Prem Babies | picklebums.com

August 5, 2010 | Filed in: Pickle-me-kate

In celebration and recognition of World Breastfeeding Week I am going to talk about my boobs today….

You would think that since I managed to breastfeed twins for over two years that I had this whole breastfeeding gig totally sorted…. but you’d be wrong.

The girls born way too early to breastfeed. They were too prem to even take milk feeds for the first week and a half. So my very first introduction to breastfeeding was the pain, anguish and humiliation of a midwife hand expressing tiny amounts of colostrum into syringes because I couldn’t for the life of me get a drop of milk out of my own boobs.

Later I became close friends with the ‘Mean Green Milking Machine’ as I expressed three hourly round the clock to try and increase my supply and keep up with the demands of my then tube fed babies. It wasn’t till the girls were about 7 weeks old that we even attempted to breastfeed…. and then it was a total disaster. Two sleepy, tiny babies, with reflux, big boobs and flat nipples…. it wasn’t at all like I had expected. Eventually, with the help of nipple shields and a little good advice we went on to breastfeed for more than two years.

I am proud of that achievement, against the odds, and I knew I’d battle whatever I had to to breastfeed my next baby too. But after Muski was born, I suddenly realised I had absolutely no idea how to breastfeed a newborn. Not a clue.

I knew the theory behind getting a baby to latch properly… but I’d never had to actually do it. With nipple shields, a correct latch is a non issue. You just get the baby to suck, they suck your nipple into the shield and off you go. You also hold your breast differently when you are holding on a nipple shield.

Faced with a hungry baby and a bare breast I was totally lost.

I muddled through for the first couple of days, watching my nipples get shredded before my very eyes. At the end of the first week I gave up being stubborn and rang for an appointment with the local lactation consultant. Of course that was Friday and I had a whole weekend of pain and feeding ahead of me. So I did what any self respecting net-nerd would do when in need of help…. I googled..

I read through the fabulous Kelly Mom site and some ABA info and forum posts which were all great…. but I already knew the theory, I just wasn’t quite able to get the mechanics of it all to work when I needed it most. How exactly do I hold the baby? Where exactly do I put my hand? How do I hold my boob and get everything in the right place at the right time?

I’m a visual learner… I needed pictures…. I needed video!

I hit you-tube.

I searched around a bit, and watched a couple of videos and suddenly the light bulb went on. I was holding my breast all wrong, no wonder I felt all tangled and confused.

It was as simple as that.

I sorted out which way to hold my breast, reminded myself about aiming my nipple at the roof of his mouth and off we went. By the time my Monday apportionment with the lactation consultant rolled around my nipples were well on the way to healing and we were feeding with no troubles at all.

Three years (and a day) later I had a new hungry baby to feed and while I was much better equipped this time around I still jumped on the computer and hit up you-tube for a bit of a refresher course.

Nothing comes close to good advice and support from a great lactation consultant or midwife (I know because I’ve had some terrible advice in the past) or ABA counsellor (which by the way you can call or email just about any time) but if it happens to be the middle of the weekend or the middle of the night or you just need some reassurance, some information and some real life demonstrations, check out these video resources for positioning and latching a newborn….

Shifting the Baby to get a Good Asymmetrical Latch with Dr. Jack Newman

Getting a good latch with Dr. Jack Newman

Baby 28 hrs old, Baby-Led Mother-Guided Latching

share the love

More »

In the early hours of a Saturday morning a boy was born, our fourth child. This is the story of his birth, but it can not be told in isolation. The story of his birth is intertwined with those of his brother and sisters. The strings that wrap around their stories, criss-cross each other so many times in so many ways that one story becomes part of the next and the next.

So I need to start at the beginning, almost seven years ago, with the birth of our twins.

I never for a moment thought that I would have twins. I had other ideas of how pregnancy and birth would be when we decided to try for a baby – a happy, healthy pregnancy and a peaceful, natural, birth centre birth. Instead it became a carefully monitored, high risk, scary pregnancy, ending with a c-section and two tiny prem babies who spent weeks in hospital. My world changed.

While it was not the birth I planned it was the birth I needed.

Without the monitoring and the specialist obstetric care, without the c-section at 29 weeks and the specialist neonatal care … without any one of those scary things our girls would not have survived. It was not easy, and we are not without our scars, but it was the birth we needed and while I wish it had happened differently, I do not regret it.

When I became pregnant with our third child, I knew it would be different.

Logically I knew that the reasons the girls were born early couldn’t happen, wouldn’t happen, to a single baby. Logically I knew that I had just as much chance of a long and healthy pregnancy and natural birth as anyone else. I thought things through, I weighed up some options and I choose the path that felt right to me. I would birth this baby naturally, normally.

His was an easy pregnancy, sure I threw up a lot, but physically and emotionally I felt wonderful… until around 41 weeks when I began to doubt myself. My body had never gone into labour without severe trauma, maybe it never would? At 42 weeks I hit rock bottom, I wanted another c-section. Two days later, a quiet, slow, long labour began.

After 24 hours of fairly painless labour and an hour or so of pushing my first boy baby was born into my arms and my world changed.

The adrenalin pumped through my veins for weeks after his birth. I was on top of the world. I felt powerful. I felt incredible. Despite people telling me that I had made the wrong choices, that I was crazy, that I would never get what I wanted, when even I had begun to doubt myself, I birthed my baby, into my arms.

My first two births couldn’t have been more different. Both amazing and miraculous in their own way, but poles apart. And this time? Our fourth child, my third birth… how would it be this time?

This pregnancy was physically harder than either of the others. I didn’t suffer any of the really nasty pregnancy symptoms or issues so I can’t really complain, but this time around I felt old, physically tired, and old. This baby burnt my ribs and made everything I ate taste terrible. He kicked and wiggled and hiccuped all day and night. In the last weeks as his head got lower and lower (something that never happened with M) my ankles swelled and I waddled like an uncomfortable duck.

It was the end of the school term, the middle of the year, and we were busy, really busy. School stuff, a third birthday and a ballet concert. I wished and wished this baby out a week before his due date but he wasn’t playing along… so I accepted that this would probably be another 42 week pregnancy and got on with life.

I wasn’t ready for labour when it kicked in late Friday night. I wasn’t ready, so I dismissed the regular, slightly painful crampiness as a result of eating too much Chinese food at the birthday dinner. I went to bed, but it didn’t go away, so I got up and got online… I needed a distraction.

I tweeted with the lovely Jayne for an hour or two in the middle of the night, before I finally decided that if this was labour and the contractions were around 3 minutes apart and hurt somewhat…. hang on… they hurt? They never hurt this early on with Muski…. hmm if they hurt and are three minutes apart, perhaps I should do something?

So I warned our babysitter and packed a bag as the Baldy Boy crammed in an hour or so sleep before I woke him. I’d decided that I really didn’t want to be stuck in the car if things got any more hurty than they already were… I was ready to go.

The fabulous Shae arrived and we left a little before 3am.

Round-abouts SUCK when you are in labour. They really, really suck.

We got to the hospital at about 3:40am (The Baldy Boy swears he didn’t speed, there was just no traffic at all, which is a good thing). It was dark and quiet and freezing cold.

We ‘settled in’ which means I huffed and puffed through a few more contractions while trying to answer questions and we monitored the baby and the contractions for a little while. It was like dejavou hearing the regular ‘doof doof’ sound of the baby’s heart beat…. I’d heard it so often with both the girl’s pregnancy and Muski’s. It was strong and regular and never wavered…

At 4 am I asked if the midwife would check to see what was going on…. she reported a big bulging bag of water and that she couldn’t feel my cervix at all. I’m not sure if that made me feel better or worse…. it all seemed so fast, too fast and it hurt, it didn’t hurt last time, it wasn’t supposed to hurt!

As if the ‘fully dilated’ report was a button things suddenly switched from regular hurty contractions to ‘holly crap hurt a lot, I’m never ever doing this ever again, bugger that I am pushing’ in a matter of seconds. Then there was a loud ‘pop-splat-gush’ and midwife, husband and even me, despite not having much time for breathing let alone talking, stopped for a split second to marvel at the force with which my waters broke, shot across the room and hit the wall. “Woah” was the resounding response from all of us.

It was all crazy pushing, yelling, crying, swearing and “I’m never ever EVER doing this ever again” from there on in. The lovely on call obstetrician arrived just as he was crowning and I was wondering, in a crazy moment of complete clarity, why I didn’t just sign up for that c-section – because you know I could have had a c-section, all I had to do was ask.

Muski’s birth was pretty much pain free. It was uncomfortable and hard work but it didn’t really hurt. I didn’t have that ‘ring of fire’ as he crowned…I just felt pressure and exhaustion. This was different, very different.

As this baby began to crown I began to cry… I couldn’t possibly do this. I pushed, his head slowly inched out, then stopped. I lost it. I started yelling at everyone.
“I can’t stay like this, someone do something” I pleaded.
Everyone tried to reassure me that I wouldn’t be stuck like that forever but I didn’t buy it. They told me to just push with the next contraction, but there wasn’t one. For what seemed like forever (but was probably only a minute or two) the contractions simply stopped. I’d been willing the darn things to slow down a bit in the previous hour and now, just when I wanted them to ramp up and get this thing out of me, they stopped…..

Finally another contraction hit and he crowned…. K quietly slipped the chord from around his neck and then he was born…. in a crazy mess of yelling and tears….

It was just after 5am. Six hours from the first twinge. Three hours from when regular contractions began and just over and hour after we arrived at the hospital. My life changed.

As long slow and relaxed as Muski’s labour and birth had been Quatro’s was fast and full-on and intense. It grounded me in a totally different way. This time I didn’t want to yell from the roof tops, this time I wanted nothing more than to stare at my baby in quiet amazement which is just what we did for the next couple of hours.

With each of my births the resounding response from me has been ‘Wow’.

Said with relief…”Wow! I have twins, and they are alive and doing ok”

Shouted from the roof tops….”Wow! I birthed my baby into my arms, I am awesome!”

and this time…

Whispered quietly with awe….”wow…. just wow.”

Giving birth changed me each time. ‘
Each time in different ways.
Each time in the same way.

share the love

More »

I blamed pregnancy hormones as I got all teary watching this mother of twins learning to bond with her babies. But to be honest, watching and hearing the babies crying in unison and seeing the look of shear exhaustion, confusion and fear on their mother’s face, I was right back there in the early days of our twin’s lives.

The show followed a young mum as she went to therapy sessions over a number of months to learn to respond to and bond with her babies, particularly one of them. Her beginning story was so familiar to me. She never thought she’d have twins and was still coming to terms with that fact when they were born, by c-section, eight weeks early. This Mum had other issues from her childhood that also played a part in her bonding issues but I could identify with her on so many levels.

I didn’t bond with my girls when they were born.

I would never had admitted it at the time, in fact I don’t think I had even a shred conscious knowledge of it, but looking back, it seems so obvious. I was detached from my girls even before they were born.

When I found out there was two in there it took me a long long LONG time to process that idea. (even now I still have moments of shear confusion when I realise it is part of my life). I was 25 weeks pregnant when things first started to go wrong. I had four weeks in and out of hospital before they were born with various procedures. medication, information and statistics of how likely our babies were to survive and what their outcomes might be like. Then 11 weeks early, they were born, in a hurry, via c-section.

I cope really well with stress, and disaster, because I am practical. I think through all the scenarios (ok I worry through them) and then work out how we’ll cope in a practical sense. On the emotional side I’m not so together. It wasn’t intentional, and I didn’t realise it, but I coped by making a little gap. Just a little space that would keep me functioning in case the worst happened. Then I dismissed the idea of loosing them and got on with being practical.

It was the same after they were born. They were both alive and fighting so perhaps I let the gap lessen a little, but it was still there. I needed that gap to get through all the crap that life with two prem babies throws at you.

Don’t get me wrong, I did love them… I just didn’t love them.

There was no rush of maternal love. There was no doey eyed moments like on the ABA poster in the expressing room. There was just lots of practical learning, and doing, and waiting. I was good at that stuff, so I focussed on the stuff I was good at.

When they came home I was still good at all the practical coping stuff. Hell, I’d been a nanny, I’d worked in childcare, I had a degree in this stuff. I knew how to do all the practical stuff, but there is more to having babies than practical stuff, and there was still a gap.

When they were both sleeping I’d often catch myself looking at them and suddenly realising they were mine. They didn’t really feel like mine. They could have been someone else’s babies, babies I was just looking after for a while…. but they weren’t.

As I watched the documentary last night and saw this mother learning to gaze into her babies’ eyes to make a connection, I really felt for her. When you have two unsettled babies there isn’t much time for eye gazing. When they get upset, you get upset and stressed, which makes them stressed, which makes you stressed… it’s a vicious circle compounded by a million other little things that I’m sure lots of mother’s go through. It’s just that some of us have that little gap…

Things got better for us when the girls were around six months old. It was a combination of things, like sorting out the right medication for their reflux, getting back on track with feeding, connecting with some wonderful like minded mums and finding one or two professionals who took the time to tell me I was doing a good job…. and just time.

I started to enjoy them as well as simply cope and the gap slowly disappeared.

I don’t have guilt over our lack of ‘bonding’ any more. I have plenty of hefty Mother Guilt over a lot of other things, but surprisingly not over this.

I was caught up in a cycle of crappy circumstances – A bucket load of stress while pregnant, a c-section well before my body even thought about giving birth, no happy post birth hormones, no babies to hold, expressing instead of breastfeeding, more buckets of stress and exhaustion while the girls were in hospital, early problems with breastfeeding, later problems with breastfeeding, reflux x2, failure to thrive x 2…..and the list goes on. Not exactly a balanced equation for building a loving bond with my first children. Given the circumstances I think the fact that we coped at all is pretty darn amazing.

I do, however, worry.

I worry about long term effects. I worry that Izzy’s melt downs and Zoe’s sensitiveness are somehow related to our lack of early bonding. I worry that their social choice to stick to each other like glue forsaking all others is because of our less than perfect start. I know it might not have caused any of these things, but I also know enough to know that it might have.

I also know there is no point in worrying, but I still do.
It’s what I do, it’s how I cope.

And for the record…. it took me ages to go to sleep after all that!

share the love