Baby Essentials - Number 2 - The White Noise App

Your life pre-baby may involve peace, quiet, and music. Ah, music. 

Babies, however, are not much interested in music. What they like are monotonous sounds...the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, the hairdryer. As it isn't massively practical to carry any of these things round with you, I heartily recommend you invest in a white noise app. 

This amazing thing CHANGED OUR LIFE. It was 69p from the App Store - I am not exaggerating when I say I would have spent thousands on it. It has a good selection of sounds to choose from - we compromised on the 'Conch Shell' - a lovely sound of breaking waves, as I couldn't stand the hairdryer - it also has a timer that you can switch on for the first hour of baby going down in their cot. Once they are asleep it switches off. 

And get this: it then 'listens' to your baby. If they rouse, IT SWITCHES BACK ON.

There are no words to describe the genius of this. 

We only discovered this when Baby Britney (BB) was about 6 weeks old. I so wish we'd known sooner. It has helped to crack the non-napping in the daytime and she is so used to the routine of it after bath time that her eyes literally close as soon as it is switched on. 

Of course, this idea is not new - my mum's friend said she had a cassette tape of white noise that she used to play to her boys - but at least now we have the amazing technology to make it so much easier and portable.

I now watch the ipad like a hawk - our worst nightmare would be if the battery died!

Good Morning Dubai!

The view from our terrace at 7 am. Beautiful, non?

When I first arrived in Dubai I gleefully blogged about my daily routine. I was so giddy to be here, waking up to blue sky and sunshine every day. Many people told me that this novelty would wear off, that I would take it for granted. 

I'd just like to set this record straight: after six years in the UAE, this joy has not abated. If anything, I'm even more grateful and thankful for my life here than I was back then.

So how has my routine changed? 

Well, some things are different: In the morning there's a beautiful peachy-headed baby to snuggle before getting dressed. There's a garden and a terrace to sit on with the morning coffee. There's palm trees wafting and birds singing and butterflies fluttering by (a by-product of the garden). There's a smiley, friendly little Indian man at our front gate sweeping the street with a palm tree leaf (I just love this).

And some things are the same: the wall of warmth and sunshine that envelops me as I walk out onto the street. The taxi that I hail, the numerous 'Hello's' to the army of people cleaning, polishing and generally making sure that our lives run like clockwork. 

It's always a beautiful start to the day and I am eternally grateful to the Universe for these blessings. 

We have about 3 weeks before the mercury climbs to 40 degrees at 8 am - remind me of this positivity then, yes?!

Things I Missed When Up the Duff

If you enjoy it, you probably can't do it...sigh.

My pregnancy was classed as very high-risk. Not because of my age,although I was practically dead by Middle Eastern child-bearing standards, but due to a few health issues. 

Anyway, as a result, I missed some of the usual things that up the duff ladies miss, plus some that they don't: 

• Booze
• A night without getting up to wee every 30 seconds
• Running
• Walking or standing for longer than 20 mins (doctor's orders: I COULD physically walk for longer,but paid the price afterwards)
• Exercise of any sort (even pregnancy yoga was banned)
• Swimming (see above)
• Plane travel
• Lying on my front when sunbathing
• Lying on my front when attempting to sleep
• My Whistles skinny jeans (although was still in them at 20 weeks, mofos!)
• The spa (for the first 12 weeks)
• My sanity (to be fair whether this was in place before is up for debate)

It's not forever, although it feels like it. Repeat: it's not forever.

Baby Essentials - Number 1 - The Bouncy Chair - Baby Bjorn

Handsome man not included - thankfully I have my own!

So many people have asked me what my 'must-have' items for a baby are. Truthfully, we didn't over indulge too much on frippery...ultimately what a tiny baby needs is somewhere to sleep, food (whether formula or bosom) and nappies. Oh and snuggles. Soooooooo many snuggles!

BUT there are undoubtedly some things that made our lives much, much easier. So I'll share them with you.

The first: a bouncy chair. Now there are hundreds of these on the market, and 99.9% of them are utterly hideous. I have never filled my house with neon/primary coloured plastic before, and I fail to see why I should now that I have a child.

So the only choice for us was a Baby Bjorn. These are beautiful, carefully designed chairs that also LOOK GOOD. Call me shallow, call me old-fashioned, but this was music to my ears.

On the practical front,it also folds completely flat, so you can store it out of the way. 
Putting away the Baby Bjorn has actually became a ritual in the evenings. After bath and bedtime, the chair is put away, signifying the end of all things baby and the start of grown-up chat and wine time. Bliss.

Baby Britney was so small that she couldn't actualy sit in it for the first few months (they need to be a certain weight so that they don't crumple up in it/slide off, bless) but the average newborn will be fine from day one.

Theya re brutally expensive in Dubai - double the price of Amazon in the UK, but they are worth every single dirham.

Parenting: Men and Women

He clearly hasn't spent the day with a screaming baby...

Before I had a baby I (obv) thought about how it would change my life. 

Of course I knew about sleep deprivation (or thought I did, ha), and priorities changing, but what I hadn't considered is how different the experience is for men and women. My favourite Dubai blogger sums it up here  when she says:

"While DH, wallowing in the congratulations of his colleagues, put on his suit and skipped off to his adult world of coffees, meetings and the gym at lunchtime, I sat at home and felt robbed: robbed of my career, robbed of my figure, robbed of my sleep, and robbed of my sanity."

Because this is precisely what happens. Men, in the main, carry on as before. They get up, get dressed (usually after a full night's sleep,as feeding falls to women) and go to work. 

They do not see their salary disappear along with their sanity. They do not spend all day with a fractious, grizzling, clingy tiny tyrant. 

They make plans to see their friends and casually tell you as they head out of the front door. 

By the time they get home from work very likely the baby is asleep or passed out, exhausted from screaming, whilst you are slumped on the sofa in your pyjamas wondering where the day went.

Women on the other hand, have a huge adjustment:

One minute you're a sassy, stylish, slim girl about town. You are up and at 'em every morning sporting the latest Chanel lipstick and Michael Kors handbag. You go to the office where you are paid for your experience, opinion and skills. You talk and people listen. You interact with staff and clients. You laugh casually during lunches, people bring you coffee in meetings.

Next minute you're fat, bloated, in agonising pain. You can't lift your hands above your head to wash your hair. You have a small screaming baby attached to you 22 hours a day. 

You look in the mirror and literally do not recognise the haggard sweaty mess before you. 

You don't leave the house for weeks as you can't walk or drive and it's 45 degrees outside anyway. 

Your biggest brain challenge is how many scoops of formula go into each bottle/how many minutes since the last feed/minutes to the next feed.

People say to you "Oh, you can't possibly go back to work" as it is assumed that your career no longer matters and you are the primary care giver. (Note: No-one EVER says this to a man).

In order to leave the house and have a social life you plan weeks in advance and when you do get out of the door in the one pair of jeans that now fits you, you feel like Bella Emberg and weep in the taxi on the way home.

Now, I was one of the lucky ones. As I was formula feeding I got a couple of nights off every week IF DH wasn't working the weekend. Those 4 nights a month were beacons of joy and sanity. One time I slept for 13 hours without moving an inch and woke up in the same position I'd collapsed in - unheard of for me. DH  wondered if I'd died and had to come and check on me. 

So ladies: brace yourselves. You do start to claw back your personality and identity, but it takes time. 

For me it was around the 18 week mark when I started to plan for going back to work. I cleared out my wardrobe, binned all the maternity clothes, laundered and ironed my work 'uniform' and was reminded of a different world, a grown up world.  

And then comes the guilt......but that's a whole separate story!

Fat Girl Slim

I need a vat of this stuff!

I didn't do too badly on the weight gain front when pregnant.

I went from 58 kilos/9 stone to 72 kilos/11 stone. This still felt enormous and disgusting to me and totally out of character. An exercise ban plus the doctor's order to eat more, much more, really did my waistline in.

I'm hovering around the 62 kilo/9 stone 7 mark at the moment - only the second time in my life that I've ever weighed more than 58/9 stone.

I'm surprised that I actually care less than I thought, I know that I'm disciplined enough to get it off. And I'm simply not prepared to replace my entire wardrobe for size 12's, it could actually bankrupt me.

The issue I'm facing is that due to lack of sleep, I have zero energy. And without energy I can't run. And without running, this last half a stone ain't going to shift.

What to do?

Annoying things people say to you when you have a baby: Enjoy every moment, it goes so fast

Time with a baby......sloooow.

On the surface, this is true.

Babies do grow at an incredible pace. If you stare at their feet you can almost see it happening - a bit like those time lapse cameras of leaves unfurling in the rainforest. Which is why you shouldn't buy too many pairs of socks. Their toes burst out of them like the hulk at warp speed.

And it is truly amazing that in 5 months, Baby Britney (BB) has tripled her birth weight.

But here's the rub: when you are spending every minute of every hour of every week of every month with the tiny tyrants, and surviving on 3 hours of broken sleep a night, time does not go fast.

Likewise at 6 am when you've been up all night trying to settle a fractious whinging baby, I assure you, the time does not whizz by.

It goes sloooooooooooooooowly.

Sometimes I would look at the clock thinking that the screaming must surely have been going on for hours, when it had actually just been ten minutes. Likewise, it was hard to believe that anything so small could scream for four hours. FOUR. HOURS. Ear plugs became my new best friends.

I found myself counting the hours AND minutes until DH came home from work, as at that point, I could pass BB over to him and breathe/shower/dress. Also, she then became partly his responsibility if anything went wrong.

Of course, there are joyous moments in all this, and you grasp and cling to them like a sailor lost at sea. But let's be clear, unless you are some sort of masochist, you are not going to enjoy every moment...so please don't feel guilty when you don't.

NB: No sooner had I written this post than a friend shared this on her Facebook. Great minds clearly think alike....

The First Few Magical Days with a New Baby

I smiled for days....

I promised I'd be honest about pregnancy, birth and babies, but for fear of terrifying my pregnant friends to within an inch of their lives, let's turn our attention to some of the wonderful parts of life with a small baby.

I had a hideous pregnancy full of pain, sickness, surgery and stress beyond my wildest dreams, so for me the best bit about having a baby was: I wasn't pregnant any more. 

And let's be clear: Nature is very clever.  Small newborn babies (your own) are hypnotic and addictive. And I've never been a baby-cuddler before. I'm also certainly not one of those people who trills that you 'forget all the pain' of childbirth as soon as the baby is in your arms. I had a lovely, planned, calm elective c-section, but let's be clear: the agony that followed will stay with me for the rest of my life. It didn't magically disappear.

I digress.

I had really struggled to believe that there was a teeny tiny person inside my stomach. Even as I ballooned in size, even as I felt the kicking inside me, my brain just could not compute that there was a little human being in there, at all. In fact right up until the moment that Baby Britney (BB) was hauled from my stomach, I had visions of my consultant saying: "No, no, nothing to see here. It's just doughnuts and Twirls I'm afraid."

I was metaphorically holding my breath when they were getting her out....partly because it's just the weirdest thing ever, a c-section, but mainly because I couldn't believe what was happening, and we were terrified that there might be something wrong (they had warned us that the baby was small, hence coming out a month early).

So when this tiny screaming bundle was held up, when they announced that 'it' was a girl, and she was perfect, my first instinctive reaction was to shout: "NO WAY!!!" It's amazing how shouting echoes off an operating theatre walls. It was a little inappropriate looking back, I blame the drugs.

This sense of disbelief stayed with me for days - especially as BB was taken away to NICU shortly after delivery. This meant that 45 minutes after giving birth, I had nothing to show for it, and didn't until lunchtime the next day.

But even without a baby, the hormones and the morphine (oh, the joyous morphine!) combine to make you feel immensely, overwhelmingly happy. And when BB was wheeled into my room in her funny little incubator bed, swaddled like a tiny fajita, there are really no words.

Her tiny size, her snuffly, snuggly, warm little body as she nestled into my neck...well she melted my heart. And I KNOW it's a reflex when they grab your finger, but it still feels like a monumental achievement when they do it.

Despite the pain and the gore, the 5 days I spent in hospital were pure bliss. A tiny baby bubble with nurses on hand to help with everything (I simply pressed a button if I needed them), a la carte meals brought to me every few hours, a comfy bed that moved up and down at the touch of a button.

Lying in the dark of the hospital room at 5 am, with DH sleeping on the sofa bed, DD snoozing on my chest, little legs twitching just as they had done inside of me, will remain one of the most overwhelming experiences of my life. 

You're suddenly a family, your baby is perfect, you're not pregnant any more. You're also coursing with adrenaline and hormones so the exhaustion is somehow bearable. These chemicals will cary you through the first through weeks in a haze...enjoy them.

Annoying things people say when you've had a baby: "Trust Your Instincts"

God knows I'm trying!

I found this advice extremely frustrating. As an only child who grew up without being surrounding by children, and as an adult that had held only a very small handful of babies, I honestly didn't have a clue where to start.

I remember being rolled into NICU in a wheelchair to see Baby Britney (BB) for the second time, with me looking like Princess Margaret after the 'bath incident' only sadly, without having consumed any gin.

They passed BB to me to feed and I managed to a) let her head snap back (so terrifying, those wobbly heads) and b) choke her on the bottle teat simultaneously. I squeaked feebly: "I've never fed a baby before!" and dissolved into tears.

"You'll just know what to do!" well meaning people had said to me. "Nature is amazing!"

Well, nature is a wonderful thing. I was filled with a fierce instinct to protect her and care for her, no doubt. But when she was screaming endlessly in the middle of the night, no instinct told me how to soothe her. When she was awake hour after hour after hour, no instinct came to my rescue with a magic sleep solution. In those circumstances you can just cuddle and whisper and kiss and ssshh and pat...and download as much tv as you can onto your iPad.

Maybe if you're an earth mother type something does 'click' and you feel like you've been doing it all your life - I am not one of those women. And if you talk, really talk, to other mothers, many of them will confess that they're not either.

This blogger writes beautifully about what it's like becoming a parent and instincts when she says:

"Dr Spock told a generation of women that they didn't need to learn how to look after their babies, that it was instinctive and that they knew more than they thought they did. He was completely wrong. When you have no proper experience of babies, as most of us don't, and one arrives in your house, it is like suddenly being asked to re-sit your final school exams. In Russian."

As a good friend said to me: "You WILL be okay, it IS tough, it IS hard, every hour is an amazing achievement, there is NO induction manual, you have had NO training, you are doing the very BEST that YOU can possibly do... You are being a mother for the very first time - and that is true every single day."

Cling to friends like these, the ones who tell it like it is, who are honest. Whose instincts didn't suddenly take over and save the day.

They will save your sanity.

Annoying things people say when you've had a baby: 'It gets easier'

Any minute now, it will get easier...or not.

I almost feel bad listing this one. People are really trying to help when they say this. To make you feel like there's light at the end of the tunnel.

The problem with it is that for some people, it does get easier, but really, really, slowly.

The first milestone I was told about is 12 weeks. Apparently at this stage something magical happens to the little blighters. They've been through some major growth spurts, and for whatever reason, they start to settle better and magically they SLEEP.

Oh really?

I approached the day after Baby Britney's 12 week birthday with cautious optimism. Like Dubai's bid for Expo2020 I was confident, I was positive. Things would be DIFFERENT! She would EAT! She would SLEEP! She would NAP! She would stop screaming all the time! I would be able to get dressed before 6 pm!

Nothing changed.

If anything, I found it got harder rather than easier. At the outset you have so much adrenalin coursing through you that you seem to have more strength (mental and physical) than you thought you would. I also expected it to be tiring at the newborn phase. But by 7 or 8 weeks, you are ground down. 2 hours sleep a night has taken its toll and you feel like death. When you reach 15 weeks and it's still no better not only do you feel like death, but you feel cheated, and a little like a failure. Perhaps it's something that you are doing wrong, otherwise surely the tiny tyrant would be sleeping by now?

The fact is, if you have a baby that sleeps (like winning the lottery, in fact, I would prefer it to winning the lottery) I am sure it does get easier, much more quickly. If you don't, well, there's no easy way to say this: it is going to be very tough for a very long time.

Take any help you can get. If a friend offers to walk the baby round the block, say yes. If a neighbour offers to hold the baby whilst you have a shower, say yes. Hell, if Mussolini had offered, I would have said yes. 

We are now at 19 weeks and baby Britney (BB) has JUST started doing some daytime sleeping. We're now up to 45 minutes, twice a day! This is a far cry from what other mums/books/experts will tell you - they should be cracking out two hour stretches at least, apparently.

But hey, I'm grateful for small mercies....