You and Your New Baby. Anna McGrail
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Название: You and Your New Baby
Автор: Anna McGrail
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Секс и семейная психология
isbn: 9780008359508
isbn:
Sometimes a caesarean can lessen the feeling of continuity, as it did for Sushma: ‘They brought him in about five o’clock for a feed. He was all washed then and wrapped in a white blanket, very clean, and so calm – big, dark eyes looking round. I felt like I was being introduced to a stranger, though, who had just dropped in. I was very glad to meet him and all of that, but I didn’t get the feeling that this was the little being I had laboured for so many hours to produce. I felt no connection between this baby in a blanket and the pregnancy I’d had. This baby was here, and I wasn’t pregnant any more, but they didn’t seem to coincide, somehow.’
WHEN YOU’RE preparing for the birth, it may be a good idea to read up about caesareans. That way, if things do turn out not quite the way you planned during your labour, you will be better informed to make choices about the sort of caesarean birth you want.
ONE IN EVERY 90 births in this country is of twins, triplets or more. If this is your situation, you may find many of the problems of adjusting to life as a family doubled (or tripled). In particular, the physical demands can be exhausting, as Dawn and her husband found out: ‘Sometimes we do despair. The sheer volume of work – washing, drying, bottles, nappies – and the effort involved in lifting three of them into the bath, out of the bath, into the highchair, out of the highchair, into the cot, out of the cot … And the noise! Just when you’ve got the last one off, the other two wake up and start shouting.’
STATISTICS SHOW that unfortunately twins, triplets and other higher order births experience medical problems more frequently in the early months of life, and spend more time in special care.
Colin, whose twins did need special care, used to envy parents who only had one: ‘I just seemed to lurch from worry to worry and they had so much more time. So it was useful to be reminded occasionally just how special the twins were. Although I envied parents who only had one, I would never have swapped the twins for just one, or had them one at a time.’
MOST OF US, when we envisage ourselves with a child, envisage exactly that: a one-to-one relationship. Right from the start, therefore, if you’ve given birth to twins, you have to adjust the dream to the reality in a fairly major way.
Jess felt she was giving neither of her children the attention they deserved: ‘Other parents might have time to show their babies a book, or take them for walks, but I hardly had time to smile at them. If one was being quiet, I’d rejoice, because it meant that I could change the other one’s nappy in peace. Most of the time, though, in those first few months, I felt as if I was listening to a constant grizzle, because – except when it came to feeding – whatever I was giving one, it meant I wasn’t giving it to the other.’
PARENTING IN the way or to the standard you’d imagined may not be possible with twins or more, and individual attention may be at a premium, but twins have each other for companionship and, as they grow older, a guaranteed play partner, in ways that singletons can never know.
Widening the circle can be more difficult, however: the efforts involved in getting out and socialising are multiplied more than seems fair when you have more than one. With her triplets, Dawn found it especially complicated: ‘Sometimes it can seem like too much trouble to put on three pairs of shoes and three coats just so you can wheel them all to the corner shop. But I know from experience that if I don’t go, and if I allow Peter to bring things back from work with him at the end of the day, like milk or a loaf of bread, then I might have no reason to go out, and if I don’t have a reason, I won’t go, and if I don’t go, I’ll just stay in and get more and more miserable. So it’s worth the effort.’
HOWEVER, most parents of twins (or triplets) will confirm the old cliché: that even if the demands and problems are doubled (or tripled) so are the joys and delights.
NEWBORN NICETIES
Some of the physical features of newborns that may cause surprise or anxiety include:
Birth marks (if it’s going to be a mark that’s permanent, someone should come to talk to you about it)
Heads that are moulded (from labour) so that they look squashed; the bones will return to normal within days
Spots (usually entirely harmless, however disappointing)
Hair (either too much or too little, depending on what the parents had thought the baby would have, but any amount is normal)
The sex organs – those on some little boys can appear out of proportion (he will grow into them), those on some little girls may be red and swollen as a reaction to the hormones in her mother’s body. Swollen breasts and even occasionally small amounts of milk are caused by the mothers’ hormones. Breast size will reduce and milk disappear over the first few days
A squint (which often disappears as the baby learns to focus her eyes).
HOW MANY of us new parents were prepared for the black umbilical stump? For the blotchy skin which newborns are prone to? For the way our newborn’s hands and feet can turn blue after a long nap, a sign that the circulation is not yet efficient or mature? In fact, in many respects the picturebook baby you were expecting may bear no resemblance to the child you’ve actually got, as Lynn discovered: ‘It was only when I changed Adam’s nappy for the first time that I got a good look at the umbilical cord … which was definitely something I hadn’t been prepared for. There was this black thing, with a clip on it. What was I supposed to do? The nurse had said “Oh, sprinkle on some of this powder when you clean him”, so I stood there with this talcum powder tin trying to guess if I should move the stump to one side, or lift it up, or just sprinkle all around it. I hadn’t a clue. I was petrified of hurting him. I was convinced that whatever I did, it would be wrong: the clamp would come off, it would bleed, I’d knock it off and do him dreadful damage. Then Adam did a wee all over me and I stopped worrying about the cord and started worrying about that instead.’
THERE ARE MANY kinds of marks on your baby’s body that may worry you, although most need no worrying about whatsoever. There are two kinds of birthmarks: vascular, which are to do with the blood vessels, and pigmented, which are to do with skin colouration. Philippa’s daughter, Sophie, was born with a birthmark: ‘Sophie was born with a red mark on her forehead and at first we never gave it a second thought. The midwives said it was probably a pressure mark from the birth СКАЧАТЬ