New babe

It’s always a blessing when a new member enters the family. We were graced last week with a little girl, the first for my fourth son, Jason, and his partner, Sharon. That brings my grandchild count up to seven, four girls and three boys. Because Sharon and Jason live in the Gold Coast, it will most likely be a while until we meet her but we are so fortunate these days with Messenger and Zoom and all the other aps that allow face time. We saw her shortly after her birth and were able to say hello. Modern society sure beats the old days in these kinds of things.

There is nothing worse for a new mum than conflicting advice, one nurse saying one thing and the next, another. There really isn’t much one can do that would be considered wrong when bringing up a baby these days, at least not from a normal intelligent person’s point of view. However, when trying to do the ‘right’ thing, it can get confusing.

I had a book that I referred to when my first baby was young. I had been a nurse and so had had plenty of exposure to new borns and had learnt how to bath them, change nappies and all the other things that went with it. I’d also had a couple of six-week stints in the paediatric ward where feeding lots of sick babies a bottle had been a real struggle. Sick babies often didn’t want to drink.

After my baby was born, I was soon out on the farm, baby in the front pack and me working, much like before. One particular day I came back inside and put Michael down to sleep in the bassinet. He started crying and wouldn’t settle. My book had told me to let them cry if I knew they weren’t hungry or wet.

He eventually went to sleep. When he woke later and I was changing his nappy, I saw, against his skin, a blackberry spike, (we had heaps of blackberry bushes on the farm), the real reason he had been unsettled.

That was when I threw the book away and never referred to it again, trusting my own gut and judgement instead.

I think, so much in life and particularly with our children, we need to trust what feels right to us, even if we have people telling us otherwise. Many times in my life I have followed my own instinct, against advice from others, and realised later that I had indeed done the right thing.

It can seem a tricky road to navigate having a new baby at home for the first time, but all babies grow into toddlers, all babies eventually sleep through the night and all babies eventually grow up to be adults regardless of how different their routines were as a baby. And we as mothers get to sleep through the night again at some stage too. Hold onto that.