So here we are with a baby!

The most beautiful and charming baby in the world, but a baby nonetheless, with all of the challenges and hopeless despair that go with it.

Bug (Eleanor, but I call her Bug, or her Bugship) is nearly five and a half months old and it's been quite a ride so far but things are beginning to slot into place. Food, sleep, play, development, what I didn't realise is that everything needs to be learnt (by the baby and you). There's no plonking the baby down and assuming she will sleep, at least not after the first couple of weeks. Food can be scorned (rarely by mine) or more frighteningly absorbed with unsatiable gusto (growth spurt? starvation?). I breastfeed and do so exclusively and it can turn into a real marathonic nightmare. Babies do not amuse themselves, want constant cuddling and cannot fall asleep alone. All the clichés of the sobbing exhausted parents are true.

So how are we doing? Better now than at the beginning...

Food. So I breastfeed, thanks to the patience of the midwives at the maternity who time after time showed me how to do it. It's not particularly easy at first but it's been worth it and is now the easiest and most natural thing in the world.

I've been doing it on demand till quite recently and have found that as well as feed Bug, it comforts her and has from day one been a way of calming her down and sending her to sleep. The difficulties have been the fact that for the first three months there are extreme growth spurts and feeding on demand becomes living without a t-shirt, stuck in sitting position with a guzzling baby always crying for more.

 I remember the three and six week ones with real horror. Thankfully I didn't cave in and switch to formula as the constant sucking is actually what makes the breasts produce more food as the baby grows. Bug is now a fat and healthy baby who breastfeeds at day and has a bottled of expressed milk in the evening as part of her bedtime routine (more about the pump later...).  In the last week or so I've added a combo rice/corn/tapioca cereal to her evening bottle, and she has a bit of mashed veg at lunch (carrot and courgette so far) which she loves. I'm lucky that this baby has no food issues apart from wanting to feed all the time, which i am slowly cutting down by having stricter meal times (yeah right). This means:

7AM Breakfast - Breastmilk at source
10.30 Mid-morning snack - Ditto

1PM Lunch - Breastmilk at source and a few teaspoons of mashed veg
4.00 Afternoon tea - Breastmilk at source
6.30 Evening snack - Ditto
8.30-9PM Supper - Bottle of breastmilk with cereal.

OK, I realise this is way too much, she should be on four meals a day but she desn't eat so much at each meal except the night bottle, because...

Sleep. This has been ,and still is to a certain extent, our big challenge. What I didn't realise was how often babies need to sleep. Every couple of hours when they're six months old and more than that when they're smaller (mine should be at about 1h45 at the moment!). For weeks, months, Bug was, unbeknownst to us, exhausted and would just scream and scream for hours driving me insane and all of us desperate. One way of calming her and getting her to sleep was to "titty her up". Let me explain.

For the first four and half months, except for rare occasions in the pushchair or baby-carrier, Bug would only fall asleep mid-feed, on her maternity cushion, on my lap, with a mouth full of nipple which I was sometimes able to slide out without causing her to wake up. And then, if I wanted her to sleep, I was stuck. For day naps I just sat there for an hour or so until my muscles spasmed and she'd wake up, but at night things were complicated. She would fall asleep lying on the cushion which is a long curved thing that wraps around my waist. Once knocked out (code MC - milky coma), I would gently recline and let Gorgeous Chook slide his hands under her, and start to lift her away from me.

Then performing incredible silent acrobatics in slow motion, holding her in exactly the same position she had fallen asleep in, we would glide across the flat to lay the sleeping beauty GENTLY into her cot. Nine times out of ten she would wake up at some point during this delicate procedure and we would be back to square one, having to "titty her up" to get her back to sleep. After a few months of this I decided it was easier to feed her in bed and sleep in sitting position in my own bed, sometimes waking Chook at ungodly hours to settle her (still in silent acrobat style) in her cot next to us. This worked better because she was in super-deep sleep, but not always.

Apart from being uncomfortable and back-deforming (I'm now a hunchback with chronic shoulder pain) it was also incredibly dangerous. SIDS, hellooo? I would wake up in the night, with Eleanor's feet sticking out of the crook in my elbow, her head buried somewhere between my tummy and the cushion. Or disppeared down the side of the cushion. Too much was too much and we decided to try sleep training.

Now, it's important to know that out there online there are websites and forums and blogs and everything dedicated to getting baby to sleep so I have no intention of trying to imitate what is already very well done. If you're really interested try this : how to successfully teach a baby to sleep. It's wonderful. Welcome to the world of CIO, PUPD, NF, BW and all of it.

Basically there are a million ways of getting baby to sleep: from let them cry it out (CIO) alone till they fall asleep, to hugging and cradling and whispering them to sleep, and anything in between.

We went for Ferber which was tough but wonderfully efficient. Ferber was the guy and this was his method: after a bedtime routine full of love and tenderness, checking that baby is fed, dry, tired and loved one leaves the baby to cry to sleep, though with frequent checks that become more few and far between.

We started when Bug was 4 and a half months old, on June 1st. It's not recommended for babies under 4-5 months and we had tried once before but very quickly aborted mission.So after a lovely bedtime routine of bath, change, story, feed, cuddle and night-night, we lay her down and shut the door.

You shut the door and let the baby cry to sleep with only brief checks every so often to reassure her that she's not being left to the wolves. It is absolutely awful as it can take up to an hour so Chook and I would just sit in the other room in silence, nursing triple whiskys and occasionnally whispering hoarsley "is it time to check on her yet?" (no, it's been three minutes). Horrible but efficient. She now conks out after five or ten minutes of slightly high-pitched whingeing. And sleeps till 6.30 usually.

Naps have been less successful; she is resisting and can scream up to an hour so I usually put her down for one nap like that and have another with the old "titty up method" on our bed. Still not ideal but at least nights are free, and one can blog again... 

So here we are introducing Eleanor

Wow! So half a year has passed since the Pacs and my last post. I was very pregnant at the time and thankfully haven't been for a while. Since January 16th in fact, the due date, when my beautiful daughter Eleanor was born. She's just turned 5 months and I am completely besotted, and this blog may quickly become an online altar to her glory and education. Oh well.

Having had a nightmare pregnancy it only seemed fair that the birth should go well but that was alas not the case. Of course you want the nitty-gritty so allow me.

The contractions started on the evening of the 15th and I had a sleepless night of shifting and rolling, while Chook filled up empty plastic bottles with hot water for literal if not authentic hot water bottles. The previous few days I had tottered around, climbing stairs and doing the sales but it seems I have a punctual baby and around half past six on the 16th we called my dear friend Jaj who had offered to drive us to the maternity.

Once there, about 7AM, I saw a midwife who was just nearing the end of her shift and who hesitated about sending me home. I didn't want to, so suggested they plunge me into a hot bath instead which they did. Lovely and I dozed a bit. in my labour room I sat on the big bouncy ball a bit, walked around, even went for hot chocolate in the cafetria,crippled by contractions every few minutes. 

At 12, having casually shrugged it off earlier, I started yelling for epidural, which I got with many subsequent top-ups; very nice and I actually snoozed stonedily most of the afternoon.All this time my contractions were regular (though no longer painful thanks to the wonders of medecine) and strong, and all my and the baby's vitals were bleeping away merrily. But the baby wasn't coming down and I wasn't dilating.

This situation didn't change so by late afternoon, my lovely midwife Nina who had been following me for about ten hours at this point, decided to pierce the water pouch (my waters hadn't broken, a consequence of the baby not pushing down). That happened well out of sight and as much as possible out of imagination, and... nothing. Nina mentioned that at this rate I might have to start thinking about a caesarian. It was about half past six when I told Chook to go and get some newspapers; it looked like a long night.

Hardly five minutes after he had left, about half a dozen people came into the room. All the machines were bleeping crossly this time- the baby was in cardiac arrest and it was caesarian. NOW. It's a bit of a blur from then. I remember people asking me for Chook's phone number. Bloody hell i can barely remember it when I'm sober and calm. Luckily, he came back very quickly. I started to shake uncontrollably, which didn't stop for hours and was rushed to the operation room. I remember very little except for Chook being a star and taking my mind off things by asking me practical questions such as who to send texts to. A few minutes later (I think), they dumped a red squirming squid on my neck and I having said hello, I told them to take it the hell away. I vomited and passed out. Voilà, I was a mother.

I spent five days at the maternity and remember them as five days of warm and cosy paradise as outside it snowed horribly as Paris experienced its most horrible winter for years. I learnt to hold and wash and feed Eleanor, had a procession of family (my parents and mother-in-law, specially over from Thailand) and friends come through, spent cosy time with baby & Chook whio was sleeping on a chair and hardly left our sides. A wonderful team of midwives at the Maternité des Bluets took care of me and the other mothers.

Eleanor was born on the Wednesday and we left on Monday, with difficulty as no friends or ambulances wanted to risk the icy roads home. In the end we took a taxi and, without a car seat, it was the most nerve-wracking ride of my life as I clutched my tiny baby to me without a seatbelt.

We got home and in the blink of an eye, five months have passed. From

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