Heather's Handmade Life

Guest post: When your baby hates bottles …

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Heather Laura Clarke

I’m so happy to announce that today we have a guest post from my fabulous friend, Lindsey, over at like a hamster on a wheel. Enjoy!

I’ve been reading my friend Heather’s blog since the day she started it. I’m happy to say that we were by each other’s sides from daydreaming about starting our families, to TTC (well, I wasn’t literally there for that part … ha!), to the play-by-plays of pregnancy and motherhood. We’ve each had such unique experiences and learned from each other, A LOT. I’m excited that she invited me to guest post and share a couple of my own stories with you.

There are so many unknowns associated with becoming a new parent — Will my baby be a boy or a girl? Will he or she be born with hair? Will they sleep through the night? Will I ever get my social life back?

Then there were also many things about motherhood that I felt sure about — I would love my baby unconditionally, I would sing to him and rock him to sleep, and I would most certainly change plenty of dirty diapers.

And then there’s that special category … the things-you-thought-you-knew-but-were-so-wrong-about stuff. This is probably where most of your pre-parenthood knowledge will be filed after your bambino comes along.

For us, one of those troublesome subjects is bottle feeding. To avoid any nipple confusion, our doctor recommended waiting six weeks before introducing a soother or bottle to our boy. I was fine with that, and was extremely fortunate to have a positive breast feeding experience.

When they day came to pass the baby to Husband with a bottle of expressed breast milk, I was both excited (for Husband have the experience that I love so much) and relieved (to be able to leave Jacob with his Dad or even with friends or family and regain a bit of my/our freedom).

That moment I was looking so forward to didn’t turn out quite as expected. It was actually pretty discouraging. He would kick up a fuss every time we tried to give him a bottle. And we’re nothing if not persistent. We tried pretty much every brand or bottle on the market. We’ve used slow flow, fast flow, big nipples, little nipples, anti-gas tips, everything you can think of to appeal to his tastes.

Seriously? Isn’t a baby bottle one of the most iconic symbols of new motherhood — they’re on greeting cards, shower decorations and embroidered on onesies. But in our house, they’re the devil.

A few times he decided to take an ounce or two out of a bottle in one sitting. What a little tease. Now we’re prepared to cut our losses and move on. Time for cups.

Every new milestone is exciting. Some don’t necessarily turn out the way we’d expect, but our babies are only little for such a short time. Rather than dwelling on my negative feelings about bottles (or, in our case, lack thereof), I’m choosing to savour the moments we share when I nurse him … and cross my fingers that our next baby will put some of these things to good use.

Have you had parenting experiences that felt so different from other people’s? Share them here!

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back soon to share another adventure in parenting. Feel free to pop by my blog, www.likeahamsteronawheel.ca, and say hi!

Five little things I do daily to make myself happier

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Heather Laura Clarke

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Make our bed every day, perfectly. Tight blankets smoothed without a wrinkle, neatly arranged throw pillows. Then I open all of the curtains in our bedroom so the sun comes in and makes our bedroom look bright and pretty. ~~Most days~~ Some days we have no visitors, and I am getting back into the bed before Darling Husband (or anyone) has even seen it all made, but I still do it. It makes a huge difference in my mood when I walk past the room 9,492 times a day on the way to the laundry room and the bathroom.
Put on makeup. If I know I’m going out later, I put on a bit more (and do it a bit more carefully). But on a daily basis, I always swipe on a bit of concealer under my eyes, some blush, and a smidge of eyeliner or mascara. And a hint of lipcolour, so I don’t have that whole corpse look going on. When I make trips to the bathroom during the day, I’ll touch it up if I’m looking all crappy and pale again. And then at night, I take it off — and often no one’s seen my made-up face except me and Baby Boy.
Dress Baby Boy in cute, coordinated clothes. I don’t how many times I’ve been picking out an outfit for Baby Boy while someone (Darling Husband, my mom, etc.) exclaimed “He’s just hanging out at home! Who cares?!” I care! He never, ever, ever wears mismatched outfits. It’s just as easy to dress him in a coordinated outfit, and when you take 874 photos of him daily, it helps that he always looks camera-ready.
Draw the line between clothes and pyjamas. In the early months, I would get dressed later in the day, and sometimes my “clothes” would be so casual that I’d sleep in them. Hot, right? I always felt grungy and just “off,” no matter how often I showered. Now I get dressed first-thing in the morning, immediately after I get Baby Boy changed and dressed. It’s usually just yoga pants or leggings and a stretchy tee, but it’s clothing. And when I wind down at night, I change into pyjamas — like a nightgown or a two-piece set or something. It sounds stupid, but it’s made me wear nicer things during the day, because I know I’ll be in comfy pyjamas at night when I’m relaxing.
Keep our home tidy. Since it’s usually just me and Baby Boy here, alone, sometimes for days on end, I could definitely get away with sloppy housekeeping. No one would know! But it would make me all twitchy, so I make a point to keep it fairly tidy. Walking into my nice, clean kitchen is like a little shot of Valium, I swear.

What was I thinking?

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Heather Laura Clarke

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Do you ever get little flashes of mommy regret, where you ask yourself what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks you were thinking at a certain point in time?

I was thinking back to Baby Boy’s newborn days, and remembering how I used to get up for middle-of-the-night feedings. I would take Baby Boy from his Playard next to our bed, change his diaper in his room, and then go to the living room and watch an episode of America’s Next Top Model while I nursed him. And I’d eat little pre-made snacks of cheese and crackers and pepperoni. I’d be up for almost an hour, from start to finish.

What was I thinking???

At the time I was convinced it was the best thing to do. I had tried changing him and then nursing him in his dark room, like, once. Then I declared the feedings took too long and I got bored. I also had the deluded idea that by keeping him awake for a while — nursing him, holding him for a bit, nursing him again — he would “sleep longer” once we both went back to bed.

Again … what was I thinking???

I would put Baby Boy back in bed, he would fuss, and I would have to sit on the edge of our bed rocking him until he was settled enough to go to sleep. This was in my “pacifiers-are-evil” phase, of course. I would sing and rock and whisper and rock until he was too tired to cry when I put him down. Then I would finally crawl back into bed, and … surprise, surprise … I couldn’t sleep! And he didn’t sleep for long stretches, so by the time I fell back asleep, he’d be waking up again. Aughhh!

Now? I only wish Baby Boy was right next to my bed, so I could reach over and feed him without having to get out of bed. I had a dream set-up back then, and I totally wasted it.

If I knew then what I knew now, things would be very, very different. I would have reached over, picked up Baby Boy, nursed him lying down in bed with me, tucked him back into the Playard, popped a soother in his mouth, and we both would have gone back to sleep.

I would have probably be a totally different person in those early months, because I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN MORE SLEEP!

Preggos, new moms — please learn from my mistake! Tyra Banks is awesome, but she is not worth feeling like a zombie for (for months and months on end).