10 top tips for stress-free childbirth

I emailed this to a friend a few years ago, as she was pregnant with her first baby and terrified.  She asked for realistic but not scary information about labour, so I sent her this.  Someone recently asked me about it again, so I dredged through old emails and found it for her.  Thought it made a good blog post too.:

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1. Remember that the contractions usually start small and take a long time to build up. Don't leap out of your seat at the first twinge and spend the next 12 hours pacing round the house timing everything and worrying that they aren't regular yet. Take some paracetamol and have a long soak in a hot bath.

2. The general rule of thumb is that you'll dilate 1cm per hour once the contractions start, and the point at which you'll feel like you need to go to the hospital is usually about 1/2 way. If you can wait longer, it's very reassuring to hear the midwife say "oooh, you're at 7cm!" when you arrive.

3. Time passes very differently when you're in labour. You go into another dimension where everyone around you feels like it's taking years, and yet you'll wonder how 6 hours managed to go past before you've had a chance to ask what time it is.

4. Every contraction is bringing you one step closer to your baby and they DO end. The finish line is always in sight, you just have to keep focussed on it, and stop staring at your feet, wondering if you can go another step. You can.

5. Anything you say during labour is allowed. It is an unwritten law of childbirth that you can blame your husband or midwife for everything from your grazed knee through to the Rwandan genocide, if it helps you focus through the contraction, anything goes.

6. Feel free to order people around. Your hubby (or birthing partner) is there to serve your every whim, no matter how bizarre they may seem. However, if you have gas for pain relief, some of your more outlandish demands may not be possible (or legal).

7. Make a birth plan but be prepared to be flexible. There's nothing worse than having your heart set on a birthing pool, but your instincts taking over and turning you into a hyrdophobic wildcat on the day. Have a good idea of what you want to do, and more importantly what you DON'T want, but explore all your options, so you know what to shout for when you're halfway through the door and you decide the room smells wrong.

8. Listen to your midwife, she has been through this a hundred times at least, and she will remain calm and professional no matter how much your head spins round. Your partner however, may well be a gibbering mess and incapable of thought, let alone important advice.

9. Have your baby placed straight onto your chest as soon as it's born, it's the gold medal ceremony at the olympics and you're on the top podium :)

10. Sleep as much now as you can, and get walking when you're awake. Do exercises to get baby into the correct position for birth and build up your general fitness. You're about to do the hardest thing you've ever done, but it's more satisfying than winning the London Marathon and climbing Mount Everest all rolled into one.

The OhNoSecond

Parenting sometimes seems to be long periods of mind-numbing tedium, interspersed with moments of white-hot terror; parenting in the OhNoSecond.  For those that do not know, the OhNoSecond is that moment when you get a sudden hit of adrenalin as you realise that you’re about to plunge over a precipice into a pit of pointy sticks and bitey animals.  It’s the Fight or Flight instinct kicking in and it seems to happen a lot to me.

  I think most people develop preternatural senses when they have children, in order to prevent their genetic line dying out the minute it learns to sit up and reach for the power socket.  This makes for a hypersensitivity to potential and perceived danger, so I often jump at things that I would never even have noticed in the past.

The one that seems to occur most is when I am in the car; Mapera is chanting away to herself in a slightly sinister monotone, Kaitereo has resorted to repeating “MaperaMaperaMapera” in a bid to get attention, and then some small part of my brain starts to tap on the shoulder of my subconscious going “there’s something not quite right here”  tap tap…tap tap.

  I am usually in ZombieAutoDrive mode by this time, having zoned out the constant noise from the back seats, when all of a sudden the little bit of brain that is in charge of Panicking and Leaping breaks down the door shouting “YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THE THIRD CHILD!!”

At this point my head is instantly filled with visions of my baby sitting on the side of the road, howling like an enraged, alcoholic Buddha as I drive obliviously away.  My rational brain knows that I can’t have left him behind, but my inner Cave-Mum takes over shouting “BABY GONE! BABY GONE!”  I twist my rear-view mirror around to try and see if he is in his car seat, and 9 times out of 10 I see his feet wiggling around in happy, solid reality; but occasionally, he has shifted a bit out of range and then real panic sets in and I have to pull over to the side of the road and race round to his door to check he has not thrown himself from his car seat in a desperate attempt to fly.

I have tried to counter the problem by having Mapera’s car seat secured next to his on the back seat, so I can ask her if her baby brother is there.  This works most of the time, unless Mapera is having a moment of concern and says “I can’t see him breathing” and the whole Cave-Mum thing starts all over again.

It is times like this when I seriously consider agoraphobia a sensible lifestyle choice.

Eczema

I've been treating Kaitereo's rash as a nappy rash and teething rash for months, but it has been spreading in little patches onto areas where she is not under a nappy or dribbling. I took her to the doctors to rule out skin problems and maybe get some useful advice and it turns out she has eczema.
Poor little mite, she's been suffering for ages! I asked the doctor if there were any ways to treat it that didn't involve steroid cream, and he said no.
So...I got the prescription: steroid cream twice a day for 2 weeks, aqueous cream every time I change or bathe her and pinetarsol for the bath.

I REAAALLLLYY don't want to use steroid creams on her unless nothing else works, so I'm going to try cutting out wheat from her diet for 2 weeks instead, along with moisturising her skin and avoiding soaps. She's keeping the teething necklace on, as I think it is helping with her teething and it won't do any harm.

I've got the steroid cream so if it gets worse or doesn't improve I will use it. UNLESS someone out there has a tried and tested remedy they can recommend. *hopeful face*

Light of my life

Life is toddling along at a normal pace now. School holidays are over, so I now have regular activities to occupy my perpetual-motion toddler. Seriously, how is it that she can literally never stop moving? If I jumped around and ran and skipped and hopped and rolled and danced and wobbled and joggled and wriggled and squirmed half as much as Mapera does, I'd be stick-thin!! Maybe that's the secret to losing the baby weight - losing weight the toddler way...hmmm.

She is definitely improving with her behaviour, and I put it down to better sleep. Up til recently Mapera has been waking every night (without fail) at around 2 or 3 am (just when you're getting your high quality REM sleep) and standing at her door shouting for us to let her out. She has a gate on the door after I nearly suffered a nervous breakdown following a full week of getting up 5 or 6 times a night to put Mapera back in her own bed.

We were racking our brains as to how to break this habit with her, and we found an answer one day when she was playing dens. She sleeps in the bottom of a set of bunks, and Daddy hung a sheet all around the top bunk so her bed was completely enclosed. She wanted the den up when she went to bed, so we happily left it in place. The next morning we were awoken to the usual "Mummy! Please you take my gate off?!" but I didn't feel like it was the middle of the night. When I looked at the clock it was 5am! Although this was still to early for me to even consider getting up, it was a marked improvement on the previous wake up time. Fortunately, Mapera went back to bed without much fuss and woke up again at the normal time of 6.30.

So, we had moved the initial wake up to a slightly more civilised hour, but I really want Mapera to learn to stay in her room until it's time to get up, even if she is awake. She was coming in to our bed for a morning snooze, but recently, she's not been going back to sleep, and it's not easy to relax with a 2 1/2 year old poking their fingers into your ears.
She has all her toys and bears and dollies, so she could theoretically play happily in her bed til it was time to get up for breakfast.

Tareka hit upon a plan to put a light on a timer in her room. We got an old bedside lamp, a plug in timer and rigged it up well out of reach. We sat Mapera down and explained to her that the light would come on when it was time to get up. If she woke up and the light was off, she had to stay in her bed, if it was on she could call out to us that it was time to get up.
She was really keen on the whole plan and happily repeated the instructions back to us (especially the bit about getting up and calling "Mummy, the light is on!"). So we crossed our fingers and went to bed.

At ar0und 3am a little voice called out in the darkness "Mummy, the light is on!"

Bother.

I got up, checked that it wasn't actually on and pointed this out to Mapera, who agreed that it was off and that she should get back into bed.

Then at 7am, just as the news came on the radio alarm in our room, our little voice piped up again "Mummy, the light is on!". Looks like we may have got it after all.

We've now been using the light trick for about a week, and apart from that first night, Mapera has not called us before 7am ONCE!! I'm going to give her another week with the gate on the door and if she's still waiting til the light comes on, I may be able to take it off at last!

Bad Mummy

Well, this blog seems to be a bit of a schizophrenic caper from my life as a Mum, to various ways of attempting to make money.

Today is about parenting. How not to do it.

Bad Parenting 101:
1. Ensure you go to bed late every night (hell, the kids are only going to wake you up anyway!)
2. When your baby wakes every hour, go in and stuff a dummy in their mouth (it's night time, they don't need anything else)
3. When your toddler climbs into bed with you at 4.30am, whisper angrily at them to be quiet every time they say "Mum" (they definitely know they are supposed to just snuggle up and go back to sleep, you've told them enough times)
4. Get up at 6.30am and stomp into the kitchen telling your skipping 2 year old that they can only have cereal (you can't be bothered to follow their usual routine, surely they can deal with that, can't they?)
5. Decide that you will stop giving the baby a dummy on the same day your toddler gets an ear infection, and after you've all had 3 nights of nicely broken sleep (I'll cope, what's one more sleepless night?)
6. Spend 1.5 hours at bedtime repeatedly taking toddler to bathroom for "poos" and waking tired baby (who is suffering from dummy withdrawal) in order to avoid a potential toilet accident, but knowing toddler is really stalling.
7. Give up and give baby the dummy.

Ah, bad parenting at it's finest.

I now have 2 sleeping children - thanks to the Pamol (Calpol) and the dummy.

One good thing to come out of all this, after spending a day getting Kaitereo to settle herself without a dummy, now when she wakes at night, I can leave her for a few minutes and she'll go back to sleep....won't she?

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Hats available now: (please note sizes are approximate)



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Med Sage - fits 6-9 months (button fastened)









Small Red Speckle - fits 3-6 months








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NB White with Lace & Ribbon edge - fits newborn








NB Cream Speckled - fits newborn







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All hats are priced at $10 (that's New Zealand dollars) and include postage within NZ. If you are overseas, drop me an email with your details and I'll send you a price based on current exchange rates, and the cost of postage to your country.