BABY ADVICE – Page 4 – NEW YUMMY MUMMY

MEETING NEW MUMS …. WORSE THAN DATING

With 4 months old daughter most of my day is filled with : nappy change, playing, picking Chloe up, rocking Chloe , holding Chloe or her toys so she can bite it, entertaining Chloe, tidying up, trying to clean, cooking, Internet sketching for answers to never ending questions and doing a lot of washing. I am doing all of that in an empty house whiles baby talking. Gosh at one point I actually worried that by a mistake I will start doing my baby talk to a grown up, or forget how to talk normally 😄 what I was really craving is a grown up company and being able to talk to someone about what I am experiencing, ideally someone who knows what I am taking about. Don’t get me wrong I love every minute I spend with Chloe but I wanted to be able just for an hour to go out for a coffee and talk to someone else than Chloe.

OPTION 1. MY FRIENDS

I would from time to time meet up with my friends but most of them are working full time which means that I can’t see them when I need it most – weekday in the mornings or afternoons. Also most of my friends don’t have kids. You should see theirs faces when I started talking about explosive poos. But it’s great to see them over the weekend to talk and thing about other things than baby 😄

OPTION 2. MEET SOME MUMS

– NCT

Best option in my opinion. Unfortunately I didn’t go to NCT course after being told by lots of people that it wasn’t good and didn’t teach them anything.they did however said that its a good way of meeting other mums. Based on those opinions I decided not to do it, what is the point of paying so much money just to meet mums??!! I regret not doing it now! If I knew how hart it was to meet other mums I would have done it. My advice is – do it!!!!

BABY GROUPS

This one is very good as it benefits your baby and you get to know other mums. If you are shy like me it can be hard to move the “friendship” from the class to actual meet ups.

Me and Chloe go to Baby Sensory Classes which are great! Chloe loves them and they are brilliant for her development! I meet quite a few Mums, and it’s something different to do once a week. As I mentioned I am very shy and also most of those mums knew each other already from the NCT Course so I haven’t make any friends to meet outside the class.

We will start now the Baby Massage. Again great for babies but also another way to meet other mums. Ideally I would have started it a bit earlier but couldn’t get free space.

We will also start going to a Play Group now that Chloe is a bit bigger and can actually play not just lay 🙂

INTERNET

There is a lot of different websites and apps. I been on all of them and tried all of them as well…

– Netmums, Mumsnet

Two of the biggest websites for parents. They organise meet ups which you can attend. If there is one in your area that great and you should defenitely go. Unfortunately there was nothing where I live. I am shy but I would always do everything what I can to change something that I am not happy with, I took things in to my own hands. I contacted regional ambassador for Mumsnet and asked about meet ups where I live. Outcome ? I will be organising them now!!! Our first one will be in 3 weeks time … I hope someone will come 😃

– Apps

There is a lot of apps but those in my opinion aren’t good enough yet. Location is a key when you want to meet other mums and that’s not very specific in most of them. I don’t thing that they are popular enough so the amount of mums on it isn’t amazing.

But it’s worth a try, there are some of them:

– mummysocial.com

– mumamie.com

– mumsmeetup.com

– meet mums now (app)

– parents nearby (app)

NEIGHBOURS

This really worked for me:-). We have moved in to our first house. There were 8 new houses build and luckily all of them been bought by young couples and most of them with kids. Because we were all new, all moved in pretty much on this same day, and we been seeing each other all the time it was really easy to start chatting. For shy person like me it was perfect!

CAFFEES

I go out every day for a walk with Chloe. If I don’t have any “date” with another mum or a friend, after walk I would go for a coffee on my own. It gets me out of the house and Chloe loves it, she is fascinated with people and lights (loves looking out of the window). If Chloe sleeps then I can read a magazine and enjoy my coffee- then it’s “me time” 😀. Very often there would be other mums doing exactly this same 🙂 now you just need to have the currage to start the conversation 😉.

This business is worst than dating 🙂

BABY SLEEPING ROUTINES: WHEN? HOW? WHY?

BABY ADVICE, MY BABY EXPERIENCE

I always was very much against running your life around baby …. My opinion has changed slightly after the first 2 months of having my own baby 🙂
When Chloe was around 12 weeks I noticed that she would only fall asleep on my breast and have a nap whenever she wanted to. This meant not much time at all for anything else in the day, and evening filled with either Chloe crying or Chloe being on my chest 🙂 .
After another evening of Chloe crying whenever we put her in to her moses basket I hit the internet…. Big big big mistake…. you start reading about everything what you do wrong, what you don’t do and you should do, and it just makes you feel like shit !!!! Then you start reading about ways to get you in to this perfect routine and thats when your head starts spinning !!! There is around 100 different ways of getting a good routine !!! Its crazy and my head is spinning just thinking about it.

FEEDING ROUTINE
From the very beginning I knew that I was against schedule feeding, there is a reason why doctors tell you to feed on demand. How do you explain to 3 days old baby that it needs to wait 25 minutes before getting milk as it’s not the feeding time yet ?????It may work for some parents but I didn’t want to try it.

DAILY ROUTINE
I knew that I didn’t agree with putting a newborn baby on a daily routine as in my opinion they are way too small for it. First of all they need to get used to this new scary word, scary smells, sounds etc and to do so they need to be dotted on. I do believe that in the beginning they know best what they want and when they want it. Not sleeping, not knowing what comes next it’s a part of having a newborn baby !

Me and my husband from the start have been letting Chloe do what she wanted: we feed her (or shall I say I feed her as my husband doesn’t have a milk coming out of his breast) when she was hungry, she was sleeping when she wanted, we been going out to the shops and cafes, walks etc when we felt like it.

As Chloe was getting bigger and we have been told by all of the informations we found on the internet that we aren’t doing it right we thought its time to set the routines in place. Apparently the reason our baby cries is because I got her use to sleeping on my breasts, she doesn’t know how to comfort herself and she is also tired because she doesn’t have a daily routine. I asked myself what do I want to achieve and what will benefit my baby?

For a week I stayed more at home and started observing Chloe. I started noticing when she is tired ( 10:00, 13:00 and 16:00) and thats when I started putting her in to her moses basket for a nap. I would give her a dummy and a comfort blanket, she would snuggle her face in to the comfort blanket and fall asleep. No, it wasn’t as easy and just doing that 🙂 it took us few days to get the routine going. On the beginning she would cry cry and cry then fall asleep. Now I just put her in to her basket and she is out.
I do admit that having a strutter in a day has helped her and me. I finally could predict what will happen 🙂 and when I can do some things around the house :-).

Did it help with her sleeping at night? no.

We always have been lucky when it comes to nights. Chloe would wake up for her feeds and then go back straight to sleep, it’s the evenings which were proving difficult which I mentioned in previous posts.
She still was for a while, quite unsetteld in the evening when we put her down into her moses basket. I think that it was just normal transition which she had to make.Come on its hard to sleep in a basket if you can in the safe place of your mums arms. We changed her evening routine a bit, after bath my husband started reading her a story. We also moved her basket in the evening to our bedroom so she could start falling asleep there instead of being with us in the living room. After a few days she started to fall asleep on her own and the screaming has stopped.

Is routine good? Yes, it is.
Does it work? Yes, it does but its not an answer to everything.
What routine is best? It depends on you. We have a bed time routine and we have set times for naps and thats it! I still feed my baby when she wants to eat ( which is very predictable now). If we want or need to go out and its Chloe’s nap time then we will let her sleep in the car or pram. I just wanted to have a healthy balance between Chloe’s needs for a routine and having a life.

My advice is yes baby needs a routine, routine which suits your baby and your life. Remember that every baby is different and needs different things, every parent is different and lives different life style….

PARANOID ABOUT BABY SLEEPING ROUTINE 😳

BABY ADVICE, MY BABY EXPERIENCE

Paranoid about baby sleeping routine.
Paranoid is how you can describe what I became yesterday. Why Chloe only falls asleep to have a nap on my chest or with dummy? Why is Chloe crying in the evening before going to sleep? should I let her cry to sleep? is she too small to self soothe ???!!!!!! I was going crazy !!! I was reading lots of different articles on the internet, asking other mums about they experience, reding some more and then driving my husband mad with questions ….. Why do some people make you think that it’s not good if your 2,5 months old baby doesn’t fall asleep on their own and doesn’t sleep through the whole night??? I know that we all do things differently and would bring up our kids in a different ways and that’s fine. What isn’t fine is when you make other people feel bad about the way they choose to do things!! There is nothing wrong with letting your baby fall asleep on the breast, there is nothing wrong with cuddling your baby when they cry & there is notching wrong with using dummy if you choose to do so!!! We all want our babies to sleep well through the night and to fall asleep on their own, have a good sleep routine (whatever that is) but on the end of the day we are talking here about small babies!! There is so many specialist claiming to know best, so many different approaches and opinions on how to put your baby to sleep and about sleeping routines; it’s hard to know what is the best option. Because there is so many of them there obviously isn’t one good way of doing it and noone knows what is the best way !!! Just do what seems right for your baby and what you feel comfortable with!!!!! #baby #sleep #sleepingroutine #newborn #firsttimemum

Newborn doesn’t want to sleep … surprise 😀

BABY ADVICE, MY BABY EXPERIENCE

Newborn doesn’t want to sleep …
How long did it take you to go on the internet to search : baby doesn’t want to sleep, baby doesn’t want to sleep in mose basket ? 😄 oh yes most of us did it within 48 hours of being at home. Every time we put Chloe down in her mose basket hoping for a brake she would start crying. We thought that she hated this basket! You can find a lot of advice on the internet, we used some of them and our common sense. Baby is used to being in warm belly, snuggled up, not having much space.
– basket was definitely very big for her, her arms and legs would stretch and she would wake up straight away. We decided to swaddle her and this really helped.
– basket was also cold so we used fleece blanket over her mattress which made it cosy.
Those worked for us . Chloe sleeps in it but I think that she still hates it 😊