One year old baby update: eating, drinking, crawling and sleep!
Our baby daughter Holly is one and I can’t believe how much of a journey we’ve been on in only a year. In some ways it feels like it was only a few months ago that I wrote the ‘Look what we made’ blog post when Holly was first born – one of my first ever write ups – but then in other ways, it feels a lot longer.
Read on for my one year baby update and like with a lot of my posts, I’ve split this one up in to different parts so you can skip to the bits that interest you. I’ve chosen to write about Eating & Milk, Sleeping, Crawling & Moving then A Bit About Me.
Eating & Milk
From around ten to eleven months old, Hollys has been drinking around 3 bottles of 8 ounce formula during the night and now rarely drinks any bottles through the day. At the time of writing this (which is just after her birthday), we have began to give her blue-top cows milk to drink on a morning and we also make her breakfast with it. I’ll probably offer her more drinks of milk during the day soon but I haven’t got a solid routine worked out yet. To be honest, I don’t know what I’m meant to be doing with cows milk? People with older kids tell me about their interactions with their health visitors and these ‘child centres’ where you would take your baby to get weighed and find out more about your child’s development and advice. Now it’s a very different story and especially so for us lockdown parents. It’s hard to know what to do and when and I think a lot of Mamma’s feel abandoned by the NHS. It’s tough, I get it and the only advice I can give you if you’re feeling a bit lost with what you should be doing with your baby is to ring your hospital and ask for the main health visitor phone line and you should be able to get a hold of someone. I’m muddling my way through and doing my best and that’s all I can say on that matter.
I want to say that I was quite worried about giving her straight up cows milk. I knew it was a bit irrational as she had already tried cheese but I was scared that she would be allergic to it and it would give her a bad tummy. I guess I will feel the same about trying her with nuts and seafood? Honestly the fear and guilt I feel over things like this is crazy but I guess it’s normal to worry (as a side note I hate the “it’s normal” justification of things as it makes people feel like they have to shut up complaining. I don’t agree – things can be normal but you are still allowed to feel shit about it!).
Leading on to food and Holly is eating all kinds of things now. At around the seven month mark, we were doing pretty well with introducing foods to Holly but then she came down with an awful flu in November. After this, she gagged on anything other than puree and she stayed that way for a long, long time. If we tried to give her anything with a bit of texture, she choked on it therefore it’s taken us a bit longer to get her to be able to eat whole pieces of food. She’s pretty much able to eat most solids now and I try to feed her healthy stuff as much as I can. I make meals with reduced salt to eat as a family but I do still use the packaged baby food when we go out or if I haven’t planned ahead and I make a ‘freezer tea’ for me and Andy (chicken kiev and chips sort of stuff). I also made her a reduced sugar cake for her birthday to try and give her something a bit healthier.
Sleeping
Oh, sleeping. The thing that is on the mind of most knackered, ground-down, poor unfortunate souls also known as baby parents. Firstly, here is a virtual hug if this is you right now, it’s really shit isn’t it? WHY ON EARTH has human evolution not caught up with the rest of the animal kingdom and upgraded our babies to be able to sleep and be a bit more independent. Zebras literally take their first breath after being kicked out of their mothers and boom, they can walk and run! Human babies on the other hand are just so much work! Crikey, someone get Darwin on the Ouija board and ask him what to do!
Moving on from my anger with nature, I’ll now update you on Holly’s bedtime routine. Depending on what time we give Holly her tea, sometimes we will give her some porridge for supper around 6:45pm and then run the bath around 7pm. Once she’s yawning and rubbing her eyes, we get her out of the bath which is normally around 7:30pm. By the time we get her dressed and settled down to sleep it’s around 8pm. Andy normally lies on our bed with her and we play her white noise Owl toy until she falls asleep. We currently have her cot right next to our bed with the side removed so we can get to her more easily from our bed (like a Next to Me baby basket). At around 10pm we head up to bed and will give her a bottle and then we move her from our bed into her cot.
Now, this is where it can vary massively as sometimes she will wake for a bottle around 2pm and go back to sleep, but other horrible, awful mornings she decides to be awake for 2 to 3 hours. WHY?! Oh my god! It’s so awful and even worse if she starts to cry – as if it’s not bad enough that she’s up and climbing around the cot then launching herself at whoever is closest, giving us a cheeky slap in the face – if she then starts to cry it’s honestly torture. This part of the night is like being really, really drunk and desperately wanting to get a taxi home then standing in a queue that is so long that the front is out of your view. And you are cold and hungry and your feet hurt. That’s the closest feeling I can think of for the sensible people who don’t have kids to relate to. I just hope it’s another phase that she will grow out of and maybe we’re working our way towards her first ‘sleep through’. Maybe…
Crawling & Moving
Holly has been crawling for quite a while now, I can’t quite remember at what month she started but she’s so quick now. She’s like a wind up toy – she’ll go from stationary to 100mph in a blink. A bit like a startled lizard. She’s been pulling herself up on the furniture and hanging off us for ages now, we really thought she’d be walking soon but I’m not bothered in the slightest. I’ll leave it up to her when she’s ready to walk, she’ll do it in her own time. She has just started to crawl up the stairs which is terrifying to be honest. Holly doesn’t like us to try and hold her hands to help her walk, she just won’t have it, nope, not happening. She sits down and shouts at us if we try. I think she may get this stubbornness from me…
A Bit About Me
A bit more of a serious tone now but it’s been a real test in so many ways and at points it’s been so hard I’ve felt like I can’t cope anymore. It’s hard to put it all in to words really, I feel like I should be writing the cliché things that people say like, “there are so many highs and lows”, but to be honest, it’s hard to remember much at all. As I’ve said before, everybody’s journey is different and mine has been one filled with overwhelming tiredness, frustration and so much washing I could’ve hid in it and you wouldn’t find me for three weeks.
I created a YouTube account to upload all of my personal videos of Holly from my phone and our video camera and when I look back on the videos of the earlier months of her life, I’m amazed by the kindness and happiness in my voice in some of the videos. The truth is, I don’t remember feeling that way. I don’t remember feeling happy and loving or enjoying the early days. What I remember is feeling absolutely exhausted and a lot of despair as I fought my way through long days and endless nights. For those who don’t know, my partner Andy was in the military (he’s just left this year) and I was with Holly on my own for a lot of the time – day and night. He’s home now and we’re establishing a new routine which has it’s own challenges but it’s definitely easier having someone to share the night shifts with.
I guess this is why we take videos as they remind you of the true reality. I suppose what I’m experiencing is the opposite of rose tinted glasses, it seems that I look back on those days through grey, dark glasses. I found it incredibly hard and I guess my memory has held on to that feeling as it was the strongest of all others. Perhaps I also want to make it that time seem as bad as possible so that things seem better now?
I love Holly so much and I don’t need to prove that to anyone but it has been and still is, very bloody hard. I can’t believe that babies require so much of your energy and it’s not that I thought it wouldn’t be like this, I don’t think I actually thought about the reality much at all. I wasn’t very interested in what others had to say about it to be honest – it floated in one ear and out of the other – and I’m not sorry as it wasn’t relevant to me but perhaps I should have engaged with it a bit more to support others.
Physically, my body is different to my pre-baby physique. I have more of a tummy now – a little mammy pouch – and I weigh more than before. I have tried to lose weight but I just can’t shift the last half a stone. I try to diet but the tiredness is what gets me – I need coffee and chocolate to survive some days and I’m okay with that for now. She will start to sleep and become more independant and then I’ll get more time for me to exercise and look after myself a bit better. The only other notable physical change in me is my hair – at three or four months I seemed to lose alot of hair around my hair line and now it’s grown back but it’s at a funny length of about 3 inches long and it seems to stick out at all different angles. It’s a desirable look guys.
Each day we are learning and growing together and my life has changed so much. Being a parent is so weird and I’ve talked about the paradoxical nature of it before but in one breath all I want is a break from being a parent and all of the tiredness but then, in the next breath, I can’t get enough of Holly and want her all to myself forever. She has such a funny little personality and loves to play and climbs all over us. She dances to certain music (Elvis and motorbike tunes are her favourite) and has started to watch films and engage with the telly a bit more.
All in all, life isn’t too bad. Everything we do together is a new experience and it definitely is a bit easier now than when she was a newborn. I hope this one year baby update has helped you or even just made you smile. Let me know in the comments of any memorable moments from your kids first year of if you have any advice for us poor unfortunate souls :).
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