Pregnant with number two?

Losing their cot to a new baby may be the least of their worries...who really needs preparing when a second baby is coming? 

When I met Bang, my firstborn, I changed. In fact changed doesn’t really cut it – I should say I became a woman-possessed. I was terrified, sleep-deprived, euphoric and falling in love in a way I never had before, all at once. He was my delight and I was your typical first-time Mum – overawed and overwhelmed. 

So when I found out I was pregnant with my second child when my son was only 8 months old, my already very over-amped brain started to meltdown. Basically I freaked out emotionally, which initially resulted in a very tempestuous new year’s eve ‘date night’ with hubby, and ended with me plagued with guilt and panic. ‘How was I going to explain what was happening to such a young child? What affects would this have on him? He already has to deal with me working 4 days a week and now this? Will he understand how much I still love him when I’m nursing another baby?’

I searched for books that explained being a big brother, I let him feel my belly and told him a bub was growing in there, I minimized all change for him a month prior to birth. We followed all the great practical advice out there* to a tee, even down to buying him a present from the new bub.

But I still struggled, how was I going to explain to a toddler that Mummy is going away and when she comes back she’ll have a baby with her a lot of the time?

Our new baby arrived and when I came home all I could think about was seeing my eldest, my heart broke as this little person, still only a baby himself ran towards me laughing and crying in his relief at my long-awaited return. The sleep deprivation that followed, coupled with watching my toddler struggle to understand why Mummy would disappear for hours with the baby created this emotionally strung out state that I existed in for months. Marked by constant guilt about not spending enough time with either child or sadness because I missed the exclusive time I used to have with my first. All the preparation in the world was not going to help my little boy if his Mummy was a wreck.

The fact is no explanation can fully prepare a toddler for the arrival of a new baby, and worse still it is going to cause them some painful jealousy. Penelope Leach writes ‘Imagine how you'd feel, for instance, if your husband came home one day and cheerfully announced the news of a second wife to you: "I'm bringing home a new wife soon, darling, because I thought it'd be nice for you to have some company. By the way, I'll need you to be a 'big girl' and help me take care of my young bride."’^ When you think about it in that sense it is completely normal that your child will feel hurt and confused by the displacement a new baby causes. What is really surprising is it can have a similar affect on Mothers too, as was the case with me.

Luckily with more sleep and time, things have settled down for our near-instant family of four. Bang still gets cheesed off if he wants me and I’m stuck feeding or changing Crash, but I’m the one who is calmer, which in turn makes both boys more content and secure. I have got used to the idea of two children now and managed to do what all my friends said would happen, that is, find as much love for my second child as I did my first.

But it didn’t happen over night, it took about six months, and all I can think is it may have happened sooner if I had been more prepared. If I had known the extent of the upheaval a new baby would cause to everyone, not just my toddler, I may have been able to relax a little more because the chaos and turmoil that ensues is completely normal.

So although the practical tips are so worth following I think the best way to prepare your toddler is by preparing yourself. If the 3 hours sleep a night, their jealousy and your heartache are no surprise then you may fare better than I did at maintaining a calm and stable environment for your child, making for a happier transition. No mean feat really!

*For fantastic practical tips for preparing your child for a baby brother or sister I liked:
Preparing your Toddler for the Arrival of a New Baby
10 ways to prepare your toddler for the new baby
^What can I do to prepare my toddler for our new baby? Penelope Leach

©My IdeaLife, 2011, All rights reserved

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Who's the party for, when they're still under four?

Nothing new to see here as am feeling guilty again *boring*. This time it's in addition to the usual suspects:
- telling off husband in front of the boys (swear words may or may not have been involved)
- ignoring not one but two whinging children for 20mins who had both awoken early from their afternoon naps
- rushing bedtime so I can sit down and relax

The list goes on but I'd rather you didn't lose the will to live, so the reason I'm feeling guilty today because I saw a photo of my boy looking at the party happening in front of him with a frown.

This was meant to be my birthday boy, at his party - enjoying himself. Doesn't look like it does it? Between rushing around getting people drinks and catching up I noticed that he was surveying the relatively 'out-of-control' scene a lot of the time rather than joining in. I wondered what he was thinking. A few things came to my guilty mind like, ‘Who are half these kids fighting over my toys?’ or ‘Why aren’t Marlowe or Helena from kindy here?’

It’s hard to admit but when I look back on this party there were only a few things that were really for him, namely the cake, that he adored (see below), the balloons, which you may have already heard about and the presents, which he is still enjoying. The rest was for adults, two in particular: his parents. It was a chance for us to catch up with friends, utilise our newly renovated backyard, and let our hair down, well as much as you can with two very little humans to sustain.

It made me rethink the whole party thing prior to the fourth birthday, and I was all ready to try this scrooge-like approach out on our second bub who’s not yet one. Then my hubby said "what about the photos? he’ll look back and say ‘Why didn’t you have any parties for me like you did for my brother?’” So in the spirit of equality I may have to have another fun adult event for a little person who may or may not enjoy it and will definitely not remember it. If I had my time again I think I’d probably alternate years and skip the two-year birthday. Or would I? He did love that cake and his smile was unmistakable when everyone sang him Happy Birthday...mmmnnnnnn.

What do you think? Are there better ways to celebrate when they’re under four?

Have your say on my Facebook Poll

© My IdeaLife 2011, All rights reserved

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How long is a piece of balloon string? and more importantly what colour?

My first baby boy turned two yesterday. TWO! I can't believe it's been two whole years since I met first met him, coughing and spluttering after being dragged into being. What a blur of love, tears, awe, wonderment and it seems balloon ribbon choices. It's with shame I admit I spent at least 3 minutes discussing the balloon ribbon colour with a long suffering, yet very patient, party warehouse employee. You see we threw my boy a bit of a do today and being who I am I wanted everything to be just so. 

The balloon ribbon conundrum basically went something like: 

LS Employee: Do you want to match the ribbon colour to the balloon?

Me: Errrr(pause length not commensurate with level of decision)rrrrrrrrr - matching... no wait, make that contrasting....actually no...can I do both?

LS Employee: Sure, we'll just choose the ribbon randomnly

Me: Sorry, I know this is a little tragic, but do most people choose matching ribbon?

LS Employee: No no it's probably more common but contrasting is often chosen (pause) but most people do choose one or the other. 

Me: Ok

LS Employee: One last question do you want metallic or matte ribbon?

Me(certain this time): Matte

LS Employee: Ok so will send you an email conf..

Me: Sorry, sorry I know this is probably very annoying and I can't believe I'm worried about the bloody balloon ribbon, I mean it's a two year old's party...

LS Employee: Don't worry I have a two year old too, I understand

Me: So I'm not being completely mental? 

LS Employee: No, no I know how you feel

Me: Thanks, well I think I'll go back to the contrasting ribbon only

LS Employee:  Ok done. 

Me: So yellow with blue, blue with red...

LS Employee: Yes that's right. 

The poor girl was obviously the consummate customer service person because in the face of my obvious neurosis she was completely lovely. Maybe she felt pity for me because despite her sharing motherhood of a two year old with me, she's never caught herself mulling over ribbon colour, let alone needing to specify what colour should go with what. I don't know - she was just nice in the face of my insanity. 

Anyway the balloons looked great, (needless to say they would have looked great with matching ribbon also). My son had a great time, and was still singing happy birthday to you before bed tonight. The kids played nicely for the majority of the time, there was only one poo incident and the cake was the most popular attraction of the day (in fact possibly worthy of it's own post). Even my hubby looked happy despite whinging about the cost of the event for weeks*.

As soon as the last guests left I of course took to my bed, well not straight away as had to put two other little worn out humans to bed first, I think it all was too much for me. 'It' of course, being the balloon ribbon choice. LOL.

Has anyone else taken the finer details of a party,
their child won't even remember, a little far?

*It only cost too much because of the gift (a Thomas play table and set) that my hubby actually chose - go figure!

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Time for Mother's Day

If someone asks me what’s the one thing in the whole world that I want for Mother's Day I wouldn’t hesitate: 

I want 24 hours to myself.

I can’t imagine the luxury of it, what a dream come true – all I would need is a hotel room with a kingsize bed, a bath, an internet connection and my own company.

Rewind three years and I wanted a whole raft of things, I wanted to earn big money and climb the corporate ladder, I wanted to have the latest designer clothes, I wanted a big house in the right suburb, I wanted to have a great body, I wanted to be popular and invited to exclusive events. I wanted to win awards and be famous within my industry. I wanted so much.

Now I’d be happy if I could shower every day. 

This basic desire got me thinking about time, ‘If only I had a few more hours a day, I could definitely fit in that evasive shower and god forbid a long hot bath’. Of course wishing for time is like wishing I could fly – it’s only going to happen in my dreams or so I thought? It turns out time can be slowed in a few ways:  

1. Hang out on a neutron star where the gravitational force is significantly stronger than on Earth,
2. Accelerate towards the speed of light OR 
3. Lay down richer memories

I'm no physicist so option 3. caught my attention. Scientists investigating whether people in danger actually experience time in slow motion, discovered that volunteers did perceive time as slower by about 30% during the experiment. ('Imagine what you could do with 30% more time?!' I marveled) 

Such time warping seemed to be an illusion caused by human memory. Researcher, David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine said the illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by."[i]

The irony of parenthood is that it is an incredibly rich source of memories and yet everyone talks of it flying by. Does that mean we are not recording the moments? Or do we need to throw ourselves out of a plane to scare ourselves slowly? I’m not about to risk my life to test this theory but I am definitely guilty of wishing time away, all the while desperate for it to slow down so I can get off for a minute.

Shot on location at Brown Brothers Winery, Victoria, 2005
I thought I was busy then...I wasn't.

So for Mother’s Day give me time:

Time to sleep

Time to play

Time to notice

Time to enjoy

Time to write

Time to read

Time to record the beautiful memories unfolding in front of me everyday

Time to slow down.

What do you want for Mother's Day?

[i] Why Time Seems to Slow Down in Emergencies
Charles Q. Choi, 11 December 2007, www.livescience.com
Copyright © 2011 My IdeaLife. All rights reserved.

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Oh to be Ita!

Like many in Australia I tuned in to the ABC’s Paper Giants on Sunday and Monday nights. I was born in the 70s and the footage of red rattlers~, paperboys selling at intersections, 20c tolls on the harbour bridge all brought back so many of my own childhood memories. Add to this the fact my Dad was a newspaper man, and for me the nostalgia of the series was like a beautiful warm blanket wrapped around what in essence was an amazing true story of a woman and mother: Ita Buttrose. No wonder I sat there mesmerised despite my sleep deprivation.

Putting the sentimentality of the series aside, one scene stuck in my mind. It was where Ita arrives home to her ultimately ungrateful, student husband after an obviously long and stressful day at work (picture all 6’2” of Kerry Packer in full flight yelling down at you) only to start dinner for him ‘Do you want onions with your steak?’ and then sit down to the sewing machine!

Now I have issues, namely two boys and a man, but none of my males expect this sort of service, thank goodness. So am I out there celebrating this fact? - no instead I’ve been having hormone-fueled meltdowns over things like having to settle both kids most nights or because my husband reads the paper on the weekend while shoveling cereal into our 2 year old, which is not my idea of great parenting. 

In fact the list of my grievances is quite long and I know the generation of women before me would probably not understand how or why given how relatively good I've got it. So I did some soul-searching as not so fond of the shouting fishwife lurking far too close to the surface. What I discovered was that expectations are the root of all evil.

I grew up naively thinking that men and women were equal and I expected my husband to be my equal partner in parenthood. So I went to university, I focused on my career, I learnt how to change tyres and the oil on a car, I went overseas by myself, I climbed the corporate ladder. On paper there was no clue that my resume was that of a female’s.

Then I fell pregnant and went on maternity leave. Surprisingly the birth, the obvious gender difference in all this, had nothing on becoming a mum. Fatherhood and motherhood I discovered are entirely different experiences.

Consider these facts about my husband:

• He can sleep through a house-trembling, vomit-producing, full volume baby's cry
• He feels no guilt about leaving the room for 40 minutes without explanation of where he is going while I’m left baby and a toddler either side of me – and it’s the weekend!
• He has never been a father before but he is entirely confident that every scream from an under 18mth old is teeth and therefore can be easily dismissed with panadol
• As soon as his head hits the pillow and sometimes before, usually during a conversation, he falls asleep

Conversely:

• I’m unable to fall asleep without first running through a checklist of room temperatures, locked doors, open windows, charged monitors
• A crying baby literally makes my stomach churn, let alone wakes me up
• I can’t make a decision without first thinking of someone else's well being, god forbid I just go out and have time to myself. 

No wonder I’m mad (in all senses of the word).

Don’t get me wrong; my husband is by all accounts amazing. He’s one of the ‘nice’ guys: honest and hardworking and always willing to help. He even makes an effort to come home early from work, and the best part is he’s more obsessed with household chores than I am.

So does this generation of women expect the wrong things from their husbands?

Should we be content that our husband's role is fundamentally different but equally as valuable to the family?

At the very least I feel there needs to be an adjunct to the women's liberation message. I would hate to see another generation of girls growing up thinking that men are their equals in every way including parenthood when there are differences that mean you probably will take more time out from your career, you probably will earn less as a result, you probably will get less sleep when your children are babies and you’ll probably also get less leisure/alone time. In fact your world will probably be turned upside down and inside out and your husband’s will just shift a little to the right.

I’m not ungrateful to the Germaine Greers of this world; in fact I am completely indebted to them. I would have stabbed myself in the eye if cooking and cleaning while attached to  a sewing machine were expected of me. I also know that women’s liberation allows us to make decisions that do make us very close to equal if we choose. What they didn’t say though is that most of us would do this carrying around truckloads of guilt, resulting in a woman that is equal on the outside while beating herself up on the inside.

It seems there's no getting away from the differences between fathers and mothers, as research* shows the relational strength of the female brain is in stark contrast to the systematic male brain, in part caused by a combination of differences in neural brain structure and hormones. In layman’s terms: men can’t hear a human voice when a team is running around a field kicking a piece of air-filled leather, and women can’t not hear every voice, emotion, vibe, raised eyebrow within a 50m radius, not counting social media.

This doesn’t mean I am comfortable watching someone as brilliant as Ita Buttrose perform the role of full-time housewife and breadwinner, on the contrary. I just know I would be less agitated day-to-day if I hadn’t walked into parenthood with the expectation that my husband and I would equally share the mundane and exhausting tasks required to maintain a family. We don't and that doesn’t make me unliberated it just means I have a brain of the empathising kind* and he has a systematic one and you can guess who drew the short straw, well for now anyway. 

Please don’t slap me Ita! 

Would you like Motherhood more if you'd been prepared for
the gender inequality involved?

~ Red rattlers were the old trains that were around in the 70s - they were way past their use by date as had been in service for at least 20 yrs!
* They just can’t help it, Simon Baron-Cohen, The Guardian, April 17, 2003

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More sleep=less madness

It's amazing what a difference some sleep makes! So many mothers who have been there and done the two kids hellishly close together have kept telling me 'there is light at the end of the tunnel'. Well I think I am catching a glimpse of said light - hurrah! 

My sleep deprivation deprived me of so much more than sleep. Namely the ability to see anything clearly or logically, especially the new little human being growing up so quickly in front of me. In any case I felt obliged to write again so that all those poor women expecting their second won't curl up in a ball and start rocking after reading my first post. 

To you I say it has it's ups and downs and you may get a bub that happily sleeps from 11pm to 6am from 5wks like some in my mum's group have. Basically it is not as bad as I've made it sound - for some it is better, for some worse. Whatever your situation it is always more manageable on 5-6hrs sleep.

So lately my resentment has just faded and is being replaced by as strong a love as I have for my eldest. I can now see the positive side of all those negatives, even my husband made me laugh yesterday (!!!)  So all is well with the world again...until the next sleep-deprived night and subsequent brain snap hits. (Suddenly that scene in 'Parenthood' about the roller coaster makes sense).

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