight. All the photos of me show bones sticking out all over the place.

I spent quite a lot of time in hospital. Around age nine I had surgery which seemed to cure my health problems overnight, and at the same time I put on a lot of weight. Looking at photos of myself now I was still a perfectly sensible weight, but as a teenager I suddenly became acutely aware of my weight, and that I wasn’t as skinny as some of my friends. I had a couple of tricky years where I fasted, then binged, and would frequently make myself sick.  It was a big part of my teenage angst years. Then for some reason I just stopped.

Since then I have really paid very little attention to my weight. I think I went around fifteen years without weighing myself once. There were other things about my body that bothered me, the fact my feet were too long to fit into most shoes, that I could go to a shoe shop and not find a single pair in my size. The same with my crazily long legs, trying to find trousers that actually reached the floor was an absolute mission. These concerns were more logistical than actually disliking my body however, and only reared its head when shopping time came around.

Despite growing up with a mother who was always on a diet, who went from fad to fad to fad, who was sometimes only taking liquid food, or calorie counting or cutting out huge food groups, somehow I managed to avoid it all. I saw her getting larger and larger despite the dieting and she would repeatedly tell me that “diets make you fat”. It seems she was unable to truly absorb her own wisdom, but it definitely sunk in for me.

So my weight has naturally fluctuated over the years. As a very junior doctor, working crazy hours, running between five floors of patients and on a constant rush of terrified adrenaline I never found time to eat really, and consequently became my thinnest adult self. In the flushes of true love and contentment, a very dull job where I sat in the mess for days on end, and had a hormone implant sat in my arm, I became quite a bit rounder. Within days of taking the hormone implant out weight started falling off me, and I continued to get thinner and thinner until the removal had its desired effect of becoming pregnant! Following both my pregnancies I find that around a year after giving birth all my baby weight, plus a little extra for luck, just disappears, I stay like that for a while and then it slowly starts going up again. I seem to be at the beginning of that going up stage now, two years after my son arrived, and I’m not massively concerned. Not enough to diet or beat myself up that’s for sure.

Instead I hope to continue enjoying my life. Spend time digging in the garden and playing with the kids. Going for long walks in the woods or across the beach, often with a little extra weight to help me burn calories!

We now have an hours walk to school and back on a regular basis, which I have really enjoyed. Me and my daughter have conversations on a daily basis about foods that are good for our bodies and foods that are good for our souls, and that we should have both. It’s just about getting the balance right. Most of our food is cooked from scratch, some of it is even grown from scratch. My children can identify a wide range of fruits and vegetables and have at least tried most of them. They also have a packet of crisps and a biscuit each every day, which I resisted for a long time, but now accept as fine, all part of living in moderation and not demonising food. I definitely don’t think fat is the devil and even sugar has a pretty wonderful place to play in my world. We love food and most weeks will experiment with new recipes, new flavours and ingredients. My two year old will try anything, and my five year old, who once scoffed down absolutely anything you offered, now seems to be coming out the other end of an incredibly fussy stage. I have tried to just keep offering our wide range of food without too much pressure on her to eat it, and it seems to be working.

Maybe it’s because I’m a doctor, but me and my daughter have lots of conversations about our bodies and how they work, what they do. Nudity is not an issue in our house, particularly all sharing a bedroom it’s kind of unavoidable, but my children know just what I look like underneath my clothes, and that I’m comfortable with that. If they decide to have a little crazy dance and chase moment at bedtime (pretty much every bloody day!) then I try to join in, often half dressed myself with my soft, round, stretch marked tummy wobbling away, and that’s ok. We talk about how our muscles move to make our bodies dance and jump, how our food gives us energy and helps us grow and repair. We talk about how our skin needs room to stretch and move with us, how our faces show our emotions. We also talk about penises and vulvas, about periods and the very first chats on sex and procreation. We talk about illness and death. I try to handle all questions openly  and honestly at their level and as matters of fact, answering what they want to know without burdening them with information they can’t understand. We talk about consent, about them owning their bodies, that they can always choose what happens to their own bodies, and that they can’t do anything to somebody else’s body without their consent. With that comes the responsibility of looking after their body, washing, brushing, dressing, feeding and exercising it to keep it safe and healthy. At five my daughter definitely understands these concepts and my son is starting to take them on board too it seems.

Don’t worry. If this is all starting to sound a little too happy and smug, believe me I do have all the required self loathing that females are expected to have. I guess I just focus the majority of that onto who I am more than how I look. I criticise myself and lack all the confidence that a woman is supposed to. I guess I’m just working to try and stop my children from feeling they need to feel that way too.

Right About Now…

Its only a few months since I started writing this blog, and writing this tonight I feel in such a different place from the person who started writing. The winter had been long. Long and dark, wet and miserable. I was really struggling working full time with two small children. I had even quit one of my jobs, only four hours a week but I just totally felt like I wasn’t coping. I found it impossible to concentrate on anything, and kept forgetting things, incapable of making decisions. I felt like I didn’t really know who I was, having been so totally consumed with becoming a mother for the last few years. I was desperate for a little more time to myself, time to think, relax, breathe, recover.

Since then a series of really positive things have happened. I have taken some steps to make time for myself, particularly enjoying my monthly reiki sessions. Have also done a bit of meditation, and I have really enjoyed using crystals (highly recommend the wonderful wisdom and beautiful crystal jewellery from the highly talented Iris Bluebird if anyone is interested). I did manage to give myself that most “crunchy mother” of all ailments, a breast abscess after wearing a crystal down my bra for a long shift away from my breastfeeding toddler!! Apart from that I do feel like the crystals help my state of mind, whatever the rationale behind that may be. I have found the blog hugely therapeutic also, and I am incredibly grateful to every single one of you who has read it, liked it, commented on it or shared it. I really do appreciate the time you have taken to read my ramblings.

Our efforts to declutter our house and our lives through Konmari, though still in the early stages with much work ahead of us, really have helped so much with moving forward, leaving a lot of the physical and mental clutter of my past behind me. It has inspired me to start visualising how I want our lives and home to look and feel, and to take small steps to achieving that. Then our garden project has been so much fun, hard work, frustration, but such pride seeing what we have achieved in such a short time and tiny space.

I am now feeling in a much more positive frame of mind. The warmer weather is helping, being out and active is helping, having future plans is helping. The children are not angels, and my youngest is whole heartedly revelling in his new role as a terrible two year old, but generally they’re being pretty lovely right now, and I feel like I am managing to be a bit more patient and kind with them. Not always, but it’s a start.

Chatting in the car with my husband the other day I remarked “the future’s looking pretty good for us right now, isn’t it?” He looked askance at me and suspiciously replied “last time you said something like that you were pregnant by the end of the week!” Now that really isn’t in my mind right now. I do feel hugely conflicted about the thought of a third child full stop, but it absolutely is not in my plans right now. (To be honest, at the precise moment of making the comment I was more preoccupied with the fact that a local Waitrose is due to open in a couple of weeks and they do make lovely cake!!!)

Generally though the future is looking good, and I hope to continue to build on this positive feeling, and continue to work towards a good life for all my wonderful family. And I know I will have set backs, and I still get down and struggle, but our progress in just a few months feels huge. Work is pretty tough right now and due to get tougher as we enter our busiest time of year, but I feel more able to cope with it right now, so keeping my fingers crossed. Now I guess I should get ready for my night shift, maybe you’ll keep your fingers crossed for me too, it may be about to get bumpy…

Busy bee

The last week has been very busy with visitors, birthdays, and some feverish garden activity.  We are still forging ahead with the Konmari, though that has slowed slightly with the glorious weather recently. It feels too nice to be stuck inside sorting through years of crap, though every day we are making small progresses. I have found this process of shedding my past clutter has really made me excited about the future, and one way that this has manifested itself is becoming obsessed with a new plan to turn our small and boring front garden into a wondrous, bee friendly, cottage garden.

I have spoken before  about my fairly recent love of gardening, and so far this has all been about growing fruits and vegetables, which I have loved. Now though I am going all out on the flowers. My husband loves bees, and my mother actually has hives of bees at the end of the garden. Our plan is to turn a patch of grass with a few fruit trees into one big flower bed, planting only bee friendly plants.

I did a little research, read some books, talked my ideas through with my mum and my husband, and we decided we should go ahead and do it. I think my husband was still a little surprised when he went on the school run, and returned half an hour later to find me and some friends in full blown lawn removal action!!

This pretty much sums up one of the big dichotomies in my marriage. I get super excited about plans and impetuously want to get on with them immediately, like that very second. Planning is really not in my nature at all. Dreaming maybe, but not actual realistic, sensible, planning. My husband is all about the planning. There is nothing he likes more than a good plan, taking into account every possible consequence, sometimes to the point of talking himself out of ever starting. I think it’s a good combination, I create the excitement and impetus to do something, and he manages, sometimes, to prevent the worst of my mistakes.

Bless him though, he has totally got on board with the dream, and has spent all week digging and turning turf, persevering with two super willing ‘helpers’ stealing his tools and trying to undo all his hard work, working through the hot sun and late into the evenings. And now as I approach a run of night shifts we are pretty much ready for the enormous delivery of compost arriving later this week, and hopefully getting some of my purchases from our garden centre visit into the ground at the weekend.

I have chosen only flowers which are good for bees, but otherwise my main decisions have been purely based on emotion. The plants my mother would point out with particular pride on our ritual weekend walks around our garden as a child, their Latin names burnt into my memory. My grandmother also had a wonderful garden which she worked very hard on. She lived in a little Cornish cottage for most of my life, and had the archetypal cottage garden, full of flowers, and many a happy summer holiday was spent sitting in that garden in the sunshine.

I am really hoping to be able to provide some of those memories for the children, sitting in their garden in the sunshine, surrounded by the sights and smells of a beautiful garden, watching the insects exploring. Maybe they will choose to create one for their own children one day. There are worst things to pass down through the generations I guess.

Here are my ideas:

When we have got further on with it I’ll show you how well I managed to turn those into reality.

Its strange, these past few weeks have been far busier than usual, filled with tidying and sorting and gardening, and yet I feel more energised than I have in years. I am full of excitement and positivity for the future. At the beginning of this year I thought that what I needed was more time alone, more peace, more rest. It seems actually that what I needed was a little more purposeful activity maybe?

 

Happy Birthday

I have had thirty five birthdays, thirty six if you include the day that I was actually born, and it’s only for the last five that I have had any idea at all about how important my birthday is to my mother. Rather egocentrically I assumed that my birthday was all about Me Me Me. Just generally celebrating how darn fabulous I am and spoiling me with both material and baked goods.  I had absolutely no idea until fairly recently that every year, on my birthday, my mother would spend the day reminiscing about the day I was born, about how she had felt, about the momentousness of it, how her life had changed, of all those years of motherhood.

My little boy just turned two.

This year he did have some awareness that it was his birthday coming up, and that he was going to be two years old, and that he would get presents, and cake. But he hasn’t yet got to the crazily excited, counting down the days, writing lists of presents he wants, type age, so me and his big sister, were definitely more excited about it than he was.

Maybe it makes me a terrible mother, who wishes to deny my children, but I find the commercialisation of birthdays and Christmas a little hard to bear. Every time I really actively try to limit the number of presents they receive. This year I bought him a book, the second in a pair, where the first is his absolute favourite (You Choose and Just Imagine, by Nick Sharratt if you’re feeling nosey). I also wrapped up his new pair of shoes that arrived a few days ago, that he desperately needs to move up into. There was also the lucky coincidence that a t-shirt I had ordered him as part of moving him into the next size up happened to arrive yesterday, and came beautifully gift wrapped, so I thought what the hell, he can pull some paper off that too! However once you add in all the presents from family there were piles and piles of presents and a room covered in scraps of paper and empty boxes by the time he was done.

Don’t get me wrong. I am very grateful to his family who want to buy my children presents. It is incredibly generous and caring of them. And he loved the presents that he got. Sometimes it just all feels a little overwhelming as the adult, but I guess I should remember being that birthday child and how excited I was unwrapping my own presents, and just let them revel in that moment that is all about them.

I spent his birthday with him, having taken annual leave from work, and with my mother, who was there on the day he was born.

We actually spent most of the day at the garden centre buying plants for my latest dream garden plans, which I am getting totally carried away with. He had a wonderful time there, eating fried breakfast, watching the fishes in the pond, climbing onto things and into things that he shouldn’t really,

and getting very excited by the enormous train track running around the whole garden centre.

It was particularly fortuitous when the bulk of his birthday presents that evening turned out to be train set related. That made for one extremely happy boy!

I now realise that birthdays are huge days not just for the children, but for their parents too. The last few days (actually weeks really) and especially his birth day itself, I have spent reminiscing on his birth and reflecting on my two years of being his mother. And now my own mother has let me into the fact that every single one of those thirty five of my birthdays, she has spent doing exactly the same. I think my grandmother is probably still doing the same now that my mother is a pensioner.

So here’s to the mothers, for all those years of mothering, and all those years of reminiscing on that day where we brought a whole new person into this world. To all those years of watching them grow whilst we try to help them become the person they are meant to be. I think we’ve earnt this one.

 

The First Day of my Life

Day 9 overdue, I woke up before anyone else, at around six in the morning, and noticed the annoying Braxton Hick’s contractions which had been annoying me for a few weeks now. I didn’t think much of it all. My daughter woke at about quarter to seven and I got her up and out of her night nappy. I went to the loo and realised that these tightenings weren’t going away like they usually did when I got up and started doing things. They were very short, barely twenty seconds long, but happening every two or three minutes, and they were a bit more intense than anything I’d noticed before. I texted my doula to let her know that something a little different was happening, then I took my daughter downstairs, letting my husband get a bit of a lie-in. I started getting her breakfast together, and my mum came down. We sat and chatted, drinking tea and eating breakfast, with me stopping every couple of minutes, still just twenty or thirty seconds at a time, for these pretty powerful contractions. It wasn’t long at all until I really needed to give these contractions my full attention and by eight o’clock I was kneeling on the floor, leaning on a kitchen chair, with these very short contractions coming pretty frequently.

My husband was down by this point and I was fairly sure that this was it. It definitely felt different from the Braxton Hicks. It seemed to be stepping up pretty quickly, so I wanted my doula here now. For some strange reason our phone signal had completely died, so I think we spent about half an hour trying to get in touch with her. I panicked just a little bit at this point. Eventually we managed and when she asked if I wanted her to come over I said YES just a little too desperately.

It seemed mere moments until she arrived and it was like having my superhero fly in to rescue me. She instantly got everything sorted for me, putting a roll-up mattress down on the floor for me to kneel on, and a cushion for me to lean on for the chair. This was absolutely the only position I wanted to be in and she was great at getting me really comfy. My daughter thought it was wonderful, and kept trying to ride on my back, doing horsey rides. My mum took her out in the garden to play at this point, so that I could focus.

I think it was about half nine that we phoned the midwife. I was coping pretty well, with amazing back massages during the contractions, my favourite music playing in the background, the smell of clarey sage everywhere, and not moving from that kitchen chair, just the perfect height to lean on. The midwife insisted on speaking to me, and was there trying to get my address details right in the middle of a contraction. She said she’d pop by the local hospital and pick up some gas and air, and would then come and see how I was getting on. To be honest I didn’t really want her there yet, I felt like I was doing ok, and I worried that she would interfere with things if she got there too soon.

My birth plan was short and sweet. I did not want any routine vaginal examinations. I did not want to be told when or how to push. I wanted to choose my position for myself. I wanted to be in the pool. I wanted to have a natural third stage and not to cut the cord until I agreed. These few requests were written out large on bright orange card on the wall for the midwives to see, but after all my requests were ignored the first time I was a little nervous about how the midwife arriving would affect things.

My husband started pumping up and then filling the birth pool.

It turned out to be a lot less easy than we had thought, with the hose not fitting properly to any of the taps. He ended up having to run it down through the house from the upstairs bathroom, and prior to that there had been quite a lot of kettle boiling going on. I managed to block most of that out though, focusing on my contractions, with the hypnobirthing practice I had done really seeming to help me. My doula gave me regular sips of water, spoonfuls of honey, and incredible back massages. She did make me get up and walk to the loo every half hour or so for a wee, which felt like a massive effort, but still a million times better than the three catheters I had had last time

The midwife seemed to be taking her time, and eventually we got a call to say she’d got lost. Maybe making me tell her my address in the middle of a contraction hadn’t been the best idea. My contractions were seeming to be changing, from upwards and inwards, to a definite down and out feeling and I started to panic. I was scared that the midwife wouldn’t find us, and I was very close to asking my husband to take me to the hospital. I was sure I couldn’t do this, I needed somebody to look after me. At this precise moment, without me asking, my husband took a moment from his frantic pool filling efforts, to kneel beside me, with his arm around my shoulders. It felt like the strongest, safest, warmest arm I had ever felt, and it totally gave me the strength and bravery I needed to keep going.

The pool was now ready, but my doula wanted me to wait till the midwife arrived before I got in. She didn’t want to risk her insisting I got out again. Thankfully the midwife arrived, with me mid contraction, and waited wonderfully until it passed before coming and introducing herself. She quickly listened in to the baby, felt my tummy, and checked my blood pressure. She asked if I’d be able to go and do a wee sample, and as the obedient patient that I am, I said of course. I got up to walk to the loo, a contraction hit, and I just said that I have to get into the pool RIGHT NOW.

As I got into the pool I needed to push immediately. I think I had probably needed to push for a while by now, but until the midwife arrived I hadn’t let my body get on and do what it needed. I had thought that I wouldn’t actively push at all, just let my body do it, but I really needed to push with all my might. I was in the pool, on my knees, with my body up straight now, desperate for this baby to come out. The midwife got straight on the phone for the second midwife to arrive, and she turned up very shortly afterwards.

Having dealt with the contractions up to this point pretty easily, I could now feel the baby’s head about to crown, and it felt as if my entire body was about to rip in half. This really was absolute agony, and it was like I was straight back in my first birth, in that terrible fear and pain, that certainty that I absolutely could not survive this. And I’m sure that I had that thought of third degree tears and hours in theatre and months of recovery and I was so scared of this. I started to get really loud and shouty and hysterical, but somehow I managed to put my hand down and I could feel my baby’s head, right there, ready to arrive at any second. The waters broke now, and there were just a few more, shouty, terrified pushes and my baby tumbled his way into the water. I could see him lying on the floor of the pool, with these enormous hands reaching up to me. It took me a moment, and my doula gently said “pick up your baby Rachel.”

I picked him up, noticing the cord was wrapped around his neck. Without even thinking about it for a moment I unhooked it and brought him up to hold him on my chest. This was when I got to check and find out that it really was a He after all. Throughout the pregnancy I had been so completely certain that he was a boy, and I was so relieved, so pleased that he was who I thought, so pleased to finally see this little man that it felt like I had always known.

I desperately wanted my daughter to meet him, so without really thinking about what he wanted, I sent my husband off to fetch my mum and daughter. They arrived to say hello just four minutes after he was born. My husband held my daughter and she cautiously watched me and her new brother as we cuddled in the pool.

I kept holding him, with the cord still whole, and despite no injection it wasn’t long until I started contracting again, and around half an hour later I delivered the placenta, still in the pool. At this point I clamped and cut the cord myself. My husband cut my daughter’s cord, and that had been the plan this time too, but I suddenly felt very strongly that I wanted to. I had managed this far to get him into the world by myself, I felt I needed to complete his journey into becoming his own separate person.

Up to this point I had been the only person to touch this new person. I passed him now to his Daddy so I could get out of the pool, but my daughter became very upset by this, so my Mum took him instead and I was helped out of the pool, going to lie down on the mattress on the floor. My daughter wanted me, so we all lay together, my husband by my side, getting to know each other, there on our kitchen floor.

He was an hour old before the midwives asked to weigh him and check him over. They checked me too, and decided I didn’t need a single stitch, this was such a relief after the horrors of the first time. He weighed a remarkable 10lb3, my fabulous, not so little, man. I hadn’t even had a paracetamol, the midwife had never got the gas and air out of her car. Being at home and having my amazing support made it all feel manageable, except for those last few minutes, and whilst I will never forget that pain and knowing it would surely kill me, it instantly vanished when he arrived.

So, from my first twinges at six, convincing full blown labour around half eight, the first midwife arriving at eleven, my boy was born at quarter to twelve. We all celebrated with home made cake for our lunch, as my doula cleaned and steamed my placenta on our stove, ready for encapsulatiom the next day. I headed upstairs for cuddles in bed while my husband and daughter cleaned out the birth pool in the May sunshine in the garden.

It really was the most perfect, magical day. I wouldn’t change a single moment of it, and would happily do it again tomorrow. My midwives were wonderful, and totally respected my wishes. My doula was incredible, and gives the best massages of all time. I was so pleased that my daughter was a part of it and that my mother was there too. Everything just came together perfectly and was everything I had ever dreamed of. And our lives have all been improved as a result of our wonderful son joining our family, it was like he was the piece of the puzzle that we needed to make us whole.

A room of her own

When I was pregnant the first time round, me and my husband did discuss co-sleeping. We were pretty damn adamant that there was no way we would do it. After all how on earth are you supposed to sleep with a baby in the bed with you?? We spent lots of time and thought making her a nursery with a cot bed. I planned to have her sleep in our room for the first six months, but my idea was that she would have all her daytime naps in the nursery so she associated that with sleep, ready to move there full time at six months. We had a beautiful rocking crib beside our bed for nighttime sleeping. I had it sorted.

I had come across all the guidelines on how to cosleep safely, so thankfully I was aware of these, but didn’t think I’d need to know. And then my baby was born, and refused to go down in the plastic fishbowl cot at the hospital. After hours of staying awake holding her, I called my husband to get us both, and was so grateful to get us home for some sleep at last!

Well I spent some time trying to settle her into the crib with no luck, so at last I reluctantly brought her into bed, and we all managed to get a little sleep with her on my chest. The next day we kept trying with the crib, with no success. I think at one point I just left her in it, screaming, while I got into bed beside her and fell fast asleep, completely and utterly exhausted by this point. I have no idea how long I slept for, but when I woke she was still crying. I was probably so tired that I was unsafe to be looking after her in bed at that moment, but I still feel guilty about that one and only time I left her to cry by herself.

Over the next few weeks we tried everything we could think of. We went out and bought a Moses basket, a lamb skin blanket, a whole array of different swaddling blankets, we tried clothes smelling of us, warning the basket first, every trick we could find. Absolutely none of them worked. This was always the result of trying to lay her down alone to sleep:

And yet this was the result when she was with me in bed:

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It took about six weeks till we gave in and just accepted that she was going to sleep with us for now. Life got so much easier from that point on. We did try building a side car for her, but this was the closest she ever came to sleeping in it, and the rest of the time it ended up full of clothes waiting to be put away, toys, blankets etc.

Sleep wasn’t so bad really. As long as she was on us, with us, she was ok. As long as we stayed with her the whole time, she was ok. We stopped attempting to leave whilst she slept as the resulting hysterics if she found we weren’t there on waking was devastating. She woke consistently several times through the night when I was home, but settled easily on waking. When I did night shifts she slept beautifully for her Daddy.

When I was pregnant and chose to night wean things deteriorated quite dramatically. She stopped seeming to sleep at all. She had already stopped all day time naps when she turned two, so it felt like we were all surviving on a few snatch minutes of sleep a day. By the time her brother was born I would find myself being fine all day, and as darkness arrived I would become an anxious mess, terrified of the horrors the night had in store for me. After the first few weeks sleep settled a little, but it soon became obvious that having one sleeping each side of me was exhausting and unmanageable. There were some beautiful moments

but many more were I felt I was suffocating.

My Mum ended up making the decision for us after my daughter slept in a toddler bed next to us when we went to visit her. Shortly after she arrived with a toddler bed for us to use at home. It was still right next to our bed so I would often need to hold her hand at various points through the night, but the transition was remarkable easy and she started sleeping through the night, aged three and a half, in her own bed.

At around four and a half, a couple of weeks before starting school, I made the rash decision to move them both into their own room, well kind of, a little dressing room attached to our bedroom, round the corner from our bed. This lasted six weeks, and was a disaster. Neither of them slept, they both seemed really distressed by it, and I ended up sleeping between them on a roll up mattress on the floor, awake all night comforting each of them repeatedly.

We gave in after six weeks of no sleep. She was disturbed by it for ages, taking at least a month to start sleeping through the night again, needing me to comfort her frequently. After our failed experiment I was certain that I wouldn’t be trying again any time soon.

Four days ago now my daughter set up a bedroom for herself in the cave. She made herself a bedside table out of an old washing up bowl (which we keep nearby to catch vomit if needed!!) upside down, with a variety of treasures carefully arranged on it- a candle holder, a book, a Rubik’s cube, a single book end, and a crayon. She got some rugs and made herself a bedside chair out of the old roll up mattress. And the last three nights she has slept in there, on her own, with absolutely no problems, no need for us, and has been happy as Larry.

I don’t know if this is a permanent development. I feel pretty happy with it for now at least, and it’s definitely a step forward. I’m very pleased we have tried to let her do it in her own time, and plan to do the same for her brother. It gives me hope that they really will make these steps in their own good time, and we just need to keep supporting them until they’re ready.

My two sided pregnancy

I’ve spoken a little before about the differences between my two pregnancies, they really couldn’t have been more different, but my second pregnancy was quite a confusing time generally. I got pregnant incredibly easily and was as shocked to get the positive test as I was overjoyed. I did feel a little nauseous in the early weeks, but it was manageable, nothing that sent me to my bed wishing for death, or running to the bathroom every five minutes. Already this was a vast improvement from first time around! I struggled a little with my first trimester night shifts, but overall I felt pretty healthy. By the second trimester I was practically blooming. I got a bit of SPD which made my sacroiliac joint very weak and painful if I stayed still too long, but apart from that it was a wonderfully easy pregnancy. My little Pasty baby was less a footballer, and more like a little acrobat, squirming away all night and day, doing little somersaults in there, and I’d smile to myself imaging him spinning and twirling away.

I was feeling pretty positive about the birth and felt hugely supported by my wonderful doula. I was making some time for myself and feeling in a pretty good place.

However, despite all of this, I will always remember my second pregnancy as a very difficult time. Having felt like we were getting to a really good phase with my daughter, almost as soon as we knew I was pregnant, things deteriorated dramatically. She had been speaking in full sentences by her second birthday, but it felt that each day she started speaking less and less. She stopped making her own sentences at all and started to only repeat what was said to her. She never, ever spoke directly to us, and never called me Mummy. It wasn’t just the speech itself, but all her communication, she stopped looking at us or really interacting with us at all. She stopped having eye contact with us. Her play became more and more bizarre, repetitive sorting and organising of objects, insisting on us repeatedly playing out the same actions and speech for weeks on end. It got harder and harder to get her out of the house, to get her to leave her repetitive games behind. We thought that we were going to get through the terrible twos easily, but during the pregnancy she suddenly started tantrumming, getting more frequent, longer, more volatile by the day. It got to the point where it felt like all day, every day was one long tantrum. We bought a black-out tent to have as a calm down area for her, and it got lots of use. I think there was definitely an issue with over-simulation, we turned off the radio, tv, phones, cancelled all our plans and just stayed home very quietly, and that did seem to help things a little. After I night weaned, sleep became practically non-existent, for any of us, which definitely didn’t help!

Her pre-school carers started raising the possibility of autism. It almost felt like a relief that somebody acknowledged that this was harder than normal, that we weren’t just making a fuss about nothing, that we weren’t just bad parents. I wasn’t worried about a diagnosis but it just felt nice to have somebody else say it must be hard. She was always so quiet and meek around other people that everybody assumed she was the perfect child, and it seemed that anytime I mentioned it was hard, people would talk about the over-energetic hyper children who everybody could understand were hard work. That just made me feel I was complaining about nothing.

I do feel sad that I spent my pregnancy feeling so well, and yet spending all my time regretting ever getting pregnant because the thought of looking after another baby on top of struggling with my daughter, frankly filled me with terror. It felt entirely unmanageable.

We find that with everything with our daughter, preparation is key to things going well. We tried so hard to prepare her for the birth of her brother, talking it through with her, reading books about it, but the whole time she absolutely refused to acknowledge the forthcoming baby in any way.

The amazing end to this story is that my daughter was there for the birth of her little brother, meeting him at just four minutes old, and took it totally in her stride. She seemed to fall in love with him from the first day, and has been the gentlest, loving big sister you could ask for. As soon as he was born everything got easier, she started interacting more, talking more, and the first time she called me Mummy I burst into tears. The tantrums eased considerably, and life as a foursome has been so much better than I could have imagined. If you’ve read any of my other posts you probably realise she is still a very intense little girl, and she still challenges me on a regular basis. We also find that when tired, ill, stressed, her more reclusive, repetitive behaviours become more prominent again. I am convinced that she got herself so worked up about the unknown threat of this new baby that she really struggled. It really felt like she met him, thought ‘he’s not so bad after all, kinda cute really.’ And all that stress went. For all of us!