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 Invisible Mother

I got sent this in an email, and although I am not a religious type, or one to succumb to spam I thought this was worth sharing :)

The Invisible Mother.....

It all began to make sense, the blank stares, the lack of response, the way one of the kids will walk into the room while I'm on the phone and ask to be taken to the store. Inside I'm thinking, 'Can't you see I'm on the phone?'

Obviously not; no one can see if I'm on the phone, or cooking, or sweeping the floor, or even standing on my head in the corner, because no one can see me at all. I'm invisible.. The invisible Mom. Some days I am only a pair of hands, nothing more! Can you fix this? Can you tie this? Can you open this??

Some days I'm not a pair of hands; I'm not even a human being. I'm a clock to ask, 'What time is it?' I'm a satellite guide to answer, 'What number is the Disney Channel?' I'm a car to order, 'Right around 5:30, please.'
Some days I'm a crystal ball; 'Where's my other sock?, Where's my phone?, What's for dinner?' I was certain that these were the hands that once held books and the eyes that studied history, music and literature -but now, they had disappeared into the peanut butter, never to be seen again. She's going, she's going, she's gone!?

One night, a group of us were having dinner, celebrating the return of a friend from England. She had just gotten back from a fabulous trip, and she was going on and on about the hotel she stayed in. I was sitting there, looking around at the others all put together so well.

It was hard not to compare and feel sorry for myself. I was feeling pretty pathetic, when she turned to me with a beautifully wrapped package, and said, 'I brought you this.' It was a book on the great cathedrals of Europe.

I wasn't exactly sure why she'd given it to me until I read her inscription:
'With admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees.'
In the days ahead I would read - no, devoured - the book. And I would discover what would become for me, four life-changing truths, after which I could pattern my work: 1) No one can say who built the great cathedrals - we have no record of their names. 2) These builders gave their whole lives for a work they would never see finished. 3) They made great sacrifices and expected no credit. 4) The passion of their building was fueled by their faith that the eyes of God saw everything.

A story of legend in the book told of a rich man who came to visit the cathedral while it was being built, and he saw a workman carving a tiny bird on the inside of a beam. He was puzzled and asked the man, 'Why are you spending so much time carving that bird into a beam that will be covered by the roof, No one will ever see it And the workman replied, 'Because God sees.'

I closed the book, feeling the missing piece fall into place. It was almost as if I heard God whispering to me, 'I see you. I see the sacrifices you make every day, even when no one around you does.

No act of kindness you've done, no sequin you've sewn on, no cupcake you've baked, no Cub Scout meeting, no last minute errand is too small for me to notice and smile over. You are building a great cathedral, but you can't see right now what it will become.

I keep the right perspective when I see myself as a great builder. As one of the people who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to work on something that their name will never be on.

The writer of the book went so far as to say that no cathedrals could ever be built in our lifetime because there are so few people willing to sacrifice to that degree.

When I really think about it, I don't want my son to tell the friend he's bringing home from college for Thanksgiving, 'My Mom gets up at 4 in the morning and bakes homemade pies, and then she hand bastes a turkey for 3 hours and presses all the linens for the table.' That would mean I'd built a monument to myself. I just want him to want to come home. And then, if there is anything more to say to his friend, he'd say, 'You're gonna love it there...'

As mothers, we are building great cathedrals. We cannot be seen if we're doing it right. And one day, it is very possible that the world will marvel, not only at what we have built, but at the beauty that has been added to the world by the sacrifices of invisible mothers.

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.

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?

HATS FOR SALE!

Hats available now: (please note sizes are approximate)



Large Green - fits 9 to 12 months








Large Gray (pink ribbon detail) - fits 9 to 12 months











Large Sage - fits 9 to 12 months








Med Multi - fits 6-9 months











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











Med Blue - fits 6-9 months






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









Small Red Speckle - fits 3-6 months








Small Green - fits 3-6 months







Small Cream, Blue Band - fits 3-6 months







NB Blue Striped - fits newborn









NB White with Lace & Ribbon edge - fits newborn








NB Cream Speckled - fits newborn







NB Gray Speckled - fits newborn





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.

I don't know how you do it

Spent the morning looking after 6 kids, all under 5. Then managed to get rid of 2 just after lunch, so had 4 til 6pm. Just got my mental 2yr old off to bed, hoping she is asleep now!

Wow. I've agreed to look after my friend's 2 boys for a couple of months as she is going back to work. Originally, her hubby was finishing his job end of January, and he was going to stay home and be a house husband. Yeah, right! Bless him, he's a lovely guy, but he really has no clue how hard it is to run a household and look after 2 kids. Anyway, he's wussed out and got another job starting beginning of Feb. Meanwhile, my friend got herself a job early, assuming she's be at work for at least 6 months, and could finally give hubby an idea of how much she actually does around the house (he is inclined to think she's lazy if the washing isn't done, or if the dinner isn't ready). This one is a contract til mid March, and she's expecting bub number 3 at the end of this year, so she'll stop when this contract's up. In the mean time, I'm minding the boys.

Today it was OK, the 4 of them get on fine, and they all keep each other amused, but my neighbours kids (who are ALWAYS wanting to come and play, I mean ALWAYS. From the minute I open the door in the morning, til after I put the baby to bed in the evening) came over for the morning. Now I can send them home anytime really, but I let them stay til lunchtime to see how I coped. I coped. But I lost my rag at my poor hubby who was trying to make helpful suggestions - !!

Tomorrow, I will only let them come over for an hour or so, and I'm not giving them lunch!

So now it's 10 to 9 at night, the 2 yr old is still awake cos she keeps getting up to go to the toilet. I have a mountain of dishes to do and a garden to tidy. So much for getting to bed early!

Night on the tiles

OK, so BabyM has an ear infection poor love, but at least we can do something about it, so the antibiotics start today. She's staying at Nana's tonight, while hubby and I go out for dinner with his work crowd. We're off to a buffet restaurant, and I think I'm going to be the only pregnant one there. There are a couple of other pregnant women at hubby's work, but they seem convinced that they can't eat from a buffet, so they aren't going - silly beggers. I checked with my midwife, and I can have hot buffet food, I just have to avoid salads and seafood (which I will be doing anyway, seeing as it's winter!).

Project Update

SIL window sign - the first coat is on and drying. It looks pretty good considering I've never done anything like that before, so once it's dry I'll take off the stencil and neaten up the edges. Then that will be DONE! I love crossing things off the list.

Projects are GO!

Now we have BabyM sleeping again, I feel like I can get on with my projects again. Today I have my "day off" where hubby takes charge of BabyM for the day, leaving me to get on with whatever project I'm working on.

The first thing completed was a few more emails about the Great Lakes Tournament. This is a jousting tournament organised by Company of the Lance, and involves jousting, foot combat, re-enactment and a medieval themed market. My job is to book the stalls for the market. I organised it last year, and it went reasonably well, but I'm hoping this year will be much better. The guys know I won't be able to be on site to organise (due to Baby2), but I'm going to get all the bookings done and sorted so all they have to do on the day is direct people to their sites.

The craft projects are about to start too, I've finished knitting BabyM's hooded scarf, and it's come out very well considering I didn't have a pattern to work from, so now I'm onto making little knitted balls for babies. I'm going to fill them with different things to make interesteding textures and sounds and then add them to my stock ready for a stall in the summer (or to add to the web catalogue, depending on what comes up first!)
I've also finally got back in touch with my scrap-booking buddies, and we're all getting together on Tuesday night, so I intend to get my UK trip scrapbook all finished then.

Photos soon!

Onwards and upwards

OK, we have BabyM back in her cot and she's sleeping a lot better, both during the day and at night, so hubby and I are beginning to feel human again.

I have my first potential customers for Usana, which is very exciting, and I've started getting some advertising out in the local area, so I hope this is the start of it taking off.
I've finally got rid of the broken Sizzix machine that was sitting in my spare room and looking malevolent, and I've almost finished knitting BabyM's new hooded scarf SO I think I am getting somewhere with my projects at last.
While I'm in knitting mode I'll be using up all the odds and ends of wool I have to make a batch of toys for sale, so I'm hoping to have them underway this week. I'll be posting info once they are ready.

Miserable failure

Well we haven't cracked it after all. Last night BabyM got up out of bed every time she woke up. Eventually, at about 5am I put her into her cot and she finally slept til about 7am.
She's exhausted today, but when we put her in her cot for a day sleep, she climbed out! I feel like I just can't win. Hubby has even suggested getting a lock for her bedroom door, and I'm almost at a stage where I will agree.

We've decided to just get a round handle for now, which she won't be able to open for a while, and I'll put a mattress on the floor so if she does climb out of her cot, she won't be able to get out of her room, but she'll have a comfortable place to drop off on.

I feel like such an evil parent, effectively locking my child in her bedroom til she conks out on the floor from exhaustion, but we have tried everything else we can think of.

The start of something

OK, so I've started ANOTHER web thing to keep updated. The thing is, I want a website, and I am not tech-savvy enough to create one, so I thought a blog with links is the next best thing. All the sites I regularly frequent are in the links section, so feel free to browse and find out a bit more about me.

I am a Stay At Home Mum and I'm always looking for ways to earn a little bit of income in order to pay off the mortgage a bit faster, so I've been looking around for home businesses and potential projects to do this with. So far, I have signed up with Usana to sell health and beauty products (see link), and I'm working on a parenting resource pack to help busy parents make the best use of their time.

I've also been getting into arts and crafts, and will be putting some of my pieces up for sale via email. I'll post pictures and prices here, and if you're interested in buying something, email me.

I also do a lot of voluntary work around my child (soon to be children!), where I run a Mainly Music group, chair the Toy Library Committee and attend various playgroups and coffee groups. I've been gathering a lot of useful parenting advice over the last couple of years, so please feel free to ask me any questions and I'll see what I can do.