All posts tagged: #baby

Say hello to my little friend

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The magic of Christmas is a special thing when you’re a kid. Twinkly lights, the Snoopy’s Christmas song on high rotate, seeing extended family, decorating trees, waking up to presents and a note from Santa, a special lunch and a free pass to gorge on candy canes. When you’re a kid, it all just…happens. When you’re a parent, however, it all just…happens because you do it all. I’m no grinch, and Christmas is pretty much the highlight of my year (note: Due to printing deadlines, I’m writing this column quite far ahead of Christmas. I will laugh at myself long and hard when I see that sentence in print), but from somewhere around mid-September my right eye starts to twitch as I think about logistics. Where will we be? Who will be coming? Does everyone fit? Are there any more vegetarians than there were last year? Oh, and a vegan now, too? Where are the Santa Sacks? Are we allocating enough time to all sides of the family? Can someone please turn off Snoopy’s Christmas …

Parenting by online committee

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In this current age of what feels like parenting by online committee, I’ve seen many a mum taken out by commenters shout-typing their opposing opinion and take that mum down a peg or two for daring to share her thoughts. On the flip side I’ve seen some incredible support and rallying, often sparked by those exact same women or by very similar topics, in carefully monitored groups. A group I’m in, The Motherhood Project, recently shared an article written for Stuff by one of the group members, Rebecca Goodhue, about how relentless she’s finding motherhood because her baby is a non-sleeper. I read her article and completely related because I knew that non-sleeping life. It’s exhausting, it’s hard, it’s lonely, it takes the shine off the moments that everyone says you must treasure, and you feel like you must be doing something really wrong because your baby isn’t doing the things with sleeping that everyone says theirs is doing. I thought thankful thoughts about Rebecca on behalf of the mothers of other non-sleepers, because there’s …

Firsts and Lasts

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(Originally published in the Autumn 2018 edition of Little Treasures Magazine) “I re-homed the Mountain Buggy while you were out, it’s gone to a lovely family expecting a surprise third baby” my husband beamed at me, a look of expectant pride on his face as if I’d soon be whipping out a certificate for ‘The Most Helpful And Organised Partner’. “You WHAT?” I shrieked. “G-gave away the M-mountain Buggy?” He stammered, “The thing you said we should probably give away because Tilly is too big for it now? To a nice family? Was that not right?” Doubt flickered across his face as he edged towards the fridge to pour me a large wine. It was absolutely the right thing to do, better than my default plan based on leaving it under the house to gather that under-the-house-smell saying, “we really must re-home that buggy,” every time I trip over it while trying to hunt down the cat. It’s not that I didn’t want another family to benefit from the pram that had given me a …

Shape Shifters – Exercise after Having a Baby

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I had a chat with the exceptionally clever and lovely Stacey Law, physiotherapist from Leto Women’s Health in Auckland, to write this article for Little Treasures Magazine. Stacey helped put me and my diastasis recti (I won’t lie, I always have to google the spelling of that one) back together after my second pregnancy, and is a go-to guru for post-natal bodies. She’s a big fan of being kind to yourself and grits her teeth when she reads headlines about celebs ‘getting their body back after baby’, and I love her for it! You can read the article in this pdf here: Shape shifters Or jpgs below.

The name game

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Before I had my own babies, I couldn’t understand why people would say “still deciding on a name” in their birth announcement. What? You’ve had nine months to prepare for this moment! How hard it is to choose a name? Er, actually harder than it looks, I discovered when pregnant for the first time. Jeremy (my husband) and I had decided not to find out what we were having, so we needed options both ways. We set perimeters on name-choosing rules, such as checking there were no notorious criminals with that moniker, no names of ex-partners or meanies from school, and making sure it wouldn’t sound silly with our last name (when we got married, I was keen on having one family surname, but filled out the forms somewhat reluctantly because my married name makes me sound like a drunk Irishman). We both loved the same boy’s name. Sorted. A girl’s middle name would be Clare, after my mother. BAM, we were nailing this naming thing and I was only about eleven minutes pregnant. But …

Secondary Infertility & IVF

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This is part two of a blog originally written for If Only They’d Told me, about endometriosis, IVF, and (spoiler alert) motherhood. You can read part one here I’ll just do IVF I remember breezily thinking in my twenties, “oh, I could always just do IVF if I don’t get pregnant naturally.” The reality of IVF was a little more intense than I anticipated. The first hurdle was All The Needles. I’m a needle-phobe. I turn into a gigantic child in the face of injections, IVs and blood tests. I’m fine with actual surgery, but not the needles that come with it.  You’d think after three surgeries for endometriosis (which involve IVs and drainage tubes) and Amy’s caesarean delivery I would have gotten over myself. Nope.  I had to do my first injection about an hour before we were leaving for Jeremy’s 40th birthday dinner, which was probably for the best as there was no time for stuffing around. We’d already decided that for the sake of our marriage it would be best for me to …

The upsides of the massive front side

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A few friends are pregnant with their first babies at the moment, which has propelled me into a surge of nostalgia – combing through our newborn photos, and getting teary about little socks that I can’t face giving away. My pregnant friends agree that yes, tiny clothes are gorgeous and perusing Moses baskets online is a worthy cause for reaching their data cap, but they all look at me like I’m drunk at 10am when I say, “and isn’t being pregnant just so wonderful?” Flicking through my pregnancy diary, there are tales of sore hips, exhaustion, uncomfortable nights, and all-day sickness, but I think Mother Nature suppresses those recollections so that the human race continues. Or perhaps the sleep deprivation after Tilly (my youngest) altered my brain function. Either way, the upsides of having a massive front side are dominating my memories. The clothes I loved maternity clothes, that wonderful comfortable world of elasticised waist bands and stretchy tops. Seriously, jeans that appear normal, but with little elastic inserts where no one can see? Genius! …

Endometriosis and Motherhood

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I always knew I wanted to be a mother. Right from when I was tiny, I fed, bathed and bedded my dollies and teddies, and wouldn’t let anyone do up the top buttons on their tiny clothes in case it choked them (this could have been an early indicator of OCD, in hindsight). I gravitated toward anyone with a baby in their arms, and when my parents finally delivered on a sibling for me when I was 11, my poor little brother essentially had three parents all over him, all the time. I even attended antenatal classes with my parents, and remember thinking “this will all come in handy for me one day.” There were many things I wanted to do in my life, and having babies was always part of my grand plan. Despite practicing for “becoming a woman” long before my time (generally by trying on Mum’s bras and stealing from her boxes of Tampax so I could watch them puff up in water), I was completely blindsided by puberty. Health class showed …

Baby Shower (no actual showering involved)

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The two year old was devastated I wasn’t taking her with me to a baby shower (because, seriously, unleashing Tornado Tilly in the home of an uninitiated mother-of-twins-to-be just seemed cruel). Luckily the five year old set her straight on how mundane the event would be: “Tilly, you don’t want to go to a baby shower. It’s just a whole lot of women together, and they help the pregnant lady to have a shower, then they all take turns giving each other showers all afternoon. Bor-ring.” Great. So then my husband was suddenly interested in coming along, too.