Sunday Jamie turned 1 month old, so we had a little photo shoot. Here are a few of the best:
And some of the outtakes:
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
routine...what routine?
You always hear people talking about getting into a routine with your baby. I'm not sure at what stage this is supposed to start, but we're not there yet. My day is more or less dictated by Jamie's hunger levels. I'm still breastfeeding at the moment, and as much as I'd like to have a say in his feeds--he pretty much needs to eat when he's hungry or there will be no peace in this house. I'm attempting to try to get him to eat, then have some awake/play time, then sleep. This does not always work. Several books recommend this method as the precursor to sleeping through the night eventually, but it's not always that easy. Sometimes it works beautifully, but usually only for one portion of the day. Other times he eats-plays-eats-sleeps or eats-sleeps-eats or this morning (at 5:30am!) he played-slept-played-slept-ate-played-slept. These are all in 2-4 hour cycles. During the night, he's supposed to eat-sleep-eat-sleep-eat-sleep and then eat-play-sleep at the start of the morning.
The past couple weeks, from about 6pm onwards he has been eating nearly every other hour until bed and then it takes a long time for him to actually get to sleep. I think he's overeating and then overtired, and using the feeds for comfort. We were probably 'bad' parents and held him too much while he napped when we should be putting him down in his Moses basket. So I've decided to try to be a little more strict (well try to anyway). It's very easy to just let him sleep on me during the day--I mean he's just so cute when he sleeps-and I've just about managed to work out how to position him so I can still use the laptop and reach the remote at the same time. But I am vowing now to be more disciplined and make every attempt to try to get him to sleep in his basket. We're also going to introduce a new bedtime routine and make the last feed of the day an expressed bottle feed which Paul can do. We tried this last night for the first time and he did drink from the bottle (he had refused it the only other time I tried), but he didn't go down straight after-he needed a lot of holding/rocking/shushing, but once he did, he then slept for a solid 4 hours and then fed fairly quickly at 3:30 and went straight back to sleep, when usually it takes him 60-90 minutes of eating/dozing before he will go back to sleep. I am really hoping to establish some good habits before it gets too late and becomes really hard to break the bad habits. We will see. I've already let him break the pattern today as I couldn't keep him awake after his mid morning feed...
Guilty parents:
The past couple weeks, from about 6pm onwards he has been eating nearly every other hour until bed and then it takes a long time for him to actually get to sleep. I think he's overeating and then overtired, and using the feeds for comfort. We were probably 'bad' parents and held him too much while he napped when we should be putting him down in his Moses basket. So I've decided to try to be a little more strict (well try to anyway). It's very easy to just let him sleep on me during the day--I mean he's just so cute when he sleeps-and I've just about managed to work out how to position him so I can still use the laptop and reach the remote at the same time. But I am vowing now to be more disciplined and make every attempt to try to get him to sleep in his basket. We're also going to introduce a new bedtime routine and make the last feed of the day an expressed bottle feed which Paul can do. We tried this last night for the first time and he did drink from the bottle (he had refused it the only other time I tried), but he didn't go down straight after-he needed a lot of holding/rocking/shushing, but once he did, he then slept for a solid 4 hours and then fed fairly quickly at 3:30 and went straight back to sleep, when usually it takes him 60-90 minutes of eating/dozing before he will go back to sleep. I am really hoping to establish some good habits before it gets too late and becomes really hard to break the bad habits. We will see. I've already let him break the pattern today as I couldn't keep him awake after his mid morning feed...
Guilty parents:
Happy baby:
Monday, 19 April 2010
Jamie on his playmat
So I've finally made my first short video with my new camera. To be honest, it's not that exciting as Jamie is a little young to actually interact with his playmat, but he's focusing a lot more and is aware of it. He also gave you a little 'present' during the filming, which I chose not to edit out and I hope you find it amusing!
Thursday, 15 April 2010
life as a new mother...
...leaves you little time to blog.
I wish I had a bit more time to write about about how things werer going, but it seems if I'm not feeding or comforting sweet little Jamie, then I'm frantically trying to get something done that's been on my to-do list for at least two days. Blogging, sadly has fallen down the list of priorities. Over the last week, though, we seem to have reached a little bit of a routine from morning to late afternoon (evenings are a different story), so hopefully, once I knock off a few more of my to-do's, then I will have some time for some morning blogging.
Jamie is doing very well. We went to see the health visitor today and he had his hearing checked and was weighed for the first time since day 5. I'm proud to say he's a healthy little chap with good hearing. He's up to 8lb 4oz, up a pound and a half from his birth weight. He's definitely been eating like a champ, so I'm not surprised. He has been feeding like a crazy man in the evenings, which actually means I get a couple decent blocks of sleep at night. We usually go to bed around 11 or so and then he wakes up around 2, feeds for an hour, and then again at 5:30 or 6, and then feeds for another hour. Tomorrow I'm going to try expressing for the first time so Paul can have a chance at one of the multiple(!) evening feeds.
Speaking of evening feeds, he's just starting to fuss for one, but I thought I'd share our Flickr site where we're trying(!) to upload some of the better photos of Jamie. We have a premium subscription to the site so you can download the full res versions of the photos if you want to print any of them. We will try harder to take and upload more photos, but it's another thing like blogging, that is a bit harder than I expected!!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwoodward/sets/72157623625531237/
I wish I had a bit more time to write about about how things werer going, but it seems if I'm not feeding or comforting sweet little Jamie, then I'm frantically trying to get something done that's been on my to-do list for at least two days. Blogging, sadly has fallen down the list of priorities. Over the last week, though, we seem to have reached a little bit of a routine from morning to late afternoon (evenings are a different story), so hopefully, once I knock off a few more of my to-do's, then I will have some time for some morning blogging.
Jamie is doing very well. We went to see the health visitor today and he had his hearing checked and was weighed for the first time since day 5. I'm proud to say he's a healthy little chap with good hearing. He's up to 8lb 4oz, up a pound and a half from his birth weight. He's definitely been eating like a champ, so I'm not surprised. He has been feeding like a crazy man in the evenings, which actually means I get a couple decent blocks of sleep at night. We usually go to bed around 11 or so and then he wakes up around 2, feeds for an hour, and then again at 5:30 or 6, and then feeds for another hour. Tomorrow I'm going to try expressing for the first time so Paul can have a chance at one of the multiple(!) evening feeds.
Speaking of evening feeds, he's just starting to fuss for one, but I thought I'd share our Flickr site where we're trying(!) to upload some of the better photos of Jamie. We have a premium subscription to the site so you can download the full res versions of the photos if you want to print any of them. We will try harder to take and upload more photos, but it's another thing like blogging, that is a bit harder than I expected!!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwoodward/sets/72157623625531237/
Monday, 5 April 2010
Happy Easter!
Yesterday was Jamie's first Easter and also our first outing. We went to church in the morning. Jamie was a perfect angel and slept through the entire service and the coffee/tea/chatting afterwards. He wasn't as perfect for the rest of the afternoon, but Paul took care of him while mommy had a nap. In the evening, I made him his first Easter cake:
It's a carrot cake with butter cream icing. The fur is coconut and the face is made of marshmallows, raisins and a cranberry. I got the idea off allrecipes.com. He didn't get to eat any of course. We saved it for lunch today with our friends Rob and Eilidh.
He also got his first Easter present on Saturday from our friend, Anna: a little yellow ducky that quacks:
I think he'll enjoy it more when he's a bit older! Mom and dad like it though! Mary and Anna came to pay us a visit on Saturday. Jamie likes to show off his good behaviour for his guests. All our visitors so far have seen him pretty much just sleep. It would be great if he was like that more for mommy and daddy. It's a good thing he's so darn cute!
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Jamie's first starring role
Big thanks to Sam (Paul's brother) for making this little video of our little baby:
Sweet Baby James from Sam Woodward on Vimeo.
Sweet Baby James from Sam Woodward on Vimeo.
The birth
I thought I'd post a little (well probably a lot) about the birth of little Jamie. It was an intense couple of days, but I know people are probably wondering what happened and why I had to have a caesarean. This will probably be a lot more detail than some people want to know about, so I thought I'd warn you in advance. My friend Jill did this and which she said she found very therapuetic and I am sure I'll find the same.
I had my sweep Monday morning and as I posted, I had progressed over the weekend, probably thanks in part to that awful Norovirus, which well and truly got my guts moving, just like they say spicy food should do. Nothing much happened during Monday, but Tuesday morning I woke up and I realized that I had started contractions. They started about 10-20 minutes apart and not very painful. Throughout the day they became closer and more painful. Paul had gone to work, and he wasn't sure when he should come home and I said to wait a bit, but after about an hour his boss said "What the f* are you still doing here, go home" and so he did. I mostly hung out with my mom during the day and watched tv when I could to try to distract myself. I was also using a TENS machine throughout the day for pain relief, which basically sends through little electrical pulses through electrode pads on my back between contractions, and when I start having a contraction, I push a little boost button which causes the pulse to become continuous until I depress when the contraction is over. In retrospect, I'm not really sure it did much, other than signal to everyone else when the contraction started and ended. I think it did give me something to focus on, but perhaps it caused me to focus too much on each contraction. I didn't really sleep much during the day as I was afraid I'd slow down the process. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake. I spent a lot of the day pacing the house, trying to get them moving along. Here's a photo of me with my TENS and a gingernut:
Most of the late afternoon and evening my contractions were 6-8 minutes apart, lasting for about 90 seconds. The hospital don't really want you coming onto the ward until your 3-4 minutes apart, lasting 90 seconds and are painful. We called to update them a few times and they encouraged us to stay home as long as possible. Around midnight that night, they were getting closer to 4-5 minutes apart and quite painful, and I was sick once with the pain, so I decided it was time to go in. My mom, Paul and I went in. We had our own room and the midwife asked us a few questions, took my blood pressure and disappeared for a long time. She said she was going to assign me a midwife (she was the head midwife on duty), but we're not really sure what happened with that. She came back a while later and asked me how things were going. Contractions had sped up and were more painful, she did an internal and said I was only at 2 cm. She said I wasn't that far along, so I could either go home or go to the maternity ward (where you're in a room with 3 others) and see if I progressed there. At this point it was 4:30am, and I was so exhausted (as were Paul and mom), that we decided to go home, hoping the contractions would go crazy on the way home and we could turn around and come back. Not the case...
When we got home we all were so wiped that we slept for a bit. My contractions did slow and for the rest of the day they became very erratic. In the afternoon, they were still erratic but more and more painful. I had my induction still scheduled for that night, so I called the hospital and asked if I should still come in and they said yes because they could progress the labor (why not the night before, I don't know!). Anyway, I was asked to come in the hospital at 8pm. When we got to the hospital, I was put in the ward with others being induced. They took my BP and hooked me up to a monitor to see how the baby was doing. Within a couple of minutes, I was surrounded by 3 midwives and a doctor, I assume someone pulled some sort of alarm, but had no idea why. Apparently the baby's heart rate dropped. They started talking to me about having to break my waters to see if the baby recovered or they'd have to an emergency caesarean. They rushed me into a labor room and the doctor broke my waters. Luckily he recovered and I continued with contractions, and I at that point I was at 3cm. I had to stay monitored throughout the night. The contractions became stronger and I used 'gas and air' or nitrous oxygen for pain relief. You bastcally just beathe into this tube when you feel the contraction coming on. It worked pretty well. However, occasionally I took too much on and threw up, but it was worth it. Halfway through the night, I was really getting exhausted (it had and decided to have an epidural. Man, that was worth it! I could still slightly feel them on one side (I found out later the epidural came out on one side). Unfortunately, my contractions slowed a bit, though I still progressed to 6cm.
Throughout the night, the baby's heart rate would drop after each contraction for 10s. That can happen as the baby's head descends down the pelvis. However, later in the night, it started dropping for longer, for 60-90s. The doctor said they needed to check the baby's blood oxygen levels, which they do by taking a blood sample for the top of the baby's head with a scope thing (he still has the scratches on his head, poor Jamie). They did this twice in 90 minutes and his stats were dropping, and as I was only at 8cm and progressing about a cm an hour, I wouldn't be ready in enough time and the levels would go too low. They tested one final time, but the machine wasn't working, so they decided they should progress with the c-section anyway. They said it could be the cord around his neck.
They prepped me, and had to give me a spinal since the epidural had come out on one side. Paul scrubbed in and was able to stay by my head. The baby came out pretty quick, they took him and gave him a once over, his Apgar was 9 at delivery and 10 one minute later. They gave him to Paul and put him on my pillow too while they stitched me up. Apparently I lost quite a lot of blood (1.4 liters), not sure why, but we both made it through fine. The cord wasn't wrapped around his neck, so they don't know why his heart rate was dropping, but as rough as I felt after, I don't regret the decision as we don't know what might have happened had we waited. And I have my perfect little Jamie, so everything is good.
They recovery wasn't easy, especially the first day, but I'm getting stronger everyday. Paul and my parents have been an extraordinary help. And we all have Courtney to thank for the hundreds of photos she's taken. They left this morning and we'll miss them a lot. I've had a lot of emotional ups and downs these past few days, but after having Norovirus, 46 hours of labor and a major operation, we're doing pretty well and I'm looking forward to motherhood.
Here's our first ever photo together (not that pretty!):
I had my sweep Monday morning and as I posted, I had progressed over the weekend, probably thanks in part to that awful Norovirus, which well and truly got my guts moving, just like they say spicy food should do. Nothing much happened during Monday, but Tuesday morning I woke up and I realized that I had started contractions. They started about 10-20 minutes apart and not very painful. Throughout the day they became closer and more painful. Paul had gone to work, and he wasn't sure when he should come home and I said to wait a bit, but after about an hour his boss said "What the f* are you still doing here, go home" and so he did. I mostly hung out with my mom during the day and watched tv when I could to try to distract myself. I was also using a TENS machine throughout the day for pain relief, which basically sends through little electrical pulses through electrode pads on my back between contractions, and when I start having a contraction, I push a little boost button which causes the pulse to become continuous until I depress when the contraction is over. In retrospect, I'm not really sure it did much, other than signal to everyone else when the contraction started and ended. I think it did give me something to focus on, but perhaps it caused me to focus too much on each contraction. I didn't really sleep much during the day as I was afraid I'd slow down the process. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake. I spent a lot of the day pacing the house, trying to get them moving along. Here's a photo of me with my TENS and a gingernut:
When we got home we all were so wiped that we slept for a bit. My contractions did slow and for the rest of the day they became very erratic. In the afternoon, they were still erratic but more and more painful. I had my induction still scheduled for that night, so I called the hospital and asked if I should still come in and they said yes because they could progress the labor (why not the night before, I don't know!). Anyway, I was asked to come in the hospital at 8pm. When we got to the hospital, I was put in the ward with others being induced. They took my BP and hooked me up to a monitor to see how the baby was doing. Within a couple of minutes, I was surrounded by 3 midwives and a doctor, I assume someone pulled some sort of alarm, but had no idea why. Apparently the baby's heart rate dropped. They started talking to me about having to break my waters to see if the baby recovered or they'd have to an emergency caesarean. They rushed me into a labor room and the doctor broke my waters. Luckily he recovered and I continued with contractions, and I at that point I was at 3cm. I had to stay monitored throughout the night. The contractions became stronger and I used 'gas and air' or nitrous oxygen for pain relief. You bastcally just beathe into this tube when you feel the contraction coming on. It worked pretty well. However, occasionally I took too much on and threw up, but it was worth it. Halfway through the night, I was really getting exhausted (it had and decided to have an epidural. Man, that was worth it! I could still slightly feel them on one side (I found out later the epidural came out on one side). Unfortunately, my contractions slowed a bit, though I still progressed to 6cm.
Throughout the night, the baby's heart rate would drop after each contraction for 10s. That can happen as the baby's head descends down the pelvis. However, later in the night, it started dropping for longer, for 60-90s. The doctor said they needed to check the baby's blood oxygen levels, which they do by taking a blood sample for the top of the baby's head with a scope thing (he still has the scratches on his head, poor Jamie). They did this twice in 90 minutes and his stats were dropping, and as I was only at 8cm and progressing about a cm an hour, I wouldn't be ready in enough time and the levels would go too low. They tested one final time, but the machine wasn't working, so they decided they should progress with the c-section anyway. They said it could be the cord around his neck.
They prepped me, and had to give me a spinal since the epidural had come out on one side. Paul scrubbed in and was able to stay by my head. The baby came out pretty quick, they took him and gave him a once over, his Apgar was 9 at delivery and 10 one minute later. They gave him to Paul and put him on my pillow too while they stitched me up. Apparently I lost quite a lot of blood (1.4 liters), not sure why, but we both made it through fine. The cord wasn't wrapped around his neck, so they don't know why his heart rate was dropping, but as rough as I felt after, I don't regret the decision as we don't know what might have happened had we waited. And I have my perfect little Jamie, so everything is good.
They recovery wasn't easy, especially the first day, but I'm getting stronger everyday. Paul and my parents have been an extraordinary help. And we all have Courtney to thank for the hundreds of photos she's taken. They left this morning and we'll miss them a lot. I've had a lot of emotional ups and downs these past few days, but after having Norovirus, 46 hours of labor and a major operation, we're doing pretty well and I'm looking forward to motherhood.
Here's our first ever photo together (not that pretty!):
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