Settling into Fatherhood

I’ve been quiet of late on my blog. That is because a couple of weeks ago this happened…

I now have a daughter, Little L. Along with my 21-month old son, Big M, I’ve now reached my target family size!

Having a second child actually makes you think back and compare how things were with your firstborn. For a start, like everyone tells you, the second one is easier in that you don’t worry so much about things; all that training, stress and exhaustion you encountered during your firstborn’s arrival puts you in pretty good stead for handling a second baby. All sorts of things like changing nappies (which I still have to do for Big M), feeding them, burping them, bouncing up and down to sooth them, it all comes back to you. And the sleepless nights somehow seem more manageable at the moment; I now know that eventually I will get my sleep back so that is a good way of looking at things.

My paternity leave this time was also much more enjoyable. During my time off work looking after Big M I basically experienced this for two weeks:

“WHAT AM I DOING? WHY IS HE STILL CRYING? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SURVIVE ON THIS LITTLE SLEEP? AM I LOSING MY MIND?”

Whereas with Little L it was like:

“Oh, she’s crying. Let’s cycle through the changing-feeding-soothing cycle to see if that settles her”

It left me feeling that I could actually bond with my family rather than worrying about all the little details.

The only challenge I would say I’ve found is having to deal with a hyperactive toddler and a newborn at the same time. In general Big M is very interested in his little sister – no jealousy appearing yet – but he also hasn’t got a clue how to be gentle with her. One minute he can gently kiss her on the head, the next he can give her a big smack. Trying to get him to understand the difference at such a young age is difficult but he is slowly getting there. And I’m sure when Little L is older she’ll get her own back.

Normal service will resume on this blog soon albeit a bit slower as I now have to write my posts during my lunchbreaks at work, so stay tuned.

Becoming a Father: One Year On – Part 4

This is the fourth part of my retrospective on my first year as a new father – though I’m starting to lag behind a bit now as my son is now nearly a year and a half old!

To view all the parts, please click on one of the links below:

1. The Beginning
2. The First Two Weeks
3. Getting the Hang of Things

This post focuses on…

The Accident

Looking back now, the first six months of my son’s life were actually quite uneventful. I would hear stories of his little friends picking up bugs and colds but he seemed as healthy as you could hope, which is something to be thankful for. He never had so much as a sniffle. When he was around 7 months old though he would be paying a visit to the hospital.

One morning my wife was carrying him down the stairs when she lost her footing and slipped, sliding on her back down several of them. It left her a bit bruised and for an adult that would kind of be the end of it – just shrug it off, since it wasn’t that serious – but my son was crying uncontrollably. We couldn’t figure out why as we checked him all over and couldn’t see any marks or bruises anywhere, but he simply wasn’t himself. Our initial thought was that the incident was too much of a shock for him, but after about an hour our instincts told us to get him checked out. As this was a Sunday calling the doctor was out of the question, so a trip to A&E it was.

After waiting for hours that afternoon we had several doctors check him out and the overall conclusion was that he was just in shock still. We did consider maybe a broken bone but pressing on any part of him seemed to illicit crying so no-one could tell. In the end we took him home and gave him Calpol to help him sleep through the night.

The next morning while I was at work my wife texted me to say she was taking him to our GP to get him seen again as he still wasn’t right, who then referred him back to the hospital to get an X-ray on his right leg. Around 4pm I got a call saying that he had a hairline fracture on his right femur and would need to be put in traction, which meant of course staying in the hospital. And that was the start of the week-long “holiday” on the children’s ward.

I left work early to run home and pick up a few overnight things for my wife and son and went straight to the hospital to see them. He was on baby morphine to help him with the pain and still was not himself. My wife was now constantly blaming herself for a) inflicting this on him, even though it was an accident that she could not have prevented, and b) not spotting his broken bone sooner, despite not having X-ray vision herself.

I watched him as the nurses put him in traction, basically by lying him in bed and wrapping bandages and splints around both legs then tying them to pulleys hanging above his bed; the aim was to keep the leg straight so that it would heal faster – there is no magic cure for broken bones, you simply have to let your body heal itself. Fortunately it was only a hairline fracture and, given his age and constant body development, he would heal a lot faster than an adult (he was well on the mend in a week, whereas it might take me months to heal the same wound).

I stayed with them for a few hours before leaving them for the night; my wife would be staying with him around the clock whilst I would still have to go to work each day. That night was actually the first time ever that I was separated from my son; as I walked past his bedroom at home that night I looked into it and it was empty for the first time, which made me feel more alone that I expected.

The Sleepover

So far it is all sounding doom and gloom, isn’t it? Well let me reassure you by showing you what my son looked like for the rest of the week.

As you can see after his first night in hospital he was pretty happy with life. And wouldn’t you be when you have toys surrounding you in your bed and CBeebies on tap? If anything it was harder on my wife, which I will get to.

As I still had to do my day job I was responsible for ferrying items to and from home for them and visiting them first thing in the morning before work and straight after work before going home. I would then get the luxury of sleeping at home, ready to start the routine all over again.

My wife on the other hand stayed with our son 24/7. He got a room on the ward meaning my wife could sleep on a sofa-bed with him. For five days in a row she lived on the ward with him. By the fourth day she was almost at breaking point and when the weekend finally came so I could take over she vomited on the way home through sheer exhaustion. When I did my weekend shift straight after work on the Friday night I could finally understand what it was like; the ward was never truly quiet, always having staff roaming around and coming in to do observations on my son, day and night. There was even another child on the ward who sounded a lot worse than our son; I would periodically hear uncontrollable screaming from down the corridor, so I don’t know how that child’s parents managed to survive.

But we did it for him because as parents that is simply our job; to put him before ourselves. And he seemed to be having a whale of a time, getting visits from his grandparents regularly and only getting bored now and again. Let’s face it, he could have been a lot worse.

Coming Home

After just over a week (and my wife having a weekend of sleeping at home while I took over) he finally got discharged. He was also getting sores from the bandages on his legs so had to come out of traction anyway but his leg had almost healed completely, we just needed to be careful how we positioned it and keep him on his back. My wife took him for check-up X-rays and a month later he was given the all clear.

In fact now we forget that it ever happened. He is so active and runs around all over the place that it is hard to imagine that his leg was ever broken; people even now ask us how his leg is and we have to think for a second as to what they mean.

Plus, as the doctor at the hospital pointed out to me, it is safe to assume that this will be the first of many accidents he may experience in his lifetime as kids will always get into scrapes in their continual quest to have fun.

Next time: One Year Old…

Becoming a Father: One Year On - Part 3

This is the third part of my retrospective on my first year as a new father. To view all the parts, please click on one of the links below:

Part 1 - The Beginning
Part 2 - The First Two Weeks
Part 4 - The Accident

This post focuses on...

Getting the Hang of Things

Once I became more accustomed to waking up several times in the night followed by waking up early in the morning to go to work each day, I came to realise that things do tend to settle into a routine (almost). My wife and I learned many things about our son in the first 6 months:

1. He liked to be on the go all the time, he simply did not like sitting still much. This resulted in me usually having to administer some kind of silly walk whilst carrying him so he felt the exaggerated movement and which kept him happy. Although after 30 seconds of this around the living room my leg muscles would be screaming at me to stop.
2. He also didn't think much of napping during the day. Whilst other parents might boast that their little angel would have a 1 - 2 hour nap in the afternoon, we were forced to endure almost a whole day of feeling exhausted and looking after him since he would sleep for at most 30 minutes at a time (with usually a 4 - 5 hour gap inbetween).
3. The flip-side of not napping during the day though was that he at least seemed to understand the day-night cycle and would sleep longer and better during the night. My wife and I started off going to bed at around 8pm for at least 3 months because we simply couldn't stay awake any longer!
4. He was heavy and I was weak. When he was born he weighed 8lb 11oz - which for those not in the know is fairly large - and he pretty much worked his way up to the 91st percentile of his baby contemporaries and was generally the largest of all his baby friends. I am not a physically strong person and having to carry him around started to get very draining, though I eventually got more used to it - perhaps it could have been considered as weight training for me!
5. My wife tried feeding him expressed milk as breastfeeding did not go well but eventually he started to drink more and more formula milk to the point where he could, after a few months, drink almost an entire bottle of it every 3 hours. That could explain the weight gain...
6. He got to a point 3 months in where he slept pretty much through the night - the holy grail of parenting! But then, at 4 months, he switched things around a bit and did the dreaded sleep regression. Why babies apparently do this I do not know. I was having dinner with some friends and boasting about how he slept through the night now at such a young age when I got a text message from my wife telling me that he started waking up at night; that was the night when he started waking up several times a night for the next few months. I resolved from then on to never discuss his sleeping habits with anyone other than my wife lest I somehow jinx everything.
7. Most importantly though was that we could start to see that he had a personality. It is hard to describe in writing but there were little things he did that you could just tell were a part of him.

The Daily Routine

I found it incredibly helpful that a daily routine seemed to materialise over time - I am a programmer after all! My wife and I both agreed that I would do the (very) early morning feed as once I'm awake I tend to stay awake; I'm a very light sleeper. 

Once that was done and everyone was still asleep I could get to my morning chores which started about 6am. These involved having a shower and breakfast for me of course but also cleaning up all the milk bottles, getting the bottle steriliser ready and boiling water for his formula milk for the day. If I had time I'd also prepare his reusable nappies after they had been washed and dried. 

At about 7:30am I would go wake up my wife so she could have a shower before I went to work and I would look after the boy in the meantime. We decided that my wife would get as much rest as possible and not the other way around since she would be the one spending all day with him on the go - remember, he didn't like napping. She basically needed as much rest as possible whereas, despite me having to do a full day's work too, at least I would be sitting down for most of it and downing cups of tea through the day.

Once I got home from work I would take over from my wife and give him his bath and get him ready for bed. In the first month that tended to be quite late as he was still getting used to a regular bedtime so that meant I had to learn how to hold him in one arm whilst I ate my dinner with the other. Eventually though I was responsible for putting him to bed by giving him his bedtime bottle, burping him and letting him fall asleep on my shoulder before putting him in his moses basket.

Here's a little secret I'll let you in on: whilst letting him fall asleep on me I spent many a night playing through Angry Birds on my phone. I actually got quite far through the game in this fashion!

"What dear? No, I'm putting our son to bed, what did you think I was doing?"
Image courtesy of Echo Enduring Blog ( http://blog.echoenduring.com/2010/11/23/learning-about-design-from-angry-birds/)

It Does Get Better

My last post may have left you thinking that raising a child is a hellish experience, and initially it is incredibly demanding. It still is but as 6 months roll on you realise that you can deal with things better now, that he also grows up more and changes with you and somehow you both meet in the middle to end up having fun together.

He seems a lot happier now :)

Next time: The Accident - Oh dear...

Becoming a Father: One Year On - Part 2

This is the second part of my retrospective on my first year as a new father. To view all the parts, please click on one of the links below:

Part 1 - The Beginning
Part 3 - Getting the hang of things
Part 4 - The Accident

This post focuses on...

The First Two Weeks

The day after my son was born I woke up bleary eyed and called my parents and in-laws - now forever know as "the grandparents" - to tell them the good news; they had been calling all night but I was a little tied up at the time. I had breakfast, a quick shave and headed back to the hospital to pick up my wife and son.

My wife was fortunate enough to get a single room for the night - usually you can get at least 6 new mothers and their babies in a ward room. Even so my wife didn't get that much rest due to my son needing regular feeding and nurses popping in and out constantly to check on mother and child. So I think she was glad to be getting out of there and back home, plus it seemed the hospital kind of wanted the room back; it was never said, just implied since this is the NHS we're talking about, always under strain. On a side note at least she wouldn't have had to eat the lunch I saw them bring in; the NHS is a great institution but they never have got the hang of meals anyone would willingly eat.

So, new baby in his new car seat and me carrying a metric ton of samples of various baby related paraphernalia, I managed to finally get everyone in the car and get them home. And then the realisation dawned on me and my wife: what the hell do we do now? Because you spend a lot of time thinking about how it will be and reading a lot of books to learn how to look after a baby, but nothing says "trial by fire" more than bringing home your first-born and having to figure out everything you need to do to look after them by pure guesswork.

Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding in particular stressed my wife out a lot. You would assume, maybe from seeing people doing it or just the general impression that the idea gives, that it would be an act that both mother and child instinctively know how to do, like they are hard-wired to "just do it". Nothing can be further from the truth. Of course a newborn baby does have a natural suckling instinct, just no way of knowing where to apply it. And it's no easier for the mother - it's very easy to get the baby up to the breast but it's not easy to see whether they are latched on correctly due to the positioning of everything, with no idea how much milk they have drunk, if any. Add to that the pressure of midwives always telling you that "breast is best" and my wife refusing to try any other way, it resulted in a very stressful time.

That first day I don't think my son got much milk down him due to both our inexperience, my wife getting very upset by the end of the day. In the end he did sleep almost through the night - which helped my wife who was still exhausted from childbirth - but we were still worried he wasn't actually getting any milk. Fortunately the midwife who came to visit on the second day explained to us that a) you can express breastmilk and give it to him in a bottle and b) give him formula milk at the same time whilst learning the breastfeeding technique. So we resolved to go out to the supermarket and get some formula milk - our first trip out so it probably did us all good.

Chaos

Babies change everything. Suddenly all your little routines that govern your life are thrown out of the window and you are forced to re-learn everything. So apart from having to know how to change nappies, how to feed them, how to burp them, how to dress them and a thousand other little things that you never thought about before, you also have to try and find order within the chaos that a newborn brings into your life. As a programmer, who relishes procedures, order and routines, I found this very hard.

Take, for example, the night feeds - because your job as a parent doesn't end when the sun goes down, no siree! Every 3 hours my son needed feeding - and I mean every 3 hours, morning and night. Before he was born I insisted to myself that I would do my share of everything - nappy changing, cleaning him, the works - and since my wife was starting to express milk it also meant I could help with feeding him. This also meant getting used to a new sleep routine (or lack of it). As a result, we both basically went to bed at around 8pm for nearly 3 months because we were too exhausted to stay up any later!

There was also the night of the third day when he just would not sleep and cried and cried all night. We tried everything we could think off and were getting to our wits end when we realised that letting him suck our finger helped, but take it away and he would start crying again. It got to around midnight, when I was sitting up in bed with him sucking my finger and not being able to get to sleep like this, when I declared to my wife "I'm going to buy some dummies. Now".

Another thing you learn as new parents is to let go of all your pre-conceptions. My wife had many ideas that she thought would be good for our son such as breastfeeding, no dummies ("too unsightful") leading all the way up to baby-led weaning. We reluctantly learned the hard way that a baby doesn't care one bit what you think is best for them, it will do exactly what it likes and there is nothing you can do about it but adapt to them. So I had to drive to the midnight supermarket to get some emergency dummies, which let him at least suck on something while he slept in his crib and gave me my fingers back.

I Don't Like You

Perhaps the thing I personally and emotionally found hardest to accept in my two weeks off work was the fact that my own son seemed to hate me. Well, perhaps "hate" is too strong a word but he definitely did not like me. No matter how I held him or cuddled him he would just cry and cry at me, only stopping once his mother took hold of him; he was inside my wife for nine months, knew her like the back of his hand, whilst he only met me a few days ago and did not like what he saw.

This is a very hard thing to take, the fact that your own child does not seem to like you. I had an idea that it would be tough but I also imagined that he would at least just lie in my arms looking all cute and all, but there was none of that. I even looked after him for a whole afternoon on my own while my wife went to get a haircut; I insisted to her that some time alone for her would do her some good. It also meant that I had an entire afternoon of him crying at me, pretty much non-stop. Add on top of that the sleepless nights, trying to keep the house in order (though I soon gave up on that notion) and keeping up a repetitive 3-hour cycle of the same tasks - feed, burp, change nappy, prepare the next feed - I have to admit it almost broke me.

But It Gets Better

So far I'm making fatherhood sound like hell on earth, but overall it isn't. What people reading this who don't have children of their own must understand is that the shock of changing your life from free-and-easy to instant parent is incredibly severe. Everyone says that raising children is tough but my words alone cannot convey just how tough it is, the only true way of understanding is to experience it for yourself.

And yes the first two weeks of my son's life were incredibly tough, for me and my wife, I cannot lie about that. But every parent would also tell you that things get easier. At the time, when you haven't slept all night and every minute drags on forever, you can't see the end but it is there. And things did (very slowly) start to get better; towards the end of my paternity leave my son was starting to get a bit more used to me, partly by me realising that he wanted to be moving at all times - that meant rocking him in my arms non-stop, which wore me out physically but at least he wasn't crying! And once you start to see a pattern in his routine - such as when he appears to sleep, when he last had his feed so you can gauge when the next one should be - then you can get into the swing of things.

Next time: Getting the hang of it...

Becoming a Father: One Year On - Part 1

I'd thought I'd choose a different topic to what I usually write about. My son is now a year old, 13 months to be exact - sometimes it is hard to believe it - so I thought I would give a retrospective on my transition into fatherhood.

To read all the other parts to this series, click on the links below:

Part 2 - The First Two Weeks
Part 3 - Getting the hang of things
Part 4 - The Accident

The tl;dr version: being a parent is hard! No, I mean really, really hard!

The Beginning

Last May 2011 my wife announced to me at an unfavourable hour that her waters had broken. After calling the midwife we were told to make our way to the hospital in order for my wife to be induced; apparently her waters were greeny-brown, an indication that our son may have passed his very first stool before being born. Because midwives get concerned that this may cause stress to the baby, they wanted to induce my wife to get things going.

For about 8 hours my wife was pretty much left alone hooked up to a monitor to check the baby's vital signs, with very little sleep for both of us (a sign of things to come. More on that later...) Only till the next shift did a couple of midwives come and attend to us, and attend to us they did: my wife then had round the clock care which was really good for her as she was getting upset at the lack of information given to us.

Perhaps you've seen how babies are born on medical shows? It takes a lot longer than that. From about 8am till 1pm my wife was fed some sort of hormone drip which was meant to kickstart labour. The midwives were very good to my wife, always chatting and taking her mind off things. Once I came back from lunch did I really start to see the affects, as my wife's contractions had started.

This was the bit where I came into the picture. Everyone knows from TV and films that the father is meant to stand next to his partner and encourage this very slow breathing technique through your mouth whilst your partner is screaming in agony telling you what you can do with that idea. My wife did not shout at me directly but was clearly feeling the pain.

We had planned lots of things during the birth, built into a sort of "birthplan". Here's what new parents learn very quickly: plans of any kind go right out the window. My wife had intended to be in a birthing pool to help with pain relief, but to be induced means constantly being hooked up to drips and monitors. Walking and different positions also became difficult since her mobility was restricted from all these machines. Gas and air helped but there came a point - which originally she said she would refuse - to get the big gun out: the epidural.

After waiting for an anesthetist (resulting in more screaming from my wife) one finally came. She was obliged to give my wife the legal stuff, such as side effects, consent etc, though my wife was sucking on the gas and air constantly and shouting "Yes! Anything!" at that point. It did help with the pain though, the only drawback being she couldn't even stand up anymore: the epidural is injected towards the base of the spine so it basically knocks out anything from the waist down.

We had a bit of a breather for an hour or two at that point, which gave the midwives a chance to discuss with the next shift what has been happening (this would be about 17 hours since we arrived at the hospital). Finally, the big moment had come: it was time to get this baby out.

The next bit has been censored. If my wife saw that I described the birth of our child in any detail whatsoever she would kill me!

...4 and a half hours later, our son entered the world! Now usually this is greeted by the baby taking their first gasp of air and crying, at least that is what I considered to be the norm. Not so my boy; he decided to basically keep quiet, thereby raising alarms and calling in what looked like every midwife, nurse and doctor on the maternity ward to see to him and get him breathing. Let's just say it was the most frightening experience of my life. But there was nothing to worry about in the end, he was breathing just fine and simply didn't want to make a fuss. Cheeky monkey.

He was cleaned up and handed to my wife, who was still completely off her head from all the gas and air she was basically breathing in like oxygen. But it was there, that special moment when you realise that you have a little person that you instantly love. I stayed for another hour or two and then drove home to try and get some sleep while my wife still had work to do giving him his first feed.

All in all it took almost 24 hours from start to finish. I was immensely proud of my wife, who worried she would never be able to do it, and amazed that there was now a new little person in our lives (not very little though; he weighed in at 8lb 11oz, so was hefty enough). As I collapsed into bed when I got home I vaguely wondered what the future would bring...

My boy, less than a day old, wondering where the hell he is

Next time: the first two weeks...