Four month postpartum and baby update!

Hello and welcome back to my blog! It’s been a while since I’ve updated you on Holly and me after the birth and now she’s four months old I thought I’d better get cracking. Life is really busy and hectic at the minute but it’s also feeling more normal as each day goes by. I’m still figuring out how to keep all of the plates spinning and keep life going in a way that it’s not all nappies and bottle feeds but I’m getting there.

Let’s start this off with an update on the little lady herself.

Holly

Holly is now four months old and is cuter than ever – I swear she gets more gorgeous every day! This is not a thing I say about everyone’s babies – I have probably said before that I’m not a baby person, I’m not that girl that rushes over to have a hold of the new arrival BUT I just find Holly so adorable, she melts my soul.

She has started to do little laughs and babbles away talking in a language that might be understood in the remote jungle tribes of the Congo… but not in County Durham. Sometimes she sounds like the little green aliens from Toy Story (‘Ooooh the claaawww’) and last week she woke me up ‘talking’ to herself – I hope that’s not a regular thing! When she was younger she wasn’t as interested in toys but now she really interacts with them and gets so excited when you hold up her favourite ones. She kicks her legs, her arms flail about like she’s playing the drums and she widens her eyes like she’s just seen Santa Claus in the North Pole. Aww it’s really nice to see her happy like that, that’s one of the better parts of being a parent. She can also roll over on her side in both directions and holds her head up pretty well.

I finally cut her nails at about thirteen weeks old and I think it took about ten minutes to do. It was quite scary the first time as I had visions of catching her skin and making her bleed. I definitely would have cried if I hurt her but I took my time and it was okay and since then I’ve cut them twice more. I’d like to thank my pet rabbits over the years for letting me practice my nail cutting technique on them.

Despite trying over and over in the early weeks, Holly does not want and will not take a dummy. Now this has advantages in that it means we don’t have to wean her off it when she’s older and it won’t affect her teeth. However, she has taken to sucking on her hands instead so now I’m worried she will suck her hands/thumbs and what if we can’t get her to stop? You can’t take thumbs away! I guess that’s a bridge we will have to cross in the future.

She is now on a three-hour pattern through the day for feeds which isn’t so bad and is taking five ounces. I think she will be ready for six ounces soon but sometimes she won’t take a full or even half a bottle so she’s not quite there yet. She has acid reflux which is a real pain the neck some days. It stops her feeding well and she cries alot when it’s particularly bad. I have medicine from the doctor but I was told from the Health Visitor that it can take up until they are one year old before the diaphragm muscle fully forms enough to stop acid from coming up the windpipe. I really hope it doesn’t take that long because it’s pure hell some days and she won’t stop crying, won’t feed and won’t let you put her down. It’s really exhausting to be honest and I find those days really draining. I’ve cried, I’ve screamed, I’ve wanted to give up but all I can do is get through the day and hope that the next one is better. Chocolate and coffee help.

Normally she naps a few times a day but only for fifteen minutes to half an hour and goes to sleep for the night anywhere from nine pm to ten pm and is asleep until half seven to half eight the next morning. She stirs for a few feeds through the night – some nights it’s every three hours but it’s getting more regular that she will go four to five hours in between.

Finally, I have no idea how much she weighs. She was weighed at thirteen weeks to check she was on the correct dose of antacid and she weighed thirteen pounds four ounces. But here’s something I found a bit weird – when I took her to the doctors to get weighed by the nurse, they didn’t have baby scales? Instead, I stood on the scale and they weighed me then I stood back on them with Holly and they worked out the difference. It seems like a really archaic way of doing things considering how many women must visit the surgery with their babies? It’s an odd one and I’m sure there will be alot more instances like this where I’m baffled by the ways of the healthcare system.

Catherine

I’m getting used to being a Mamma in a lot of ways but it’s also such hard work – I’m not going to sugar-coat it. It’s tiring, backbreaking and soul crushing some days but equally other days it’s so natural and easy.

Since giving birth, I’ve lost about two and a half to three stone but I’m not a hundred percent sure on what I weighed just before birth. I didn’t weigh myself because I didn’t care and had the mentality that it didn’t matter if I knew how much fat I had gained on my body as there was nothing much I could do. I was so hungry and tired that I just went for it and ate what I needed to. No shits given. Anyone that has been third trimester pregnant understands how bloody uncomfortable and tired you are constantly and every little thing is a huge effort. Now I’ve lost alot of the weight but I still have around one and a half stone to lose to be back to my pre baby weight. I’m not in a huge rush as I don’t want to overdo it and exhaust myself but I have started the Couch to 5k running programme in order to shift a bit of the fat in time for my sisters wedding in August. I still have what I call a ‘kangaroo pouch’ on my tummy but it isn’t too bad really. I have a few stretch marks on the very front of my tummy and my hips but they are quite faded now. I’m not in love with the state of my torso at the moment – it’s not the worst thing in the world and I’m learning to live with it but I don’t want this to be my forever body.

Another delightful little momento that pregnancy left behind on my body is spider veins on my legs. They are basically like thin stretch marks and I’m not sure when or if they will go away as I don’t know anyone else who has had them. I’m quite self conscious of my legs now and really pine for my old milk bottles but I’m trying to be patient and see what happens. I did try some fake tan to see if that would disguise them a bit but as someone who is extremely pale and has never used fake tan before, naturally this was a disaster.

My hormones are still a bit all over the place, my periods are on a weird cycle, I’m sweating quite a bit more than I used to and recently I’ve noticed that my hair has started to shed. I’m not losing my hair, it’s not coming out in clumps it’s just started to come out in the brush. In the last few months of pregnancy, I didn’t lose any hair at all – I would pull the brush through and it would be clean whereas now when I brush I have to clean out alot of strands of hair from the bristles. I’m not worried about it as it’s just the hair that I built up in those third trimester months so I think it will settle down soon.

That’s probably it for now. I feel like the dust is still settling on my postpartum life and body but who knows, maybe the dust never settles now and my life will constantly be changing and adapting. Maybe the days will never feel the same again but I’ll just have to ride it out and see what happens in my parental journey. I’ll write another update in a few months time when Holly has had a chance to grow and develop even more.

Thanks for reading, I hope you have an amazing day. Sending good vibes from me and Holly 🙂