top tips for heavily pregnant women (jan 2013)

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

top tips for heavily pregnant women

      Having previously written a food blog – mainly for my own amusement really as I am not aware of very many actual followers – I have singularly failed to post anything for more than a year.  Initially this was because of 9 months of full-on morning sickness.  Even if I had been physically capable of eating anything that wasn’t beige, then I would have had to post it from the vomitorium and you wouldn’t have enjoyed the photos.  Then, baby chaos descended. So my first post in a year digresses from food to briefly download my top tips for anyone about to pop their first sprog.  This isn’t exactly an exhaustive list but just some things that I wish someone had told me, or perhaps that I had actually listened when they did.·     

Firstly, congratulations!  Welcome to the most brilliant thing ever.  Your baby is of course gorgeous (even if you realise in three years time that it was a bit squashy and odd looking). It’s also a massive problem-solving exercise that will consume every ounce of your brainpower for the coming weeks and months.

·      Your pace of life. This may sound either basic or patronising, but SLOW DOWN.  If you have been hard at work for more than a decade, don’t feel guilty about being at home and compensate by trying to get all the housework and baby admin done.  This especially applies in those early days when you could be so exhausted that you are hallucinating. The washing up will wait a few days, but the time to stare at your baby endlessly cannot be brought back.  You need to watch and listen to understand how they are trying to communicate with you and what their habits are. Plus, you need to become a health and safety nerd now which is incompatible with extreme housework.

·      If you have stairs, they are top of the health and safety list.  It will suddenly become apparent how many inanimate objects end up in precisely the wrong side of the flat/house but don’t be tempted to carry the baby in one arm and something else in the other on the stairs. Keep a changing station on each floor and if possible a moses basket, or a safe place to keep the baby while you go to the loo/grab your phone from upstairs/go to the door. 

·      Kit 

·      Buy or borrow a baby carrier EARLY – you may think of these as the tool that hipster modern men deploy when showing off their baby while buying Sunday papers, but in reality they will liberate you inside the home more than outside.  You will be able to walk into a room, forget what you came in for, walk out, and back again, etc ad nauseam, and carry whatever it is back again afterwards without juggling the baby.  Plus babies love being close to their mothers a lot, and it makes them happy. Some are not suitable for newborns, so do check. The Ergo is good, has a newborn insert that looks like a folded duvet, although after more than an hour in it your baby may look a bit squashed like a traveller on the Japanese underground.  You can also get slings like the Kari-me which are very versatile and easily transportable.

·      You may find yourself not wearing a watch after having a near-nasty scratching incident in the early days.  If so, thishttp://www.johnlewis.com/231470616/Product.aspx may be one of the most useful things that you can have..it lives by the feeding station, and tells the temperature of the room (blanket decisions) and the time for how long your feed lasts.

·      For bath time, sew (or you can staple) a ribbon to two corners of a towel so that you can have it hanging off your front like an apron, pick the baby out of the bath and into your betowelled arms.  Also, kneel on a cushion by the side of the bath or you will probably need knee surgery before too long.

·      Visitors.  You will have a deluge of visitors – tell them that however far they have travelled from, you can only entertain them for an hour max (an hour and a half if they have actually come from abroad).  That’s about the stage when you keel over exhausted and start wishing they would leave, but because you are British you can’t actually bring yourself to say “really sorry I have to get my boobs out now/go and deal with some sort of unsavoury postnatal medical issue”

·      Food. Enjoy cooking? Ha. Unless you can find a baby carrier with a heat/splash guard, start thinking of recipes that take under 2 minutes from walking into your kitchen to picking up the fork, or dishes that aren’t ruined by a series of punctuations of 20 minutes.  However much of a food snob you are, load up the freezer with pre prepared meals that you can oven bake or nuke*.

·      Colic.  Defined as crying for no reason but common shorthand for your poor little tyke storing up burps and farts but not being able to do them.  Babies do cry and you will hear the classic tick list – is it hunger, nappy, tired, discomfort or bored.  But they can also just cry, a lot, and usually in the late afternoon/early evening.  If this happens, I recommend (from personal experience but everyone is different) trying these. Naturally you won’t be able to tell which one helped but if all together they do, you can try reintroducing one at a time (these mainly assume you are breastfeeding):

o   Worship at the shrine of infacol.  This magic stuff (and other brands work in a similar way, ask the pharmacist) – joins the miniature fartburp bubbles to bigger ones, making it easier for junior to serenade you.

o   If it gives you wind, it will give the baby wind. So, don’t order baked beans on high-fibre toast with a side order of Jerusalem artichokes and a brussel sprout and prune jus.

o   Stop eating dairy.  It turns out that this is almost impossible to do unless you follow a south east asian diet, which contains most of the other things you are not meant to eat when breastfeeding. But try it for a week and then have a large glass of milk and see what happens, if it doesn’t make any difference you might be ok.

o   Also avoid: fizzy water, soft fruit/other acidic food, caffeine

o   Drink Fennel tea. It may be ick but it might distract you from your coffee addiction

o   Do the Bradley Wiggins.  Bring your baby’s legs up to its chest and in a cycling motion to help the wind come out.  Warning: this can be amusing.

o   If they have been crying a LONG time and you are fully 100% exasperated, its ok to put them in the moses basket, leave the room, take a deep breath and then go back in, or give to someone who can do the soothing for a while.

o   Don’t be scared of asking your health visitor of Dr if you think there is something else wrong – they are very good at not making you feel like an idiot for asking about stuff that turns out to be fine.
If at a few weeks you still have the baby up with you in the evening and it is crying a lot, it might be trying to say "PLEASE can I go to bed, you've had every bloody remote aunt in today to pat me on the head, I discovered the colour red today and triangles, I'm bloody knackered, please put me somewhere nice and quiet and shove the baby monitor on - besides you guys might actually get to have a conversation if you do that."

·      Breastfeeding.  Invest in a six pack of large bottles of water and keep a full one in each room at all times, obv you can refill from the tap.  Being well hydrated really does power your production. 

·      Memories.  There is no such thing as too many photos or videos.  If people want to give you gifts get an extra large memory card for your smartphone or even a flip recorder. In the early days, take a moment to take what you now think is excruciatingly boring footage of your newborn doing absolutely nothing, as when they are 3 months old you will look back and think ‘wow’.  Back up your computer.

I’m sure I will think of more, so may be back soon but my new years resolution is to resume (a) cooking and (b) blogging on it.

*microwave. not sure if this is my family nickname or a universal one.

Alternative developmental checklist for a two year old

I would like to share the questionnaire that we recently received from our NHS Trust to check that our just-turned-two-year-old’s development is on track. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think this is the right thing to do. If a child is lagging* in one area and can be helped that’s a Good Thing.  But many children have individual ways of expressing their development and so I would like to propose an alternative questionnaire as follows:

Official version (not all are included as some are necessarily dull)	Proposed alternative	Bonus points
General
Can your child drink from a beaker/cup	Can your child keep a cup of water on the table unspilt for more then 14 seconds?	Can your child fit a spoon, fork, banana, hand and baked bean in their cup?
Can your child feed himself/herself	Can your child also decide to eat NOTHING when it is just the two of you and you are desperate for them to eat?	Can your child extract a sharp knife, can opener, eggs and hammer from locked cupboards to assemble a floormelette?
Does your child attempt to dress/undress	Can your child fully undress in the supermarket, while riding in the trolley, in the time it takes to reach a cauliflower?	Can your child select and dress in a full outfit consisting of one flip flop, one high heel, another pair of high heels as gloves, lipstick and Daddy’s best work shirt?
Gross Motor
Is he/she steady on their feet, do they run, climb, walk up stairs	Can your child walk up the stairs of a public building while you are looking the other way? Bonus points for blagging their way through security doors.	Can your child climb a stepladder (unsupervised)
Can he/she throw/kick a ball without falling over	Can your child kick another child’s ball out of the playground into the road?	Can your child save a goal using the ‘fishtail’ manoevre?
Fine motor
Can your child hold a pencil using thumb and two fingers and scribble?	Can your child hold a permanent marker and scribble on the white cupboards?	Can your child hold a can of spray paint and decorate the library wall?
Can your child build a tower of 6-7 blocks?	Can your child build a tower of 4 blocks, a radio, a rusty nail and the baby?	Can your child cement their tower together with mouldy banana from the bin?
Speech
Does your child have a vocabulary of 35 words or more.	Did the first ten words include: fart, ouch, beer, telly, calpol, shit? Is their most frequently used word:  1) thank you 2) poo  3) mine	Can your child say multi-syllable words, eg scalextric, competition, ambulance, hospital
Are they attempting to put two words together eg ‘more juice’, ‘daddy car’	Are they attempting to put two words together eg ‘more sugar’, ‘mummy wine’, ‘no. no. no. no’	Are they using short sentences eg ‘my finger stuck in tap’, ‘that lady is a monster’
Does your child understand two part instructions eg ‘put the car in the box’ without you pointing or showing them?	Does your child understand two part instructions eg ‘don’t touch Daddy’s Playstation’,  ‘be nice to your sister’ or 'stop licking the pavement' without you shouting or going to the pub?	Can your child manipulate you to extract treats in return for obeying certain (desperate) two part instructions?
Does your child like to sing rhymes with you?	Can your child recognise the entry of the guitar solo in Queen’s ‘we will rock you’	Can your child perform the Led Zep John Bonham drum solo from Moby Dick, after a lot of plays from youtube
Does your child name and point to everyday objects such as car, dog, apple and body parts eg arm, nose, foot?	Does your child name and point to everyday objects such as iphone, washing-up, fox poo and body parts eg bottom, bogey
General Does your child use pretend play eg pretending to feed their toys or put them to bed, or do they copy domestic chores such as sweeping or dusting	Does your child use pretend play eg trying to breastfeed their toys or posting toast into the DVD player? Do they copy domestic chores such as turning on the gas hob, running a bath or starting the washing machine on megaspin mode?
Do you brush your child’s teeth in the morning and before going to bed?	Twice a day, do you use fruit toothpaste as a method of inserting their toothbrush into their mouth, wiggling it around and removing it.
Have you taken your child to the dentist?	Do you have too much time on your hands?
*lagging - a word used with a pinch of salt.  Children just do things at different speeds, mostly?

A rant about parking at Hammersmith Hospital, which I slightly hope no one reads.

I know this is another diversion from cooking, but I have worked myself up into a right tizz about the fact that Hammersmith parking services seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to ask me to waste NHS medical staff time to prove that I was detained in a paediatric consultant appointment and thus got my 3-minute-late parking ticket.

If anyone out there is, for example, a pissed off Dr at the hospital fed up of being asked to provide a letter ON HEADED PAPER (seriously do these people know how many attempts at printing it takes not to get it back to front and upside down, that is two patient appointments worth) for patients whose appointments go overdue, mostly because quite rightly more urgent cases came in and had to be seen to first... anyway if anyone is out there please feel free to share this with one of the idiot parking people or hospital management. Their response to my letter below was 1) the car park doesnt mainly serve the hospital (oh really, funny how it is LOCATED NEXT TO THE HOSPITAL) and 2) I failed to provide a letter on headed hospital paper proving that I was detained (Goddam right, I believe it would be immoral to ask them to do so) and 3) my suggestion at how they might avoid such problems in the past, like with a phone and pay system, was ignored and my other suggestion dismissed.
[now added - my response their theirs, below]

To: Hammersmith and Fulham parking services

Cc: Steve McManus, Chief Operating Officer, Hammersmith Hospital/Queen Charlotte’s Hospital (Imperial College Healthcare) [nb no reply from him, probably he has better things to do]

27 January 2013, sent again after Notice to Owner 27 March 2013

Dear Sir/Madam,

PCN XXXXXX APPEAL

Re: Does Hammersmith and Fulham parking really think it has the right to sap NHS staff time to justify its penalty charge notices?

Thank you for your notice to owner reviewing my appeal for the penalty charge notice. To review the situation, I was issued the PCN a few minutes after my hour long ticket expired as I was with the Consultant paediatrician at Queen Charlottes/Hammersmith Hospital for an appointment in the paediatrics department with my unwell 3 month old daughter. The walk between the car park and the clinic with my baby and car seat (total about 7kg) was about ten minutes.

You asked me to provide you with a letter on hospital headed paper to verify that this appointment ran later than anticipated.  Therefore, one of the following must be true:

a)    You believe it is morally acceptable to ask busy, highly trained NHS staff to check their attendance records to see if an appointment from more than a month ago ran over scheduled time. Presumably you know that no such record is likely to exist, so this is knowingly wasting the time of the NHS personnel.

or

b)   You ask this in the knowledge that any moral person will believe this to be an immoral request and be forced to capitulate to your demands

Given that this car park serves mainly the Hammersmith/Queen Charlottes Hospital, the majority of its users must find it difficult to predict how long their waiting time for their appointment must be and how long that appointment will last.  And a maternity hospital, too.  Are the following scenarios ethically acceptable do you think?

SCENE 1:

The scene:  woman has been in labour for 36 hours. She is mentally and physically exhausted, however she is determined to have a birth without high-end pain relief.  Because of this, she is reliant on her husband- her birth partner- and the hospital staff for support and encouragement for a good outcome to the birth.

Midwife: well done – you have worked so hard to get here, we can see the baby’s head now, you are nearly there.  Breathe

Husband: sorry honey but I just have to nip out and put some more money on the parking

Woman: I AM DIVORCING YOU AS SOON AS WE GET OUT OF HERE

SCENE 2: the paediatric walk-in unit, having arrived at an appointed time but been waiting an hour for justifiably more important cases to be seen first, mother and baby are seen by paediatric consultant:

Consultant: so we have reviewed the symptoms, now lets discuss the risks and benefits of putting your infant on this drug at 3 months old

Mother: sorry, I can’t stay as my parking is about to run out so I won’t be able to listen to this part of the conversation

Or

Mother:  sorry could you stop the appointment and I will come back in 20 minutes when I have walked to the car and back to put more on the parking

The solution:

May I ask why you have not introduced a barrier system whereby visitors enter, take a ticket, and pay for the time that has expired when they leave?  It seems a very simple idea and would prevent the absurd situation of people trying to predict how long they are going to take to give birth, trying to predict their hospital visit, and most importantly, you would not be asking people to use up NHS resources to justify how long they were at the hospital.  Alternatively many councils are using payment by phone where you can top up remotely if you are running late.

A more cynical person than me might think that not having a barrier/phone system was a deliberate ploy to earn more revenue through the PCNs that you know you will be able to issue when people have unpredictable timings for their parking.

I previously sent you this letter with the parking ticket that I bought in good faith, which you did not return to me. I trust this will be passed on as appropriate.

I trust that you will cancel my PCN and urgently review the parking system.  If you do not consider this faithfully, I will be delighted to seek the opinion of a broader audience on this matter through social media/consumer affairs programmes.

Yours,

XXXXXX

----------

Following their response I have sent this:

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter in which you either dismiss or ignore many of the points in my letter. Perhaps you did not have time to read my letter properly so I am highlighting the points you did not address or misunderstood below:

1)   you mentioned it would not be possible to install a barrier system as it would need to be manned. However you ignored my suggestion for pay-by-text. I am sure you know that this is used successfully elsewhere, would solve issues of people in hospital appointments or in the waiting room needing to top up payments and would not require on-site staff.

2)   You persist in demanding a letter on headed paper to say that my appointment with the consultant paediatrician in the paediatric ambulatory care unit ran over, causing my parking ticket to run over by 4 minutes.  You also ignore my question about whether you think it is morally acceptable to ask highly qualified and busy medical staff to do such a task, especially given that you have ignored my suggestion for making it easier for patients to top up their parking (see point 1).  Can I suggest that you therefore print this letter onto your headed paper and send it to the entire staff of the Hammersmith and Queen Charlottes Hospitals?

Dear Doctors, Nurses, other healthcare professionals and support staff based at Queen Charlottes and the Hammersmith Hospital. 

We run the car park behind your hospital.

Occasionally you may be quite busy in your clinic/on your ward, and patients who think they are there for an hour may be there longer.  On these occasions we would like you to write a letter on your headed note paper for every patient parking in the car park to state the reason for the delay.  Each letter may take you about 10-15 minutes to do, which might be the same amount of time as it takes for you to see a patient, however we think that is just fine. If we or any of our relatives want to be seen in your clinic we won’t mind at all that you are writing letters about parking.

Thank you, the parking team.

3)   You note that the car park is not intended primarily to be a hospital car park, it is for people using the Scrubs or the prison or other activities in the area. The fact that it is a large car park next to the hospital, which has only a small car park, is something you choose to ignore.  I think you might want to do a reality check on this one, or perhaps put up a notice that says something like “Don’t use this car park if you are using the hospital and are not prepared to waste NHS staff time if your appointment runs over and you can’t leave your appointment and do a 20 minute round trip to the car with your 7kg baby to top up the meter”

4)   You note that the car park is under local authority not run by the hospital, and that this is a key part of your argument for justifying the above.  I apologise for being blunt but you need to get out more.  Can I recommend Douglas Adams point of view gun, in which the user firing the gun sees a situation from the other persons point of view?  Here are some things running through peoples minds when they are parking in the car park:

a.     “I am really worried about seeing my aunt Gladys/mum/daughter. We are waiting for some news on some tests/having a difficult procedure/I am upset about it but trying not to show it for their sake”

b.     “I really hope the results are ok, my heart would break if there was anything really wrong with them. The staff are great and I know they are doing their best.”

c.      “Afterwards I need to get to pick up my child from school/take some shopping to my dad/go to work, but I don’t want to rush this visit either”

d.     I wonder which authority runs this car park? Obviously it makes my life materially different if it’s the hospital or the local authority and I will give the matter some serious thought.

Once again I look forward to hearing from you.