Trying to be a green parent

Not a very green start to the day this morning – I spent an hour in a deep, warm bath reading an entirely unintellectual magazine (I don’t even think the environmentally sound bubble bath made up for the energy cost of heating, nor the purification cost of, that much drinking water). I’m now eating a chocolate dessert produced in a factory, over packaged and heated in the microwave.

No excuse really – except that Alexander woke at 10, 1, 3, 4 and 5:30 last night – and was awake for half an hour between 4 and 4:30 and refused to go back to sleep after 5:30. Peter took him out in the pushchair at 7:30 to collect a parcel from the post-office and I got in the bath.

I’m feeling better after all that though, even if the planet isn’t.

We had a pleasant day yesterday – although it started out annoyingly. Peter and I had both taken annual leave in order to take Alexander to hospital to meet the surgeon who will later perform his hernia operation. Unfortunately once we arrived we discovered that the surgeon had been double-booked because of a computer system error and by the time the receptionists realised it was after 9 and we’d already left for the hospital. It’s really annoying because Peter doesn’t have much annual leave left and that day was thus “wasted”. We don’t yet know when the next appointment will be as the receptionists were not able to rebook – we have to wait for The Great System to send us another.

Still we made the most of the situation – visiting first the superb “hot chocolate man” on Norbiton railway station – he could remember us and was interested in catching up with our news, then a neighbour from our old flat-block. After we got home we met another friend – a girl who has been doing work experience at our company this week, but whom I have known for several years – and had her over. We made pancakes together which we all – including Alexander – thoroughly enjoyed. Once Alexander was in bed we invited our friendly neighbours over to help us finish off the batter. So an enjoyable day of socialising with pleasant people.

Well, as of yesterday I’m a working mother. This is a subject that people are very emotional about – I have had comments from an acquaintance that working mothers are the source of all society’s problems and that it is the selfish mother’s drive for material comforts – and hence unnecessary “luxury” income – that cause children to misbehave at school etc. I have also heard many people make comments about how you shouldn’t have a child if you don’t intend to spend enough time with them. I’ve had mothers tell me they regretted their decision to go back to work so soon and others telling me that they wish they hadn’t taken so long out of their careers. I’ve read books that say that children – especially boys – who go to nurseries (in particular) are emotionally scared and suffer from stress. I’ve read books that say that children who don’t go to nurseries really don’t cope with the shock of school.

But for better or worse, I have now joined the huge number of women who juggle work and motherhood. After two days of it I have some observations:

 1) Alexander has shown no distress on being left or collected from the childminder and she tells me that he has been a bouncy cheerful boy all day on both occasions. When I collected him tonight and took him from her arms he turned round and touched her and smiled before rotating back to smile at and touch me – something I took as a good sign.

2) Alexander showed genuine pleasure at seeing me at the end of the day.

3) It’s a long time since I have been that happy to be with Alexander at 5 pm – usually my “dead” hour when I’m exhausted, physically and emotionally from looking after him all day.

4) Alexander has taken well to taking milk from a bottle and I can express milk efficiently and effectively in the purpose-assigned “nursing mothers’ room” at work. He also has eaten every solid food the childminder has given him.

5) Alexander is clearly tired, but over-excited at the end of the day – probably the mixture of new experiences. Yesterday – his first day – he fell asleep on my lap when he got home, but then had trouble settling in the evening. Today he took almost 30 minutes to get to sleep – compared to his usual 10. He’s asleep in his own cot now though. Perhaps we need to stagger our hours a bit so we can collect him earlier and have a more peaceful evening before bed-time. When I go full time in September, Peter and I will alternate 8-4 and 9-6, so we’ll collect him earlier than the 5:30 we collected him the last two days.

6) I thoroughly enjoy my job. I’m very good at it too. Motherhood and maternity leave have not killed my intelligence.

7) I adore my son and really miss him when I think about him (especially when expressing milk at work).

8 )  I am going to have to be exceedingly organised to make sure everything gets done around the house and I still go to bed around 9:30 pm (so I can cope with the night feeds). I was putting out the laundry on the line at 7 am yesterday morning – while the kettle was boiling.

9) I might need to employ a cleaner.

10) I think Alexander, Peter and I are going to cope!

Today my boss told me that I’d impressed the interviewers with my energy and enthusiasm during the promotion interview I had while I was on maternity leave. I smiled because I couldn’t help thinking that those were the two adjectives my mum-friends had used to describe Alexander! My boss said she wasn’t surprised – as he clearly got that from both parents.

Alexander has had several more bad nights since my last post – 4 in a row now. Sunday to Monday was the worst – he was awake from 11 pm until nearly 3 am. I went to bed really early myself yesterday and that helped a bit. He’s slept a lot in our bed too – he sleeps better there – but I’m just hoping that he’ll go back into his own bed without too many problems once his cold gets better. Peter and I have caught the cold too. Ah well…

Two opposite parenting ideas – but I’m one for doing a bit of everything! One is that I’ve bought myself a ring sling! After the success at getting Alexander up a mountain using a sheet, I thought I’d get something designed for that purpose (he’s getting too heavy for the Bjorn baby carrier that I’ve used up to now). So far so good – I’ve tried it on this morning and after a few different attempts got something pretty comfortable. He’s even gone to sleep on my hip and I am typing away with him asleep on me. I like babywearing - he enjoys seeing what’s going on from an adult height, it makes it easy to keep an eye on him, it’s easier to go places that are cramped or have steps and I think it helps him feel safe. I’m not quite as obsessed as some people though – there are those who carry their babies all the time, but I do think baby and mum need some separation.

Those very keen on baby carrying will probably disapprove of another excellent thing I’ve got – a playpen, or more specifically Alexander has inherited the playpen his Dad played in as a baby. But far from seeing it as a prison, Alexander has taken to it really well and is clearly very happy in there. I’ve put some foam tiles on the base and with that surface he can actually slide around the pen on his belly – pulling himself along with his arms (usually backwards at the moment though). This gives him far more freedom than the carpet – which he gets stuck on and frustrated.  Before I got the foam base, I held him up on the outside – and he grabbed the rails and held on tight – keeping himself on his legs for more than 5 minutes!

So – baby close in a sling, or baby behind bars – my darling Alexander is a happy adaptable chap.

Wet grass between bare toes. The still silence of 7 am on a Sunday morning – broken by bird song and the noise of a shop shutter being opened. The hint of perfume in the air from the flowers. The weak sun straining to break from the puffy white clouds. The smile of the most beautiful baby in the world.

It’s a wonderful feeling to hang out laundry in the garden wearing your dressing gown with bare feet and with Alexander in the bumbo watching you early on a Sunday morning. A peaceful scene that’s relaxing.

5 minutes earlier I was lying in bed with Alexander wriggling, crying, kicking and showing no signs of going back to sleep. I was stressed, frustrated and absolutely exhausted. So I did a “deal” with Peter – he gets to sleep now and then later he’ll take Alexander for a long walk in the pram and I’ll go back to bed. You see – Alexander has a cold. He’s sniffly – very blocked up, he probably has a head ache (well he keeps banging the side of his head above his eye) and he’s got terrible nappy rash. We tried giving him medicine last night, but he spat it all out. At least last night he slept in his own bed until 2 am – having woken “only” at 10, midnight and 2. From 2 until 5:15 he slept in our bed. Then he woke up.  It’s not easy changing a nappy at 5:45 am either, but with the rash it had to be done… The previous night he woke at 8, 9, 10, 11, midnight and 1 – at which point he came into our bed and slept until 6.

I don’t know how I cope. In my previous existance I slept 9 or more hours every night. The things I hated most were the repetitive chores – the washing up, paperwork – the jobs that never ended. Now I consider 7 broken hours of sleep a “good night” and my life is almost entirely filled with repetitive jobs – laundry, feeding, nappy changing, tidying up (arrghhh…) – and yet, as at 7 am this morning, I feel very peacefully happy (most of the time).

We’re in Wales having a holiday. Today we went up The Hill (Garth). It apparently is the hill in the film “The Englishman who went up a hill but came down a mountain“. In our case we went up the straightforward “hill” route – with a road and then relatively broad path, and came down the more mountainous way.

There was some discussion amongst the group about how to transport Alexander up and down this hill/mountain. We hadn’t brought our normal carrier – although we got a car lift to Wales, we’re likely to return by train and we were trying to reduce packing – and there were those of us who thought we should use the pushchair and those who thought we should make a sling. In the end we went for both – we did make a sling from a sheet (!) and we pushed the empty pushchair up the hill – just in case the sling failed. But it didn’t – amazingly Alexander fell asleep in the sling and seemed quite content. On the return route we pushed him in the pushchair until it got far too steep, then put him back in the sling – where he fell asleep again.

A successful journey up and down!

(Actually we also went up yesterday – but there we went half way up by car and then went up the easy route – hence the variety of people and clothes in these pictures)

Well, Alexander has begun to eat. It’s extremely exciting – if a little messy! In his first week he had pear, apple, broccoli, banana, courgette, cheese, sweet potato, carrot, rice cakes – and has eaten the lot.

 I studied the ‘traditional’ puree based approach and the ‘baby led weaning’ approach – the latter based on giving them pieces of solid food from the start – and to be honest after all my reading I still wasn’t sure about either approach: so I decided to do both!

So, each evening he’s had a different vegetable or fruit and I’ve simultaneously given him a few spoonfuls of it in pureed form, with a ‘real’ version of the steamed or cooked food to ‘play’ with. I’ve also let him eat banana, rice cakes and cheese ’straight’. The approach has gone well so far – he has been eating quantities of both the pureed and the ‘real’ foods. He is quite independent and likes to hold his own spoon too.

 We’d bought him an ‘untippable’ bowl – and on the first evening he got it upside down on the floor. Fortunately we’ve got a mat on the floor too.

I took my little 5-month old son down to a university department today to be experimented on. Shocking?! Not at all – he had a great time and it’s all very important research in learning how children learn to speak.

Alexander enjoyed the trip up to London – smiling at absolutely everyone on the train (and getting smiles back from most of them – even those who got on the train looking extremely grumpy – Alex breaks all the “rules” about not giving eye contact nor, heaven forbid, speaking to anyone on public transport!), then falling asleep on the bus (Waterloo to Russell Square – a very comfortable 10 minute journey: probably better than the tube journey even if you didn’t have a pushchair).

We got to Babylab at Birkbeck College with him still asleep – but the friendly staff helped me get a couple of tea and discussed the experiment with me while he woke naturally. Then we went downstairs to the lab. They distracted him with lovely bubbles and some fun toys then, when he was least expecting it, they put the funny net on his head – loads of little sensors that monitor his “brainwaves” (don’t worry, nothing was transmitted into his brain, it was purely monitoring). The net had soft pads that they’d soaked in a weak solution of salt and baby shampoo in water.

After some more general games Alexander sat on my lap in a darkened room looking at a computer screen – the researchers were monitoring him from outside the room using a video camera under the screen. He was shown three female heads (life-size) that said “ba ba ba ga ga ba ba …” while the lips either matched the ba and ga, or were the opposite. The test was to see whether he was already beginning to lip read and would recognise when it was wrong.

For three minutes Alexander stared intently at the screen – fascinated by the funny woman repeating herself. Apparently they could see him trying to copy her lip movements and smiling and “talking” back to her. Then he got bored and cried. He was distracted, cheered up, but as soon as the women came back he cried again – he’d had enough of that and didn’t want to see her any more. So they stopped the experiment (apparently the three minutes of intense concentration will give them plenty of data) and we went back upstairs for some more toys and chat and he got a certificate.

We’re going to go back on Wednesday for a different study – one involving near infrared measurements of the blood in his head – monitoring oxygen levels. I’ll have a professional as well as personal interest in that study.

It was great fun and I’d thorougly recommend it to other mums!

Alexander’s first tooth has broken through the gum! On Monday (7th May – 5 months and 2 days old) in the evening as we were on the train pulling out of Wimbledon station on the way home from visiting his grandparents, we first noticed a tiny tooth tip – since then it has started to grow slowly upwards, although there’s still no more than a millimetre or so showing.

Interestingly after a week of extremely bad sleep (see below) the night after the teeth broke the gum (and every night since) he’s woken just twice a night. There have been a few other changes too – 1) the weather – the temperature has dropped 2 degrees and it’s started to rain, and 2) the aeroplanes – with the change in weather the wind direction has changed and there are no longer noisy aeroplanes flying over every minute and a half until midnight. So his sleep depends on planes, temperature or tooth problems – and not on anything I do as I have made no changes to how I put him to sleep.

(Of course, he’s still not sleeping 12 hours straight – or anything like – but for me sleeping 7 pm to midnight, midnight to 4 am and 4 am to after 6 am is good enough. Especially since he’s gone back to falling back to sleep after a 5 minute feed rather than taking 25+ minutes to go back to sleep after each of 4 or 5 night wakings).

I have had so many people tell me that there’s no point – I can cut my energy useage as much as I like, but there’s such a huge growth in energy useage around the world (China and India always take the blame – even though their per capita useage is far far lower than ours) that what I do is irrelevant.

This is absolutely true on one level. But I can’t start telling others what to do until I’ve got my own house in order – and I need to test what works before I can advise others. Still we do need to start having regulations, international treaties that mean something etc to sort this out.

One group campaigning for just that is Avaaz – click on this link for their climate change petition: http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_leaders/

Meanwhile I’ve written a letter to one of the shops in Kingston that had 50 or more 20 W dichroic lights on at 11 pm the other night. 10 unnecessary hours a night were costing them £1 per day – the fact that that doesn’t matter shows that electricity is still far too cheap. I also pointed out that in the summer it seems crazy to have a 1 kW electric fire on in their shop 24 hours a day. Ironically they were a beauty shop based on “natural” products. Will my letter make any difference? Probably not, but it’s always worth a try.

As well as sleep, I’m currently preoccupied with learning about weaning. In the past the recommendation was that babies were weaned at 3 months onto sloppy purees, slowly increasing to finger food at 6 months. Then they said don’t start until 4 months. Now the World Health Organisation recommendation is that weaning shouldn’t start until 6 months. Apparently early weaning is linked to allergies.

Interestingly people are now feeding babies at 6 months what they would have fed them at 3 months – sloppy baby rice etc. There is new research that my health visitor suggested I look at, that says if you’ve waited until 6 months, you don’t need purees. It’s called “Baby Led Weaning“ and is an interesting idea.