Managing a baby with intense needs

Meet Miss T. She’s now a confident, sometimes sassy, eight year old. She wanted me to write a blog about her, because I used photos of her sister in my last blog, and all she wants in life at the moment is to be a YouTube star, and featuring in a blog is a compromise I am willing to go with.

I told her I was quite happy to write a blog about her, as there has been a lot in the journey of parenting her so far that I could structure a blog around.

Let’s start at the start. Within a couple of hours of her birth, I went to have a shower, as you do. I came out to find her screaming in the midwife’s arms. I took her and instantly she stopped crying. And for the next seven months, it felt like if she wasn’t in my arms, she was crying. Actually, her dad’s arms were ok as well, and maybe grandma’s if she was around.

She’s my fourth child.

We had already survived infant twins.

Life was just getting easier again when I decided I definitely did want one more baby. It took me a little while to convince my partner, but I could hear this one more baby crying in my dreams. I think it was echoes of what was to come.

I used to joke I thought I was a good parent until I had her.

And we are good enough parents, but we hadn’t had a baby with such intense needs before. Some babies just have a higher need to be held, to be doing things and to be included in everything than others. Mix that with a baby that has relatively low sleep needs, and three other children under five, and you have a perfect storm for a mother that is only just holding onto her shit. Sometimes I didn’t hold it. Apologies Pete and Yvonne, we can’t have been an easy family to live next door to at times.

Some things that made life easier were:

·         Using a baby carrier for every day activities, especially naps.

·         Getting out and about even for a little bit each day. Playgroup, the JD Hardie kids club, the playground, visiting a friend, shopping, just something that broke the day up and wore everyone out a bit.

·         Breastfeeding. I expressed and fed breastmilk and formula via a bottle for my older children and keeping up with expressing, washing and bottle making would have added stress and jobs to the days.

·         Hiring a mother’s helper (a high school student that came for a couple of hours after school a couple of times a week) and using casual days at daycare (I am so sorry this isn’t an option for families in Hedland at the moment). These little breaks were invaluable. I never left the kids with the mother’s helper, but having another set of hands and the energy of a 14 year old for those last few hours of solo parenting before my partner came home did make a difference.

·         Feeding everyone the same thing. No separate kids meals, not even for the baby when she started eating. She coped just fine, and didn’t get any teeth until she was over 12 months.

·         Embracing early wakings, by popping the baby into the pram and getting a walk in before the rest of the house woke up. It started as a way to avoid waking the two year olds, but soon became a favourite way to start the day.

I’ve since found Possums Education, recently rebranded as Milk and Moon, and have become accredited in their Neuroprotective Developmental Care program for health professionals. All of the things I learnt through this program are things that would have really helped me enjoy that first year of mothering Miss T. These include:  

·         Using mindfulness to consciously enjoy my children. Looking at their beautiful little faces, smelling their heads, enjoying the feel of their soft skin and hair. Sure, I loved my kids and appreciated all of these things about them, but there is a lot of power in using these things to ground you in the present moment.

·         Using this and other techniques to self regulate when things were all happening at once, and my children were definitely not in a regulated state. I knew the more dialed up I got, the worse they were, but it is so hard to find a way to bring yourself down in the moment.

·         Realising that from the start, some babies have different sleep needs to what we might expect, and you can never make anyone sleep. Oh, the hours I spent in the early weeks trying to get a drowsy but awake Miss T to fall asleep in her bassinette. Once I began to carry on with the day and popped her in the carrier when she looked like she might sleep, the days were far less stressful, and she was still taking the sleep she needed.

·         Some really simple tweaks to fit and hold in the early days of breastfeeding. Things went quite well with breastfeeding, but there were a lot of marathon feeds when Miss T was very young and I was reliant on a pillow to feel like she was in a supported enough position. It worked, but I now know it could have been better.

Phew. I am now in a place where I can look back on that time and say, wow, that was hard and we did it. There are some things that I wish we had done differently to have increased my enjoyment of early parenting, but I am accepting of not knowing what you don’t know. Life is altogether easier with tweens, though sure, there are different parenting challenges that are still best managed with self regulation techniques.

Please reach out if you would like some assistance with your own early parenting. If I can’t help you, I can put you in touch with someone that can, or check out the resources from Milk and Moon to see if they might be a good fit for you.