Baby regrets... "I wish I'd..."

For some reason, I have all these regrets about her little newborn hands and feet. They were so tiny and precious. I wish I'd made prints of them in ink, gradually getting bigger over the weeks and months. And I wish I'd taken some film footage showing the way she used to move her little hands about when she was a newborn... they were always fluttering and opening and closing and spreading like little starfish in the sea, as if they were marveling at the freedom of the open air. In fact, I wish I'd filmed all sorts of things when she was tiny... like the way she used to make suckling movements with her lips when she slept, and how floppy her head was. I didn't even discover our new camera had a film button until she was two months old (yeah, I know). Now all those little newborn movements are long gone and I only have my memories.

Like all parents, I wasted a fair bit of money on things she didn't like. I spent a fortune on a beautiful Mio baby hammock. She hated it, and I was too nervous to use it what with the earthquake aftershocks and all (I gave birth on 12 March in Tokyo, about 16 hours after the earthquake). Oh well, at least I got a couple of beautiful pictures of her in it. She didn't like the mesh feeder or the swaddle blanket either.

I wish I had actually packed my hospital bag well in advance. The morning my waters broke I still had half my stuff scattered all over the living room. "No need to finish packing it just yet. Everyone knows first babies are always late," I had thought. Ha.

Oh, and I wish I'd depilated my legs beforehand--or rather, got a proper all-over waxing job at a salon. God knows what my obstetrician thought of me.

I wish I'd given Little Seal Vitamin D drops. She has never had any signs of Vitamin D deficiency, but still it might have been a good idea.

I wish I'd bought a proper camera as soon as I got pregnant and taken lots more bump shots. I don't regret not getting a belly mould though... that's just weird.

I wish I hadn't flipped out so badly when she had colic between 5 and 10 weeks. I did and said some very silly things which I am extremely embarrassed about now (so embarrassed that I'm not even going to say what they are). Turns out Mum was right. They do grow out of it.

I think my choice of pram (a Maclaren XT) was basically a very good one in almost all respects, but I wish I'd chosen something with a rear-facing option. I remember Little Seal being quite frightened of the pram sometimes when she was little and was being wheeled about in busy, crowded city streets, unable to see my face, and I'm sure it's contributed to her dislike of the buggy even now. It would be lovely to be able to go for a walk together and communicate face-to-face while I also get a bit of much-needed exercise. I actually use the sling a lot, even these days, but it would be nice to change it up and use the pram too. (And anyone who wants to snark on mothers who want to put their toddlers in a rear-facing buggy can go jump in a lake. Seriously. Some of us have jobs, and face-to-face time with our toddlers is a precious commodity).

I wish I'd bought more slings while Little Seal was tiny. I had no idea just how much I was going to be using carriers... a lot, as it turned out. While I think my chosen carriers (Beco Gemini and Beco Butterfly) were really, really good ones, I think it would have been fun to have a couple of mei tais in there as well. And a ring sling! Buckle carriers like the Beco aren't really ideal for a newborn, in my opinion. And it might have been fun to get into wrapping. Yes, I know wraps are really granola-looking, but they are also really pretty and interesting.

Oh, and I wish I'd bought a babywearing coat too. Turns out it would have been a good investment. I hate having to walk around inside an overheated shop in winter with my coat on because Little Seal  is strapped on on top.

Knowing what I did now, I wish I'd been just a little more conscientious about getting a tad more solid food inside her. I was pretty good about choosing iron/zinc-rich foods for her for the most part (even then I was highly suspicious of the breastmilk-is-all-they-ever-need mentality prevalent online), but I do also remember lots of lazy days when I just plugged her into the boob and surfed the web, and at mealtimes just chucked bananas and rice cakes (which she didn't always eat) in her general direction. Hmmm. Oh, and I wish I'd been a bit more careful about oral hygiene and not passing on dental-caries-causing bacteria--I cringe now to think that I actually prechewed some meat for her once or twice. I know they all get colonized by these unpleasant bacteria eventually, but it surely makes sense to keep it away from their mouths as long as possible.

I wish I'd had Little Seal's cord clamping delayed. At the time, the benefits were in doubt and there was some concern about an increased risk of jaundice (which now appears to be unfounded).

I wish I'd tried Baby Sign. Not because of any of the (dubious) benefits that are sometimes claimed for it, but because it would have been so cute. And cool. And interesting. I've heard of babies as young as four months signing "milk" in their sleep... magical.

I wish I hadn't driven both of us crazy with trying to get her to accept a bottle, when in retrospect it really wasn't necessary at all (note: this was for me in my situation. For most breastfeeding mothers, life will be a lot easier and pleasanter if the baby will drink from a bottle). If I had another baby in similar circumstances--i.e, working from home and using at-home childcare for the first nine months at least--I would probably not even bother with the bottles, and just go straight to cup-feeding and start solids at 4-5 months.

I wish I'd kept a more detailed account of the pregnancy and birth and the first year.

And just briefly... a few things I'm glad I did:

I'm glad I didn't spend money on little clothes and toys, because people give them to you anyway, and I needed my money for other things (like the hospital).
I'm glad I read baby books during my pregnancy rather than pregnancy books (pregnancy takes care of itself, mostly; if it doesn't, you need to see a doctor, not read a book about it. But babies.... well, you don't have so much time for reading once you've got a newborn, let's face it).
I'm glad I prioritized sleep from the start, and that I got tough and nightweaned at 8 months.
I'm glad I started the potty early, since this is now really starting to pay off.
I'm glad I chose a really good hospital, with nice food and nice nurses and great breastfeeding support. Even though it was damned expensive.

And I'm really glad that I breastfed, even though I was slightly ambivalent about the idea when I was pregnant. I know that the pros and cons of different feeding methods work out differently for us all, but for me, breastfeeding has turned out to be one of the best mothering decisions I ever made--largely problem-free, healthy, convenient and cheap, not to mention emotionally fulfilling, empowering and just plain cool (my body producing life-sustaining food for an infant... how amazing is that?) And it's that feeling, ultimately, that keeps me passionate about the subject and blogging about it here.

How to have a bottle-refusing baby (and a life)

Before I had my baby 16 months ago, I was quite clear on one thing: if I breastfed her (and I wasn't yet sure which way I would swing), she was going to take a bottle. Oh yes, she would. I had no desire to join the dreaded ranks of the Mothers Whose Babies Will Not Take A Bottle. I'd read all the stories, you see--about how a bottle-refusing baby irrevocably ruined your entire life, chaining you to your infant night and day and ensuring that you never had a evening-out or date night ever again. I was horrified by such stories, but not terribly sympathetic. Really, these sad excuses for mothers had only themselves to blame for not introducing a bottle properly at the right time. Or maybe they did introduce a bottle in time, but then failed to follow up on it. Tut tut. Apart from anything else, how utterly irresponsible, I sniffed--what if they suddenly had to be hospitalized and the poor husband had no means of getting milk into the baby? I, by contrast, was going to do things properly.

And so I carefully introduced bottles--beautiful, carefully selected glass bottles--at five weeks, as per The Sleep Lady. Baby Seal took them like a dream and I congratulated myself on my superior mothering skills. I now had the ideal breastfeeding-yet-bottle-accepting baby who would allow me to leave her, when desired, with Dad or Grandma--though, if pressed, I would have been forced to admit that keeping my baby primed and ready for such occasions was actually a heck of a lot of work.

You see, the Sleep Lady stipulated a rule of "one bottle a day" to make sure that baby did not lose her bottle-latching skills. This meant that in addition to breastfeeding and babycare, I had to find time to sterilize the pump (carefully gripping each piece with tongs while pouring boiling water though it), set the pump up, mechanically wheeze the milk out drop by drop, store it, sterilize the bottle parts with more boiling water, screw the bottle together, fill it with milk and warm it. Then there was the business of trying to find a time-slot for fitting the bottle-feeding into the daily routine. As Baby Seal's bedtime became earlier, my husband was no longer home in time to give her an evening bottle, so I began to give it myself.

Perhaps that's where the trouble began. At any rate, at three months old, Baby Seal began to refuse her carefully prepared bottles. In horror, I posted on Facebook "She's stopped taking the bottle!!! HELP." Everyone weighed in with suggestions (from giving the bottle out of doors, to rolling the teat in icing sugar) all of which I duly followed--to no avail. My pliant little bottle-accepter was gone, and she never took one again... well, not until she was nine months old and bottles were no longer necessary anyway. Bit of a climbdown for me, as you can imagine.

And... it was okay. We managed--just about--without bottles. Not always very conveniently or efficiently, it's true (I moaned about the problems of my little bottle-refuser here). And yet, somehow, we got through it and came out the other side.

Needs
As it turns out, bottles are not absolutely indispensable for getting milk into a baby without a breast. Over the millennia, a variety of things from spoons to droppers to cups have been used for the purpose. So why the ubiquity of bottles? Well, the big advantage of bottles over other feeding methods is that they are a way of getting a lot of milk into a baby with relative speed and without wastage. If you are looking to get large quantities of milk into a baby sans breast, then a bottle is what you need. If speed/efficiency/quantity are less important--because you are, say, a stay-at-home/work-at-home mother or on mat leave and you only need to leave your baby for the odd evening out, the hairdresser's, doctor's appointments and so on, a bottle may not be essential and could even be more trouble than it's worth.
When it became clear that bottles were simply not going to work, I girded my loins and went to internet to learn about alternative feeding methods. Over the next few months our family ended up doing a mixture of dropperfeeding, cupfeeding and spoonfeeding (milk and cereal); no method was perfect, each method had its own advantages. On preparing to leave the house without the baby, I would basically defrost a container of breastmilk, sterilize a spoon, dropper, and cup, and say to Dad/Grandma, "Erm, your guess is as good as mine. Try lots of stuff and see what works." Here's my rundown.

• Dropperfeeding

This method suggested itself from the dropper I'd used to give Baby Seal her Infacol. I know, I know--feeding milk in a dropper sounds like it is going to really, really, really slow. In fact, for this particular purpose, droppers should really be named "squirters" because you put the milk in one squirt at a time, not literally drop by drop. Slowish, but not nearly as bad as it sounds, and less messy than some other methods.

To give Baby Seal a dropper feed, we would put her in her bouncy chair facing us. It's a funny thing, but when breastfed babies are being fed milk from anything other than a breast--a dropper, spoon, cup or bottle--they tend to prefer the whole experience to be as different from nursing as possible; different posture, different part of the room, and often from someone who's not the mother. It's as if anything that reminds them of breastfeeding makes them furious--"Look, I know this isn't real breastfeeding... do you take me for a fool??" Anyway, we started off with a few drops at a time, then increased to half a dropperfull, then a full dropperfull. I found a video here, but honestly, there is no special technique to dropperfeeding--it's just insert and squirt. Any medicine dropper will do.

• Cupfeeding

Baby Seal came to cupfeeding rather late--at four months, she grabbed the rice cooker measuring cup and put it to her mouth with a cheeky grin... and I had an "Aha!" moment. The best way to learn how to cupfeed is to see it in action--thank you, Youtube.
Shot glasses are the most popular cupfeeding option, but I used either the aforementioned rice cooker cup (which had a little "give" in it), or a tiny Japanese teacup. The trick with cupfeeding (and this flummoxed me for ages until I worked it out) is to get the baby's tongue inside the cup. You're not actually pouring the milk into her mouth, because if you do this, she will splutter and gag; you need the baby to use her tongue to sip or lap the milk from the cup.
I found cupfeeding faster than dropperfeeding, but at the expense of more wasted milk. When this is breastmilk you've spent forever carefully expressing and storing, that's hard (could this be the true origin of the old saying about crying over spilt milk?). After five months old when Baby Seal was having solids anyway, I made sure there was some ready-made formula knocking about in the house, which made it a bit psychologically easier to experiment with different ways of giving milk.

• Spoonfeeding

Spoonfeeding breastmilk struck me as being the slowest and messiest method of the three mentioned thus far--Baby Seal always seemed to have a lot coming out of her mouth, perhaps due to the tongue-thrust reflex--yet my mother-in-law and mother seemed to prefer it to other methods. I guess it comes down to familiarity--grandmas are usually accustomed to spoonfeeding babies. Which leads me to....

• Cereals

If a baby is at least four months old and you've been spoonfeeding breastmilk anyway, adding a little baby cereal like baby rice or oatmeal can be a nice, not-overthinking-it start to solid foods. It stabilizes the breastmilk and makes it less messy to feed, while also giving your baby a little extra iron... and there has recently been a swing back towards emphasising supplementary iron for breastfed babies. Now... I know I mentioned this in another post, but the funny thing about a lot of lactivists is that they think spoonfeeding breastmilk is great--like a kind of superior alternative to the evil bottle--but that spoonfeeding solid foods is a Bad Thing (forcefeeding, doesn't allow your child to control their food intake, blah blah). So according to this logic, the moment you add a little powdered rice to a spoonfull of breastmilk, your baby suddenly becomes incapable of controlling their intake of what's on the spoon, and you are essentially just waterboarding them with the contents. No, I'm not buying that bit of logic either. We did the cereal thing, and offered a couple of teaspoons of water as well, to counterbalance the solids that had been added.

• Sippies

I had high hopes that Baby Seal might take to a sippy cup super-early; alas, she hated every sippy I tried on her for the longest time. She even hated the soft-spout type which are recommended for young babies. Still, it's worth giving them a try; I've heard of bottle-refusers taking a sippy as early as four months.

It doesn't last forever
So in the end, it was okay. I got out without the baby; somehow, with a bit of this and a bit of that, Baby Seal got enough milk inside her.
Now, I should stress, however, that I'm speaking from the privileged position of someone who was able to take six months' mat leave and then work from home while using in-house childcare. If a mother is going to work outside the home in the usual way, a bottle-refusing baby is far more of an issue, which is why (as discussed in a previous post) it drives me nuts when I see lactivists disingenuously advising planning-to-return-to-work mothers to wait for two or three months before introducing a bottle, or even not bother at all. With the best will in the word, babies are not going to get huge amounts of milk inside them with these methods, so if we are talking about a baby who is at a daycare nursery much of the day, suggesting to mothers that they don't bother with the bottle and instead just have their baby fed with an open cup or spoon is basically tantamount to telling mothers to encourage their babies to reverse cycle--a phenomenon which sometimes occurs with breastfed babies of working mothers, whereby the baby eats next-to-nothing all day and then makes up for it by clusterf*ck-feeding all night long. Which some mothers may be okay with, and others most definitely are not. That's even assuming you can get a daycare nursery to handle cupfeeding with a baby in the first place.

However, if you are, say, planning to leave your baby only for the odd evening out or whatever, having a bottle-refuser is a nuisance but not a disaster. Although I do generally rather hate the hoary platitude "This, too, shall pass," this is one of those instances where it does have the ring of truth. Most new mothers aren't doing much in the way of evenings-out for the first month or so after the birth anyway; and then at four to six months you start solids and the feeds start getting fewer and further apart; at seven or eight months baby may start taking a sippy cup, and so on, and the whole situation starts to look completely different. So in the great scheme of things, the time that having a bottle-refusing baby will inconvenience you is really, at most, only a few short months out of your entire life. And even during this period, honestly, you can go out without your baby when you want to--it's just a bit more fiddly and involves rather more spilt milk.

And there is a bright side to having a bottle refuser. At least you don't have to wean them off the wretched bottle if they never take to one in the first place (same with pacifiers). And to be honest, yes, going straight to an open cup probably is more hygienic, and better in terms of palate development and dental health.

In hindsight
Knowing what I do now... if I were to have another baby in similar circumstances, would I bother with the bottles this time? Well... I think would certainly introduce one like I did with Baby Seal--it's worth a try, at least. But I think that this time I wouldn't put myself through all that exhausting palaver of the daily bottle; it was just.so.much.work and I'm really not sure it was worth it. And if my hypothetical second child were to start refusing the bottle like Baby Seal, I 'm pretty sure that this time I wouldn't waste energy on fighting with her over the issue. I would just remind myself that the inconvenience of the bottle-refusing baby doesn't really last very long, and that in the meantime there is nothing more adorably precocious than the sight of a young baby drinking from a teeny little teacup.

Cups: the new bottles

This morning, I've been packing up Baby Seal's teeny-tiny baby stuff to give to a friend-of-a-friend who is expecting twins. Oh, the little tiny shirts and babygrows (could she really have ever fitted inside those?). The Miracle Blanket I could never figure out how to use. The Japanese diaper covers that I innocently used with the tabs the wrong way round for the first month.

And then there were the bottles--unused, because these were the ones I had bought in a fit of desperation when she was three months old and had decided that bottles were evil. "Buy lots of different bottles and try them out," I was advised when I posted online for tips. I did. She refused to let any of them near her mouth. After a few sessions that felt more like attempts at waterboarding than anything else, I gave up, encouraged by online voices pointing out that you could spoonfeed breastmilk in the meantime, and that babies could take cups as early as six months. My mother, however, was dismayed when I said I was going straight to cups. "They don't drink as much from cups. And babies need to suck; it's a comfort thing for them." Hmmm... my baby seemed to find bottlefeeding more of a battleground than a comfort zone, but there you are...

Of course, babies being what they are, when I took Baby Seal back to my parents' place for a visit at 9 months old she found a dusty old bottle lying at the back of a drawer and started sucking on it, whereupon my mother filled it up with water and gave it to her. "Look, she's drinking from a bottle!" said my mother triumphantly. "Bit pointless now, though," I pointed out, since she was getting towards the age when you are supposed to be getting them off the bottle anyway. "Nonsense," said my mother. "Babies like bottles! Look at your sister's kids--they continued to have a bottle as part of the bedtime ritual till they were over two! I don't know why you girls nowadays seem to want to get rid of the bottles in such a hurry."

There does seem to be more a move nowadays towards nixing bottles early or skipping them altogether and moving to sippy cups within the first year--not necessarily out of dire necessity because baby is a bottle-hater, but as a choice among formula feeders and breastfeeders whose babies take bottles happily. I wonder why that is. Maybe sippies are better designed nowadays--the soft-spout ones, for example, are less intimidating to a younger baby. I suppose many parents are also attracted by the unspoken rule that you need to sterilize bottles but not sippies.

But perhaps another reason is the kind of vague stigma that seems to have attached itself to bottles in general. Take, for example, the bizarre outcry in New Zealand over All Black player Piri Wipu appearing in a public health advert in which he hed his six-month-old from a bottle; the fact that we don't even know what's in the bottle, the fact that men can't breastfeed, dammit, the fact that the baby was six months old and most breastfed babies that age are having at least the occasional bottle or sippy, didn't stop the NZ La Leche League spazzing over the fact that a (dum dum DAHHH) bottle was being shown in an advert.

There's no doubt that among some of the more extreme lactivist circles, bottles themselves seem to be regarded with deep suspicion, hedged about with lots of "Well, if you absolutely must abandon your precious infant to some boobless freak of a co-parent leave baby with your husband..." and talk about the wonders of cup-, syringe-, dropper-, finger- or spoon-feeding breastmilk into baby's mouth instead (the funny thing is that many of the same people who are adamantly opposed to spoonfeeding solid food are convinced that this is a superior way to administer breastmilk). All these methods certainly have a place as a temporary way to feed a baby while you are getting breastfeeding established, or as a last resort if your baby is convinced that bottles are instruments of torture (raises hand), but I've seen more than one lactivist advocate using these feeding methods long-term, as an alternative to the bottle. As someone who had to ask her long-suffering mother-in-law to mess around with spoon-feeding and cup-feeding breastmilk, all I can say is that the advantages of such methods can be overstated <Yours Truly pauses to black out hideous memories of her screaming baby thrashing about demonically and knocking containers of painstakingly expressed liquid gold all over the floor>. Can you imagine finding a non-family member willing to do this?

Of course, the inefficiency of such methods is probably the whole point, since the basic thinking of Jack Newman and his ilk seems to be that preferably your baby will be consuming almost nothing at daycare anyway, and making up for it by nursing all night long instead, but that's a subject for another post. Given that the Jack Newman page I linked to also suggests a movie theater for an ideal first outing with baby (good Gawd), and hints grimly that if your teenager is surly about spending time with the rest of the family it's probably because you left her with a babysitter and a bottle to go to a wedding or something when she was a few months old, I'll be taking his views with a pinch of salt.... and advising my new friend-of-a-friend that whatever feeding method she chooses for her twinsies, getting them used to a bottle early on is a good idea.