What I Would Do If I Wanted To Get My Newborn Off Bottles and Onto Breastfeeding

My friend is having an awful time with her first baby, which is sadly similar to the awful time I had with my first baby. Basically, baby doesn’t feed, so you’re told to top up with formula and pump to try to increase supply and put baby to the breast as much as possible. You end up spending hours with a screaming baby who won’t feed, hours pumping, hours bottle feeding, hours cleaning and sterilising… You get advice thrown at you from every direction and it’s all about how to get the baby off bottles and onto the breast – or to just throw in the towel and give up on breastfeeding altogether.

I had rough starts with each of my babies but then went on to breastfeed successfully until the age of ten months ish, when I was just really over it. I’m not a medical professional, and please note particularly that this advice is aimed at babies who are out of the “danger zone” (who are alert, gaining weight, not jaundiced, etc) but where mum wants to get off bottles and onto exclusive breastfeeding while ALSO not being driven insane by the triple-feed schedule.

This is the advice I gave my friend.

1. Stop pumping. Like, yesterday.

I’m just not sold on pumping to increase milk supply. This is controversial, I know. I’m not saying it literally doesn’t work. But pumping is just such a colossal pain in the arse for the alleged benefit. I honestly think that time can be used so much more productively by having the baby at the breast and you getting some sleep. Yes, even if the baby is screaming and not latching – at least for this first phase. Otherwise you spend so much time pumping and dealing with all that stuff that you don’t have any energy left to deal with the actual breastfeeding. Yes, extracting milk encourages your breasts to make more milk. But being absolutely knackered doesn’t exactly help your milk supply either, and pumps don’t stimulate your nipples in the same way a baby does. Looking at the whole picture, including the fact that you have needs and wants too, I don’t think pumping is a good use of time.

2. Stop measuring input. Take a break from weighing her. Just measure output.

My goodness, it is so easy to get tunnel vision here. To be obsessed with how long baby spends at the breast and how many ml of formula they’ve had and how many grams they’ve gained today. You can just stop. It’s fine.

Keep track of wet and dirty nappies instead. In babies, input = output. If output decreases, there is a problem. If she’s weeing and pooing, stuff’s getting in somehow.

She’ll be weighed at 6-8 weeks as standard. Just when you were planning to re-evaluate anyway.

3. Take a night off and just go to sleep.

My absolute saving angel when Awdry was tiny was the first night shift nurse when we went back to the hospital. She took the baby, sent me to bed, and didn’t wake me up until the morning. I woke up in the middle of the night FREAKING OUT to find her feeding him a bottle and shushing him gently back to sleep in her arms. She told me to have one good night’s sleep to get myself ready to tackle the feeding problem again in the morning.

Get earplugs, noise cancelling headphones, white noise. Heck, go to a hotel! Give the baby to your husband and tell him to just cope for one night. Yes, it will be crap for him. It’s one night. Go to bed. Sleep. Your boobs won’t switch off. She’s already taking a bottle. Just sleep. Eight hours AT LEAST. Then get up in the morning ready to have another go.

4. Baby’s already taking a bottle. Take five hours off each day. You’re on the other nineteen. That’s enough.

The magic number for me and every other person I’ve talked to seems to be four hours in a row. She’s already taking a bottle. Get your husband to be in charge for five hours out of 24. (Five because you need a bit of time to drift off.)

But, don’t choose the evening. Sorry. See #13 below. Try either the morning or the afternoon and have a long nap. We had my husband getting a full night’s sleep every night so he was able to be functional during the day.

5. Stop waking her at night.

I don’t know if you are on a forced waking regime, but stop waking her at night. Stop waking yourself at night. Let her sleep. Let yourself sleep. If output changes, you can rethink. But just try it for one night. Then two. Then three.

6. Plan to spend the entire day with her clamped to your boobs at every opportunity. Ideally in bed. Naked.

But do wake her during the day if she sleeps longer than two hours. In theory this will be OK because you will be getting a four hour sleep at some point and not waking on purpose during the night.

Whack her on the boob at every opportunity. Every. If she blinks, stirs, cries, whatever. If she isn’t profoundly unconscious, whip em out. When Geronima was this age, my husband just sent me to bed for a day and I spent the whole day reading, napping and feeding the baby. It was great. Try to have her clamped on for as much of the day as possible. This is not forever! It is an attempt at breastfeeding boot camp for both of you for 3-7 days.

I don’t know how much faith to put in the whole skin to skin thing but why the heck not? Strip both of you off.

During boot camp, allow her to nap on the breast as much as possible. This was a game changer for me with Meecup. It means she goes to sleep sucking, sucks in her sleep, and then wakes up already sucking.

7. Try the koala position and side lying.

I didn’t need a lot of fancy positions with Awdry or Meecup, but Geronima was a nightmare in the “normal” position. The koala position, where you kind of lean back and have them on their front upright on you, was great for letting her do a bit more work on getting herself comfortable.

8. If she’s a drowsy baby, take all her clothes off and give her just a tiny bit of formula to pep her up. If she’s an angry baby, try to get in there when she’s juuust waking up. Give her just enough formula to calm her down, then try breastfeeding.

Either way, let her nap on the breast as much as is feasible during the day during boot camp.

9. Ring triage and say you need more breastfeeding support. Don’t let them just “observe” and tell you the theory. You know the theory. If it were that easy, you’d be doing it. Let them gets their hands in there.

You may have to shop around to get someone helpful. I was greatly blessed with my first midwife visit with Meecup. Formula loomed but she stayed for two hours to get her to take a proper feed and that was the kick start we needed. See, my third baby and I still needed proper support to get started!

Community midwives can still visit you, there will probably be groups at children’s centres, and you can escalate to more specialist support with a referral from either. Keep saying, “It’s not working.”

10. Eat/drink whatever junk food you fancy AFTER you have eaten/drunk something sensible. Think antipasti.

You need energy. Making milk takes fuel. And you need solace. Solace takes pizza and ice cream. My pro tip is to eat whatever junk food you want after having had a “sensible” meal/snack made of real food. Ideally containing fat and protein. Cooking is probably a bit much so think antipasti: ham, cheese, olives, bread.

11. Trying for 5-6 weeks then re-evaluating sounds great.

Throw everything you’ve got at this for 5-6 weeks then deciding what to do sounds like a really sensible plan.

12. Buy a good box set so you have something else to think about. Put the subtitles on if she’s screaming so much you can’t hear.

It can help to actually have something to think about that isn’t the baby and to pass the time. I recommend The Durrells if you haven’t watched it already. You may feel like you don’t have a single cell of brain space left, but baby angst often expands to fill the space available.

13. The evening scream is a thing. Just wait it out.

Every one of our babies has had an evening scream. Others call it the witching hour. It’s not you. It’s them. It can also be prime feeding time, if the baby’s up for it. That’s why I’m afraid you should be “on” then. Sometimes they just scream and scream, but sometimes they want to feed and feed (and scream also). I usually had my husband hold the baby while I ate my dinner but other than that planned to be on the sofa with my boobs out.

14. Perinatal mental health services move fast.

You’ll have a lot of people telling you, “Oh, it’s so normal to be anxious and stressed as a new mum.” Yeah, it is, in the sense that it doesn’t mean your a bad mum or that you’re failing your baby. But actually it’s not normal to be, for example, unable to sleep when the baby is asleep or googling whether monasteries still accept foundlings. I’ve had some kind of mental health support for each baby and they move FAST. Like, you could be talking to someone tomorrow and have an appointment set up for next week fast, if you’re lucky/crazy enough.

You matter too here. It’s easy to be so focused on the baby the baby the baby the baby. You’re important too. Hysterics are not something that you have to carry on having. This is unlikely to be in your top ten best periods of your life ever, but it doesn’t have to be hell. You have the right to be happy. Tired, but happy.

Beat Anxiety with the To Do SCHEDULE

One of the things that trips me into an anxiety spiral is feeling oppressed by and behind on a big pile of self-assigned tasks.

A while ago, I saved this quote by Jen Fulwiler:

“A good way to figure out how much God expects you to get done in a week is to attempt to do no more work than you could get done in a six-day week, during daylight hours only, allowing ample time throughout the days for prayer breaks and calm, nourishing meals.”

What does GOD want me to get done in my life at the moment?

Well, I guess since he gave me all these children He probably expects me to feed and clothe them. So, cooking and laundry pretty high on the list. He would probably prefer it if they didn’t all die of listeria-ridden countertops, so I guess cleaning should be in there too. He wants me to love them, and reading endless Railway Stories is an important part of that. But does God really think that having pretty box labels should be a big priority in my day? Sure, He probably doesn’t mind if they ARE pretty. But if it interferes with my ability to mother or to be a loving wife or to exist without hyperventilating, I should probably give it a miss.

In an attempt to address my persistent overreaching in this season of life, and my anxiety-spiralling when I think about ALL THE THINGS, I have rethought the format of my to do list.I don’t have a to do LIST any more, I have a to do SCHEDULE. ANYTHING that I decide I am going to write down to do in the future now gets allocated a time when I first wrote it down. There is no huge, nebulous, ever-growing list of stuff that I may or may not ever get round to that runs the gamut from “cut toenails” to “finish epic novel”. Instead, I have an A6 week-to-page notebook. That doesn’t leave a lot of space each day. In fact, it leaves me the space to write down between one and three things each day. If I have a thought about something I want to do, I have to find a free space on a particular day.

It means I am never ever confronted with the full weight of my to do list at once. I never have to scan down it and figure out what to do next. I never have to imagine all the tasks and all the days spiralling out into infinity. All I ever look at is the 1-3 tasks allocated to TODAY.

If I don’t get round to a task that day? Well, I have a few options. I can decide I’m never going to do it and experience the wonderful lightening of letting it go forever. I can flick forward to the next free day and reschedule it then. Or, if it’s more urgent, I can cancel something from the next day or two (or move it forward to the next free slot) and write in the undone task instead.

(Sometimes I come across tasks that I need to remember to do at a specific time that’s quite some distance in the future. Rather than have a hovering to do list that I keep having to check to see if it’s time yet, I use Gmail to schedule an email to myself at an appropriate time in the future. For example, I will receive an email in August reminding me to buy Vitamin D pills to start taking in September. I will receive an email in October with a link to a soul cakes recipe I want to try. It means I don’t have to encounter the task again until the appropriate moment. Sometimes I go to send myself an email and discover I’ve already scheduled one for that. That’s OK. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get my brain to release a task to the future. That’s OK.)

I find that I am very conservative about how much I expect to get done in a week now that I have to commit to a particular day for a particular task. I find myself naturally leaving breathing space in a week so I have room for some overflow. I also find myself working backwards from a deadline – if I’m going to get that Alleluia banner painted in time to bury on Ash Wednesday, I can work on it on Shrove Tuesday, the Thursday before, next Monday and… hang on, it’s not going to get done in time unless I give something else up. (I decided not to do it this year, because it was easy to see the choice I was making, rather than feel stressed about it for weeks then guilty that I didn’t get round to it.)

I like this new way of handling to do items. It makes me prioritise how I spend my day-to-day life and makes it strangely easy to give up on stuff. I suppose it can’t just hang out on the list indefinitely any more. It’s either happening on a particular day or it’s not. And it makes it very clear when I’m loading up on self-inflicted commitments. Am I scheduling to do items for three months time? Probably time to cross some stuff off intervening days to create a bit more breathing space.

Try it. You have nothing to lose but your weasel-brains!

Addendum:

This is a picture of this week’s to do schedule, as of Monday breakfast time:

It’s pretty full up! I wanted to write down another task and found I didn’t have a free slot for three weeks. It really made me think about whether I will still want to do that job in three weeks time or whether I should just drop it forever.

And here it is at the end of the week:

It’s in a “zero waste” notebook I made following the instructions here: https://zerowastehome.com/2016/04/21/how-to-make-a-recycled-notebook-in-5-easy-steps/

I used treasury tags and wrapped the end cardboard in a scrap of fabric because that’s what I had. I fill it with scrap paper cut into quarters – some of it is used on one side but that’s fine.

One important thing I forgot to mention is that when I’ve finished with a page, I tear it out and throw it away. I know some people like to look back on what they’ve crossed out and feel accomplished, but my goal is to keep myself focused on what’s happening today. Looking to the past is as unhelpful as looking to the future right now. It means my “now” is always the first page in the notebook and it never gets physically huge and unwieldy.

I also wanted to clarify the sorts of tasks I use this for. Tasks which are one-offs and/or tied to a particular date in the near future. You’ll notice several calendar reminders in there too, like nursery day and Aldi day. That’s to make sure I don’t overschedule myself on those days.

Repeating tasks (whether weekly or annual or anything in between) come in the chore box. I will write more about that soon (you’ll see I’ve got it scheduled for tomorrow!). At breakfast we all discuss our plans for the day, so that’s the time I check my to do schedule and chore box and ONLY look at what’s on today. I have to trust that my past self made good plans for my future self, so my current self doesn’t need to double and triple check and faff about optimising every second of my time.

Lenten discipline: moderation in food

I have a puritanical streak right through the centre of my soul that has almost always been unhelpful. (I’m sure I can come up with an example of it being really helpful. It’s just, uh, taking me longer than I expected…) It’s the streak that wants everything to be nice and tidy; that says, “Some people are GOOD PEOPLE and some people are SINNERS.” It also says things like, “If you can’t clean ALL the things COMPLETELY then everything might as well remain filthy.”

Coming up with New Year’s Resolutions and Lenten disciplines has, therefore, been an interesting and evolving exercise for me. I want something challenging enough to help me grow spiritually, and something that addresses my personal besetting sins rather than handily according with my own personal preferences (no meat? no problem!), but something that’s moderate enough for me to not give up on. Crucially, I think, it has to be something where it’s easy for me to get back on the wagon when I fall off. Spiritual reading is bad at this for me. After all, if I’m only going to read 99% of something during Lent instead of my planned 100%, I might as well not have read it at all, amirite?

I had one heck of a pregnancy, which involved a lot of issues with food. Which foods I could and couldn’t eat. When I could and couldn’t eat. How much it was reasonable to eat. Whether it suddenly becomes OK to eat an entire cake in one sitting just because you’re pregnant and it’s yummy. I swung wildly between various extremes.

I have now had the baby (evidence peacefully sleeping on my lap as I type) and need to find that temperate middle ground. Food is good. God gave it to us. It nourishes us. It is tasty. But the love of food is the root of all kinds of evil.

So my Lenten discipline this year is going to be: moderation in food.

This will be hard in many ways because I am not giving myself any rules to follow. I am going to have to decide each day, each meal, what moderation means in that instance. I am breastfeeding, so it does not mean fasting and restricting calories. (And that’s not moderation even if you’re not breastfeeding.) It means letting the food I eat nourish my body and my soul. Enjoying what there is without eating to excess or obsessing over what I have or haven’t eaten.

Just moderation, plain and simple.

How I Pray With All These Little Kids

I just wanted to offer you a snapshot of my prayer life at the moment. I’ve been making big efforts on this area as I recover from a debilitating bout of anxiety. (I hope to one day write a post about anxiety and my Catholic faith, but it’s a complex topic so may take a while!) I also have a nearly-4yo, nearly-2yo and nearly-3mo in the picture! I’m not working and my husband is studying from home (with one day a week in person).

Grace before eating

I am baaaaaad at actually properly pausing to appreciate the bounty of God because I am usually either starving (breastfeeding!) or trying to swat little hands away from things they’re not supposed to be touching. But the technical words get said. Almost always.

Bedtime prayers

My husband leads all of us in bedtime prayers. I forget sometimes that I’m there praying too, so it counts as part of my prayer life! Even if I am mostly smiling and nodding encouragingly to random Latin words being shouted out, or sotto voce telling people to stop kicking their sister or to stay in the place they’ve chosen.

Poor behaviour at prayers (refusing to speak their small mandatory bit of intercessory prayers where we will whisper-prompt them through every word if needed; or rolling around and poking people to the point that it’s seriously disruptive) means no bedtime story.

ut again, the words get said and tunes get sung and I am learning the major prayers and Marian antiphons in Latin which I like.

Morning offering

This is something I only just started, but it’s going OK. I printed out the text of a morning offering and stuck it up on the wall behind where I take my morning medication to tag the habits together. Heal the body and soul at the same time 🙂 It’s the first thing I do after hauling myself out of bed and I almost always remember unless I am so tired I take my pills with my eyes closed and don’t see it! I do think it starts the day off with the right tone. Sure, my holiness might evaporate by the end of breakfast some days, but it definitely reminds me of my vocation in life and purpose here on earth.

Naptime meditation

I have the Hallow app and I do the free fifteen minute version of their “daily meditation”. I found it when I was searching for anxiety resources and I would say it is the most important thing I do for my spiritual life at the moment. I do it when the baby and I lie down for our afternoon nap, and it’s a really great calming down, pause in the day, and chance to redirect when I’ve already forgotten that whole morning offering thing. I will continue to guard this even when I don’t need a daily nap any more. Occasionally I skip it because I skip a nap, but I notice when I do and get back on track the next day.

Bedtime rosary

I have always taken a long time to go to sleep. I say a rosary lying in bed while waiting to go to sleep. I count on my fingers and skip the creed because I can’t remember it, but it gets done in a bodged-together kind of way and that is better than not getting done at all.

Frequent confession

We live fifteen minutes walk from a church that offers confession on Saturday mornings, so on average every other Saturday we walk up as a family. Kids get a walk (and a visit to the library or playground on the way home), we get to cleanse our souls and spend a few quiet minutes kneeling in front of the blessed sacrament. The kids know the drill so it’s pretty drama free these days, and we try to be quick!

I have found confession to be very spiritually fruitful for me, even though I confess the same darn sins pretty much every time. I am very externally motivated to not have to say out loud that I did such and such AGAIN, and I like the humbling experience of God’s mercy as he forgives ALL our sins.

Weekly mass

We ALL go to mass together on Sundays. At the moment it feels like an absolute mission every week, but I’m always so glad we went. I didn’t go at all while I was pregnant and it’s so good to get back.

Wow, writing it all out that feels like a lot! But it doesn’t in real life. I carve out time for confession, and of course going to mass takes up the greater part of Sunday, but apart from that my prayer life is slotted in tiny bits into odd corners of my life or paired to something I would be doing anyway. It’s the first period on my life when I’ve felt successful in maintaing habits of prayer.

There are lots of things I am not doing that I would to or ought to! My confessions are prepared for in the two minutes I’m waiting for my turn. I don’t read the Bible at all at the moment. I fall asleep during the rosary or am so tired I lose count. I can say a whole set of bedtime prayers with my mind actually on something completely different and my mouth just moving of its own accord. Daily mass: ha ha ha do not joke with me.

But I recently read The Screwtape Letters and was struck by the emphasis on the daily grind. It’s easy to have a dramatic enthusiasm for religion that peters out quickly when life gets dull. What little I am doing, I am keeping up – which is always the greatest challenge for me. I like a project with an end point where I can look back and congratulate myself on a job well done, then move on to the next thing. I have managed this pattern for a few months now, and am holding back on trying to add in ALL THE THINGS to ensure that I don’t burn out.

What We Do With Our Kids’ Excess Presents

There are a lot of kind and generous people in the world, but I’ve written before about the problem is Too Many Presents: https://homefaring.wordpress.com/2019/11/21/ten-tips-to-manage-christmas-present-overwhelm/

Yes, it’s a #firstworldproblem, but it still really is a problem. Presents shouldn’t be burdens, but they are if they are filling up your house, stressing you out, and are contrary to your family culture.

Awdry is three and a half (and a bit!), and we’ve used the last few years to have increasingly firm and specific conversations with our families about what kind of gifts we would like our children to receive. I am always very clear when I have those conversations that it’s not necessary to actually buy any presents – just having them visit and play with the children is delightful. But if they DO want to buy something, then please buy books and clothes. Our children are delighted by new clothes, reading together is a huge part of our family culture, and they are things that can be enjoyed again and again in their season and then gently grown out of – and they don’t take up loads of space in the meantime. Some of our favourite picture books have been received as presents.

But… some people still give toys.

Usually these are people who live far away that we don’t actually have much contact with beyond the annual Christmas card and it’s kinda hard to have The Conversation with them. I try to be grateful in thank you cards but also encourage the books and clothes line, but you can’t win every battle.

Sometimes those people actually flat out ignore our request and are borderline vindictive with their toy choices.

So, here’s how we handle it. Now, bear in mind that our children are young. They don’t notice if things are wrapped or not, they don’t remember stuff that has appeared fleetingly, and they’re not ready for BIG conversations about consumerism. And I write all the thank you cards! In a year or two we will have to start doing things differently, at least with our oldest.

1. Be grateful for their generous spirit.

This is really important, otherwise your entire relationship with them will turn into a massive festering grudge. Dredge up every scrap of genuine gratitude that you can that people are so kind and thoughtful as to want to make your kids happy.

I don’t drink alcohol and have received an awful lot of bottles of wine as thank you presents for work projects. It’s the same principle: how kind they were to want to get me something, and how grateful I am to be so appreciated. (And regift the actual wine to someone else!)

2. Have an alternative plan for any sweets and chocolate.

At the moment, all sweets and chocolate given to our children is communal. No one gets to hoard theirs or eat it right away. Anything that’s really age-inappropriate (e.g. choking hazard) gets binned (or eaten in secret by the grown ups!) We read the packaging and they usually have a choking hazard disclaimer so we say, “Oh dear, this one says it’s not for little kids so we’ll put it away”. They have been fine with this. Then we get rid of it after they’ve gone to bed. They have never asked after anything.

Anything that’s fundamentally OK for them to eat may get doled out in little pieces alongside regular meals and snacks.

However, this year we’ve invented something which I think is awesome and want to do every year. We’ve put all the chocolate aside (it’s not loads!) and are going to use it to make a big chocolate Epiphany cake, decorated with sweets. A nice big family blowout which defines the end of the twelve days of Christmas and gets rid of lingering chocolate that isn’t even that nice anyway.

You can plan whatever you want, but I highly recommend saying, “Thank you! We’ll put that away for snack time” or something similar when it’s given, and putting it in a common area like the kitchen so you get to control when it’s eaten.

3. Pre-unwrap anything you get through the post

We peek inside every present that is posted to our children. If it’s something appropriate for our family, we tape it back up. If not, it goes right in the donation box and the children never see it.

4. Be gracious when you receive things in person

If someone HAS ignored all your conversations about books and clothes, you can still be polite and say thank you when your kids unwrap the monstrosities they have spent the planet’s hard-earned plastic on. Tell your kids to say thank you and keep your mouth shut for now.

5. Get rid of things overnight

Just disappear stuff after your kids have gone to bed. In our house, we have a concept of toy rotation and also of things that are annoying Mummy and Daddy or causing fights going on holiday for a bit. It’s no big deal when a toy isn’t there for a while. Sometimes that while is… forever. Awdry has asked about ONE toy this Christmas, which we might get back out again if he remembers it for more than one day.

6. If you can, talk to your kids about giving things to people who can use them more than us

There are a few things we are planning to give to Awdry’s nursery, as they take donations and the toys are really much more suited to that environment than a family home. We talk often about getting things from people who don’t need them any more and giving things to people who will use them more than us. I intend to give the same narrative to Awdry.

(Note: we do not do “one in one out” or allow our children to choose what to give away. Almost all of our toys are communal and I have no idea how to referee disagreements about what to get rid of between toddlers. Besides, what if they decide to get rid of the Schleich animals and keep the motorised piglet?! That’s something for when they’re older.)

7. Use thank yous as an opportunity to gently guide people

I express effusive thanks for appropriate presents and vague thanks for inappropriate ones. “Thank you SO MUCH for the book! We LOVED reading it, and always LOVE getting new books to share! We would LOVE IT if you would ALWAYS use your AMAZING book-choosing skills in the future!!! (And there was also the motorised piglet.)” Or something like that…!

8. If you waver, remind yourself of why you are doing this

Your reasons might be different from ours. I want to live in an orderly home. I want to focus on the incarnation and our love for our fellow man at Christmas. I want to strategically deprive our children so they appreciate getting just ONE present more than Dudley Dursley and his huge pile o’ junk. I don’t want our children to always expect presents when we have visitors. I want to discourage the pointless manufacture of unitaskers from our planet’s precious resources. I don’t want anyone fighting over whose turn it is with a motorised piglet.

Whatever your reasons, stay strong. It’s OK to be in charge in your house and to make rules about what and how many toys you have. People will thank you’re “mean” or “a Grinch”. You’re not. Read the story of the Grinch again and see that Christmas is NOT all the stuff. A lot of people talk that talk: be one of the ones who walks that walk too.

Sometimes It’s Hard to Be a Mummy

i have been ploughing through the archives of my favourite “mommy bloggers” while breastfeeding Meecup and reminding myself of a little something called “perspective” which I sometimes (ahem) forget about. I saved all these links to remind myself that it’s not the my-life-is-so-hard Olympics and actually my life IS hard even though it’s also wonderful, and it doesn’t have to be the worst life in the world for me to find it hard. But also, it will get better! Having all little kids isn’t forever.

So if you’re having a rough day, read through some of these and relax.

https://apieceofthecontinent.blogspot.com/2015/05/if-your-child-is-born-chances-are-hell.html?m=1

http://www.rhodeslog.com/2014/08/before-i-had-seven-year-old-series-and.html?m=1

Why I Need All These Kids

21 tips for survival mode

Living the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy in the Home. . . with Frankie

The Myth of Me-Time

http://abigails-alcove.blogspot.com/2010/08/making-peace-with-having-enemies.html?m=1

Tips for surviving (and thriving!) in the baby/toddler phase

A few thoughts on my birthday

https://onemoresoul.com/news-commentary/the-tunnel-of-parenthood.html

Homeschool:

A few things I need to remember this school year

Also homeschool:

"I want to homeschool, but I’m afraid"

Going back to confession

Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been six months since my last confession.

I went to confession this morning for the first time in half a year. I used to go… well, in theory every other week which often became once a month. But still, reasonably often.

However, for several months before I had our most recent baby, I barely went any further than our front doorstep due to some difficult physical pregnancy symptoms and a boatload of anxiety that made me want to barf even thinking about going that far from home (fifteen minutes walk) and encountering that many people.

But today I made it.

I was prepared for some anxiety, but I was not prepared for the intensity of the emotions brought up by FINALLY facing up to my sins and baring my soul before God again. I was brought up and atheist and regular confession is something I’ve only gone to on and off in the last four years or so.

Every time I’ve fallen off the bandwagon, I haven’t really noticed until I go back and it’s such a relief to look over my life and ask forgiveness and get a new start on that whole not sinning again business. I know confession isn’t very fashionable at the moment, but it’s probably been the most spiritually fruitful thing I’ve done since converting.

The best/worst thing about it for me is that I end up confessing the same old crap every time. It’s never anything exciting like murdering someone. Just the banal repetition of little everyday “it doesn’t really matter if” type sins. I find it humiliating in a good way to be confessing the same tedious things YET AGAIN. I usually totally forget to do a proper examen and just have a little think on the way and wing it and figure “these and all my other sins I cannot now remember” will cover it, but this time I did actually sit down with a list of questions I found online and write out a list.

And you know what? In six months I still haven’t managed to commit any really cool sins. It’s basically still the same old stuff, just with a bit of extra despair and missing Mass.

But wow, suddenly while I was reading out my list to the priest, I started crying. Not full on garment-rending howling – just quiet weeping for sadness, joy, relief… Lots and lots of feelings. And so tired. Both from the walk (hey, I’m ten days postpartum!) and the emotions. It wiped me out for the whole afternoon.

Thank God for confession. I feel lighter, more hopeful, more comforted and trusting than I have in a long while. I truly do feel that I have had the burden of sin lifted from me. I know people do have bad experiences in confession, but I’ve only ever had a kind, understanding response from the priest. They must hear all sorts of banal nonsense in the confessional, and they are sinners too. Nothing I say will shock or bore them.

I guess it feels right, on reflection, to be restarting at the beginning of the liturgical year. My plan is to make it back to Mass (we go to a much further away church on Sundays, so it’s a much bigger deal for anxious old me) by Christmas. And to get that new baby baptised!

I never really want to go to confession. I’m always tempted to skip it. I always feel a bit churlish and embarrassed, like a naughty child. But I’m always glad afterwards that I went. It’s never too late.

(Almost) All the Fruit, Vegetables and Eggs Our Family Ate In One Year

I spent a year cataloguing all the fruit, vegetables and eggs that our family bought. I was interested from both a frugality point of view and with an idea to us one day having a larger garden and needing to know how much of any given plant or category of plant we were actually likely to consume. It’s all very well following someone else’s planting plan, but what if you don’t actually enjoy cooking and eating the same foods as them?

Some things you need to know:

• This list runs from August 2020 to July 2021. I did it by copying off our grocery receipts into a spreadsheet. I cannot guarantee that I “got” every single receipt during that whole year, but I think I came pretty close.
• We had two adults and two toddlers doing the eating.
• I spend a significant portion of 2021 really barfaliciously pregnant. This means our family eating patterns did change, as there were some foods I simply could not have in the house, and some that were the only thing I could stomach for days on end. We would usually eat fewer peppers, less lettuce, even fewer avocados, more eggs and more brassicas.
• We had some things growing in the garden but the only things that produced in any notable quantity were tomatoes and kale. We had some rhubarb, some wild strawberries, some sugar snap peas, some peppers. We also had lots of herbs. We got a few kg of free apples and a few kg of free blackberries.
• We do most of our shopping at Aldi with occasional Tesco deliveries and a few trips to Waitrose for things we can only get there. I have had to extrapolate slightly from the usual pack sizes I know we buy rather than counting every individual item as we ate it!
• If a unit is not given, I mean individual pieces/heads/whatever.

Brassicas

Broccoli: 37

Cabbage: 28

Brussels sprouts: 8.5kg

Cauliflower: 9

Spring greens: 1

Root vegetables

Carrots: 31.5kg

Sweet potato: 24kg

Salad potatoes: 7kg

Potatoes: 20.5kg

Parsnips: 4kg

Onions: 12kg

Swede: 1

Salad veg

Tomatoes: 1.75kg

Peppers: 99

Spring onions: 36

Lettuce: 16

Cucumber: 4

Preserved veg

Frozen peas: 4kg

Tins of peaches: 16

Tins of pears: 4

Vacuum packed beetroot (4-pack): 2

Jars of pickles (680g): 3

Misc veg

Mushrooms: 13.6kg

Sugar snap peas: 1.6kg

Courgettes: 3

Green beans: 200g

Mangetout: 480g

Spinach: 1.35kg

Celery: 3

Garlic: 9

Leeks: 500g

Avocado: 3

Fresh fruit

Bananas: 791

Apples: 672

Satsumas: 28.2kg

Pears: 2.75kg

Plums: 2.4kg

Peaches/nectarines: 16

Lemons: 40

Limes: 20

Melons: 2

Grapes: 1.2kg

Rhubarb: 400g

Dried fruit:

Prunes: 1.9kg

Apricots: 1kg

Frozen fruit

Blueberries: 800g

Mixed berries: 1.5kg

Eggs

480

“When will lunch be ready?” “I don’t know, when WILL lunch be ready?”

Just a quick moment of staggering genius from my impatiently pregnant DO ALL THE THINGS self.

Awdry keeps asking when lunch and dinner will be ready. Especially when we’ve literally just finished another meal or snack. And especially especially multiple times when I am preparing a meal which takes an hour in the oven or involves multiple components coming together at once.

He was very interested in clocks and time a little while ago, so I started describing to him where the hands on our kitchen clock are now and where they will have to be when it’s lunchtime or dinner time. But having the same conversation every day got a bit old, so…

I drew some clock on the back of an envelope and taped it to our kitchen wall. (He can’t read but I’m sure he can learn which is lunch and which is dinner out of a choice of two!)

No doubt I will have to continue to engage in a Socratic dialogue about clock hands and the nature of time for a little while yet, but I hope we can figure out together how to have him check the picture, check the clock hands and compare the two to see whether or not they’re the same and therefore whether or not lunch/dinner is ready literally right now. (Apparently the presence of uncooked ingredients not on the dining table is not enough of a clue.)

My Newborn and Postpartum Essentials List For Our Third Baby

This baby is close to baked, so I’m going to get our final things together in the next few weeks. It’s all so much easier this time round than it was with the first baby. I don’t need to do any research because I know what we like, and we have a lot of the stuff already.

Postpartum Essentials for Me

• Thick maternity pads – I have washable sanitary towels for regular periods, but I like the extra long extra thick extra everything disposable maternity pads for the first week or two after giving birth. A lot of cushioning and a lot of absorbency.
• Cereal bars – like, a million. I want something I can shove in my face any hour of the day or night when I’m tired and cranky and trapped under a baby.
• Lactulose – it’s a stool softener. Very psychologically reassuring.
• Lanolin – for those early breastfeeding days.
• Breast pads – I have some I sewed myself from layers of cotton in a circle. Simple, washable. I tried stick on disposables ones with our first baby and, to be honest, found they were just awful. Hardly absorbed anything, kept getting stuck on various layers of clothing as I pulled them up and down to breastfeed.
• The phone number of our local takeaway – for that “just given birth” treat. I was starving and exhausted after both my previous labours. Thankfully we were adequately prepared the second time round and the world’s biggest pizza arrived at our home shortly after we did.
• Emergency tin of formula and bottle – yes, I’m putting this under “me” rather than “baby”. I want a backup plan. I plan to breastfeed but: a) if we have any problems I’d like the formula to be right there any time of day or night; b) it’s my dream to give baby one bottle a day so my husband can take it out or I can just sleep by myself. It didn’t work out with #2 when she was a few weeks old (turned her poo green with bloody bits…) but we used it up anyway with no problems once she was sitting up drinking out of a sippy cup so it wasn’t wasted.
• Vava Egg Light – this is the only specific product I recommend and it’s awesome. It charges up then just lays on the mattress next to me and the baby. You literally hit it to turn it on, which is about as much coordination as I want to do in the middle of the night and it just glows a vague light at the surroundings so you can see but not actually wake up. If I’m breastfeeding, I’ll pop it up near our heads. If I’m changing a nappy, I stick it near the business end. Then hit it to turn it off again. It’s dimmable, so if you prefer you can leave it on all night.

Newborn Essentials for Baby

• Sleepsuits, vests and cardigans – I like things that unfold completely, you lay the baby on them, then popper them up. No trying to wriggle wobbly baby heads through holes. We’ll just chuck them all in a basket together.
• Snowsuit, hat, mittens – it’s our first winter baby, so we have had to buy some age-appropriate outerwear.
• Muslins – as BIG as possible. One of our children was a puker and we got through multiple muslins a day, the other wasn’t and we just wiped up the odd bit of milky drool with them. But we still use them daily on them as toddlers to wipe hands and faces after meals, and sometimes tied round their necks as bibs if it’s gonna be a messy meal. (Why yes, yoghurt is still a finger food for Geronima.) I fully imagine they’ll continue to be useful for years!
• Travel cot with proper mattress – not gonna lie, I’m planning to cosleep for a few months again. But having the travel cot rather than a full sized one means I have a lot of flexibility about where to put the baby down when I want to and can try out different sleeping arrangements without it being a huge ordeal.
• White noise – I use an app on my phone. One child loved it, one child hated it. Minimal investment on our part.
• Dummy – one child loved them, one child hated them. But they’re handy sleep aids when they work.
• Playmat – essential for putting baby down and a fun thing for an older sibling to play with “with” the baby.
• Sling – essential for never ever putting the baby down! I sewed a mei tai that one of our children hated and one passionately loved. Sensing a theme?!
• Disposable nappies – I don’t think we can handle more than one child in cloth nappies at a time. Probably the middle will stay in daytime cloth nappies until the new baby starts solids, then she’ll upgrade to disposables and we’ll put the little one in our existing one-size cloth nappies.
• Changing mat – on the floor. In or next to the bathroom. Because while “sleep when the baby sleeps” is the biggest swizz in parenting, “wee when the baby wees” is an excellent rule of thumb to avoid being stuck under a sleeping baby with a bursting bladder.
• Instant read forehead thermometer and Calpol – because when you want them, you want them RIGHT NOW.

That’s it, really. There’s a few other things I know we’ll want when the baby’s a bit older:

• Bouncy chair
• Tripp Trapp high chair
• Video baby monitor
• Buggy (we have the Chicco Ohlala and love it, but it’s only suitable from 3 months)

But right now, we’re all good.