We had a photo shoot for all the babies from our mother toddler groups yesterday. One of my friend’s (say M) husband is a professional photographer, so he agreed to do it for us. The plan was to get a photo of all the babies sitting next to each other, almost like a poster for keepsake. Putting all the babies next to each other and get all of them with a smile on their faces seemed almost impossible, so we settled in for the more viable option. This was to take individual photos of the babies and put them together using Photoshop. That decided, the next step was deciding the logistics of the whole operation. Other parents would surely understand why this could potentially be such a big issue.
Anyway the whole project was planned methodically for weeks beforehand with each baby given a different time slot to arrive at the venue (a friend’s house, say L) to minimise waiting times and also to cause as less disruption as possible to the friend who was giving us her house to use. Our arrivals were staggered at 15 minute intervals with the photographer scheduled to be there half an hour before the first person got there to set everything up. I was the privileged one(??) with the first appointment and when I turned up, the photographer had not even showed up !! L had no idea of his whereabouts – he had called earlier in the morning to say he was running slightly late, but no news after. M was very vague when we asked her – our guess was they had a row and they were not on speaking terms !! Anyway an hour and a half later and we were still waiting without any news. Our carefully laid plan had already fallen apart with the house full of babies and their associated paraphernalia…One baby would cry and set off the others – almost like a Mexican wave !! My daughter decided to be extra vocal yesterday – babbling away and frightening all the boys ! The boys were howling away at the noise she was making – creating a new Mexican wave of crying each time she opened her mouth.. I finally had to take her to another room to bring a sense of calm to the room.
After keeping us waiting for almost two hours, the photographer arrived. By this time, most of the babies were sleepy, their routines being completely thrown out of gear. Our carefully planned schedule of timed appointments obviously went out of the window and it was just a case of those babies being awake getting their turn first.
Once the photographer began though, he was really good. He was interacting with the babies, making us dance and sing to get the babies to laugh, while he was clicking away. Most of the babies were quite relaxed and we managed to get some good shots. (saw them only on the camera). The next step for him is to put the collage together. Was it worth all the hassle ? Only time will tell…..
Friday, 29 June 2007
Thursday, 28 June 2007
Mother-Toddler Groups..
One of the nice things about having a baby here in the UK is attending labour classes. Well, this may not be specific to the UK at all, as India too has started having them on a regular basis. Anyway, the hospital conducts labour classes which are free to attend for all pregnant women and their partners (oops wrong word, 'birthing partner' is their official title). They tell you about the whole mechanism of labour, the various stages of labour, teach you breathing exercises and most importantly they emphasise the importance of your partner massaging you before, during and after labour. :). We attended classes conducted by NCT in our local chapter, mainly because this class was over a weekend. The class was very informative, extremely useful and helped me a lot during my actual labour.
The real benefit of the whole NCT class though was meeting other first-time mothers of similar age and attitudes. There were 12 of us in the class (not including the spouses) and even though the class was just over two Saturdays, we have kept in touch with each other. Its wonderful having such a support system of other mothers whose children are within +- 4 weeks of my little one. We meet every week for a wander round the park if the British weather allows us to, if not we meet round people's houses or in a smoke-free pub. (England is going smoke-free in all public places from July 1st and frankly, I can't wait !!). The benefits have been immense - we discuss our babies feeding patterns, sleeping patterns, bowel movements - just the kind of stuff which would drive people-not-going-through-that-right-now insane. We pick up tips and learn a lot from each other. The kids love the interaction plus we also get time to have a decent adult conversation, at times. We go out for night-outs leaving the babies to the care of our uncomplaining husbands, go shopping together, even had a photo shoot for the babies together today. Its been such a wonderful support system that I really am thankful to the NCT.
On another note, the NCT also has a wonderful counselling and advice centre for breastfeeding. When I needed some advice on breastfeeding, there was a lovely lady willing to speak to me at 7AM, would even have seen me if I had gone around to her house. And to think that all of these counsellors are mothers who volunteer their time with the NCT for no money whatsoever !!
The real benefit of the whole NCT class though was meeting other first-time mothers of similar age and attitudes. There were 12 of us in the class (not including the spouses) and even though the class was just over two Saturdays, we have kept in touch with each other. Its wonderful having such a support system of other mothers whose children are within +- 4 weeks of my little one. We meet every week for a wander round the park if the British weather allows us to, if not we meet round people's houses or in a smoke-free pub. (England is going smoke-free in all public places from July 1st and frankly, I can't wait !!). The benefits have been immense - we discuss our babies feeding patterns, sleeping patterns, bowel movements - just the kind of stuff which would drive people-not-going-through-that-right-now insane. We pick up tips and learn a lot from each other. The kids love the interaction plus we also get time to have a decent adult conversation, at times. We go out for night-outs leaving the babies to the care of our uncomplaining husbands, go shopping together, even had a photo shoot for the babies together today. Its been such a wonderful support system that I really am thankful to the NCT.
On another note, the NCT also has a wonderful counselling and advice centre for breastfeeding. When I needed some advice on breastfeeding, there was a lovely lady willing to speak to me at 7AM, would even have seen me if I had gone around to her house. And to think that all of these counsellors are mothers who volunteer their time with the NCT for no money whatsoever !!
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Weaning woes..
Children seem to have this natural, inherent ability to mimic our actions. More so when it comes to food. The little one has started waking up at nights - just once if we are lucky, otherwise more than that. This has been going on for about 2 weeks now and its surely because she is hungry - she has a feed and goes back straight to sleep. When I mentioned this to the health visitor during our regular baby-weighing session, she agreed with me that the little one is probably ready for solid food. However, there is a department of health directive in the UK prohibiting any other food except milk for infants under the age of 6 months. Some health visitors choose to waive this and advise that you can start sooner. But then there are some, like mine, who literally told me to start at my own peril.
Being a first-time mother and all that, i was quite unsure of what to do. On the one hand, all the other mothers in my mother-toddler group had started solids and on the other hand was this health visitor's stern warning. In the end, I waited till she was about 5.5 months and started off with baby rice. For the first few days, the little one took to it rather well. She ate it with real gusto, probably because it was something new. Off late, she has developed so many 'nakhras'. I have to mix it with some sweetening agent (added sugars are an absolute no-no, so its either banana, parsnip, carrot), act as I am eating it with each mouthful, pretend its yummy, make all the appropriate noises along with the expressions and then the little one will eat.. All this for half a spoon of baby rice, not to mention the major clean-up operation that is required after ! If i ever even contemplate stopping, my strict health visitor's face looms up in front of my eyes mouthing "Persist, persist" !!!
Being a first-time mother and all that, i was quite unsure of what to do. On the one hand, all the other mothers in my mother-toddler group had started solids and on the other hand was this health visitor's stern warning. In the end, I waited till she was about 5.5 months and started off with baby rice. For the first few days, the little one took to it rather well. She ate it with real gusto, probably because it was something new. Off late, she has developed so many 'nakhras'. I have to mix it with some sweetening agent (added sugars are an absolute no-no, so its either banana, parsnip, carrot), act as I am eating it with each mouthful, pretend its yummy, make all the appropriate noises along with the expressions and then the little one will eat.. All this for half a spoon of baby rice, not to mention the major clean-up operation that is required after ! If i ever even contemplate stopping, my strict health visitor's face looms up in front of my eyes mouthing "Persist, persist" !!!
Tuesday, 26 June 2007
I wish ....
I wish I had known earlier ..
1. how difficult breastfeeding is.....
Breastfeeding is plain simple, I thought. The baby latches on and away you go, everybody is a happy bunny. Until I tried it out, I could not have known how wrong I was. It is incredibly painful and so tough. In order to find out if I was doing things right, I attended numerous breastfeeding support groups. The feedback from all those groups was that both me and the baby were doing the right thing. Yet it continued to be painful throughout the length of the feed. In hindsight, if I had known how painful it could be, I would have mentally prepared myself for it.
2. how difficult night feeds really are..
I am a person who can manage without proper sleep rather well. I used to stay awake all night during college life - for submissions, exams and still manage to be productive the next day. During my working life, I used to stay awake to play cards with my cousins and still turn up for work the next day, fresh as a daisy. So I thought night feeding would be quite easy for me. Calculus, on the other hand, never coped well with less sleep before the baby was born. But tables seem to have turned ever since the little one came along - he manages very well with less sleep and even though I was on maternity leave, it used to be him taking care of the night feeds. Fortunately for us, the little one started sleeping through the night when she was 8 weeks old. Of course thats changed now and she has started waking up !!!
3. how quickly they grow..
This sounds so cliched, but I cannot believe that she is 5.5 months already..Time sure seems to have flown by. How I wish I had taken heed of my friend's advice and captured more video footage of her in her early days..
1. how difficult breastfeeding is.....
Breastfeeding is plain simple, I thought. The baby latches on and away you go, everybody is a happy bunny. Until I tried it out, I could not have known how wrong I was. It is incredibly painful and so tough. In order to find out if I was doing things right, I attended numerous breastfeeding support groups. The feedback from all those groups was that both me and the baby were doing the right thing. Yet it continued to be painful throughout the length of the feed. In hindsight, if I had known how painful it could be, I would have mentally prepared myself for it.
2. how difficult night feeds really are..
I am a person who can manage without proper sleep rather well. I used to stay awake all night during college life - for submissions, exams and still manage to be productive the next day. During my working life, I used to stay awake to play cards with my cousins and still turn up for work the next day, fresh as a daisy. So I thought night feeding would be quite easy for me. Calculus, on the other hand, never coped well with less sleep before the baby was born. But tables seem to have turned ever since the little one came along - he manages very well with less sleep and even though I was on maternity leave, it used to be him taking care of the night feeds. Fortunately for us, the little one started sleeping through the night when she was 8 weeks old. Of course thats changed now and she has started waking up !!!
3. how quickly they grow..
This sounds so cliched, but I cannot believe that she is 5.5 months already..Time sure seems to have flown by. How I wish I had taken heed of my friend's advice and captured more video footage of her in her early days..
Tuesday, 19 June 2007
Strangers..
I have always loved the saying "Strangers are friends waiting to be met".. so true.. well it was kind of proven last week. I had taken my parents and baby along to this slightly-hep-than-normal-everyday-Tesco-type foodstore called Waitrose to browse and drool over their food display. We bought a trolley full of stuff that we did not really need and got to the counter to pay. After all the scanning, I opened my bag and to my utter horror and embarassment, I had forgotten my purse at home. With a really sheepish, apologetic, sorry-for-wasting-your-time look on my face, I told the lady to keep the shopping aside and that I would pick it up later in the day. Just as the counter lady was putting away the stuff away and I was walking out, a lady in the queue comes up to me and says "I will pay". I was so shocked that I started mumbling something incoherently, as I hardly knew this lady from Eve. She walked up to me confidently, gave me her address and telephone number and told me to post her a cheque or bring it round to her house later. Thats it - no other questions - did not ask for my name, number or anything else. I was still in shock-land, mumbled a feeble sounding thanks and walked away. Of course I did post her a thank-you card and a cheque. When i called her later to find out if the cheque had got to her ok, all she said was "Its no big deal. We dont do enough for each other".. How true..
My Birth Story - Part 2
Part 1 here..
Staying the hospital in a maternity ward is NOT the most relaxing of experiences - people being wheeled in after their delivery in various stages of activity, most sleepy and dazed, some chirpy as ever, ever so eager to talk about their baby. And then there are those who are around due to some complication in their pregnancy. And the one common thing that seemed to run through them all (at least that day) was that nobody wanted to sleep - just exchange stories at 1:00AM. I managed to get very less sleep, being in a room with 3 other women. But that one night made me realise how lucky i was in my pregnancy to not have any major complications - there was this one woman who was barely in her 4th month, but she had been in hospital for half that time because of her vommitting. She was so fed up of being pregnant already, poor thing !
The next morning, a consultant came to examine me and told me that the decelerations looked better but since I was overdue, they would induce me that day !! I was so unprepared even then - i was sure they would send me home, as the midwife had mentioned that they normally do not induce till 2 weeks after the due date. The consultant, on the other hand, said "You are here anyway and you are overdue - we might as well induce you". So easily said - and here I was, so totally unprepared. We had not even brought all the baby stuff - just a few things which I needed for the night. The consultant also said that there were no beds available that day in the labour ward and so I would have to just wait it out. Calculus was with me by this time and we were chatting away when at about 1.00, the midwife said that there was a bed ready downstairs. Excitement, apprehension, fear, relief, tension were a few of the emotions running through my mind at that time. The NHS is system of such bereaucracy - it is unbelievable, involves so much of waiting around, mostly without a clue as to why we are waiting. One commendable thing is that most of the routine pregnancies are handled entirely by midwives - leaving the doctors to attend to complications. Coming from India, this was such a massive change and required a lot of re-adjustment, if you like.. In India, I was so used to seeing a specialist even for minor ailments, as my sister is a doctor. One of her friends in the associated speciality would see us, even for routine illnesses.
So after moving down to the labour ward and waiting for a couple of hours yet again, I was finally induced by 4.30PM.. It was a vaginal pessary and the midwife told me that this was just the start of the inductions as most women require about 3-4 pessaries and sometimes other medication, before the contractions begin. She told me to relax as much as i could and eat as much as I could to build up my energy reserves. It was a wise piece of advice and I probably should have taken it. But i did not and ended up spending time with my sister-in-law, who had chosen that weekend to visit us from the US. (they had planned to welcome the baby 5 days after her arrival and so had chosen that date, but got more than that.. they were here on the day the baby was born). I also kept pacing up and down the corridors and the stairs as they had told us to do in the labour classes. I had waited patiently for 9 whole months, yet those last few days and hours felt the longest.. Time seemed to drag by at such a slow pace. I did try and rest a bit, but could not, what with all the excitement within and around me.
The labour ward reminded me so much of the scenes you see in Hindi movies where the heroine is having a baby - long, exhausted, painful high-pitched screams. The delivery suite was next door and each time a midwife opened the door to it, you could hear one of the women bawling. It was so unnerving, to say the least, to think that i would be in a similar state in a couple of hours. There was also a feeling of immense finality in a sense. If it had not sunk in before then that I was to go through such a massive experience in a few hours, it surely did then. All those weeks and months of waiting were finally coming to an end.
Staying the hospital in a maternity ward is NOT the most relaxing of experiences - people being wheeled in after their delivery in various stages of activity, most sleepy and dazed, some chirpy as ever, ever so eager to talk about their baby. And then there are those who are around due to some complication in their pregnancy. And the one common thing that seemed to run through them all (at least that day) was that nobody wanted to sleep - just exchange stories at 1:00AM. I managed to get very less sleep, being in a room with 3 other women. But that one night made me realise how lucky i was in my pregnancy to not have any major complications - there was this one woman who was barely in her 4th month, but she had been in hospital for half that time because of her vommitting. She was so fed up of being pregnant already, poor thing !
The next morning, a consultant came to examine me and told me that the decelerations looked better but since I was overdue, they would induce me that day !! I was so unprepared even then - i was sure they would send me home, as the midwife had mentioned that they normally do not induce till 2 weeks after the due date. The consultant, on the other hand, said "You are here anyway and you are overdue - we might as well induce you". So easily said - and here I was, so totally unprepared. We had not even brought all the baby stuff - just a few things which I needed for the night. The consultant also said that there were no beds available that day in the labour ward and so I would have to just wait it out. Calculus was with me by this time and we were chatting away when at about 1.00, the midwife said that there was a bed ready downstairs. Excitement, apprehension, fear, relief, tension were a few of the emotions running through my mind at that time. The NHS is system of such bereaucracy - it is unbelievable, involves so much of waiting around, mostly without a clue as to why we are waiting. One commendable thing is that most of the routine pregnancies are handled entirely by midwives - leaving the doctors to attend to complications. Coming from India, this was such a massive change and required a lot of re-adjustment, if you like.. In India, I was so used to seeing a specialist even for minor ailments, as my sister is a doctor. One of her friends in the associated speciality would see us, even for routine illnesses.
So after moving down to the labour ward and waiting for a couple of hours yet again, I was finally induced by 4.30PM.. It was a vaginal pessary and the midwife told me that this was just the start of the inductions as most women require about 3-4 pessaries and sometimes other medication, before the contractions begin. She told me to relax as much as i could and eat as much as I could to build up my energy reserves. It was a wise piece of advice and I probably should have taken it. But i did not and ended up spending time with my sister-in-law, who had chosen that weekend to visit us from the US. (they had planned to welcome the baby 5 days after her arrival and so had chosen that date, but got more than that.. they were here on the day the baby was born). I also kept pacing up and down the corridors and the stairs as they had told us to do in the labour classes. I had waited patiently for 9 whole months, yet those last few days and hours felt the longest.. Time seemed to drag by at such a slow pace. I did try and rest a bit, but could not, what with all the excitement within and around me.
The labour ward reminded me so much of the scenes you see in Hindi movies where the heroine is having a baby - long, exhausted, painful high-pitched screams. The delivery suite was next door and each time a midwife opened the door to it, you could hear one of the women bawling. It was so unnerving, to say the least, to think that i would be in a similar state in a couple of hours. There was also a feeling of immense finality in a sense. If it had not sunk in before then that I was to go through such a massive experience in a few hours, it surely did then. All those weeks and months of waiting were finally coming to an end.
Saturday, 16 June 2007
Jhoom Barabar Jhoom
I watched Jhoom Barabar Jhoom yesterday. For the first time ever in my life, I watched a movie on the same day that it was released. I had some time to kill in between two appointments, so popped into the cinema on an impulse.
What can I say about the movie ? The first half started off quite well, Preity Zinta looks amazing. I have always liked her, specially her dimple (more so because I have one too). What is with Abhishek and his beard ? Why cant he shave ? So the first half was quite entertaining.. But the second half - so so utterly predictable. The onyl saving graces was Preity Zinta and the scenes shot around London. Since the movie is based entirely in London, it was quite fun trying to recognise the different sights and sounds. But on the whole, an entirely avoidable experience.
What can I say about the movie ? The first half started off quite well, Preity Zinta looks amazing. I have always liked her, specially her dimple (more so because I have one too). What is with Abhishek and his beard ? Why cant he shave ? So the first half was quite entertaining.. But the second half - so so utterly predictable. The onyl saving graces was Preity Zinta and the scenes shot around London. Since the movie is based entirely in London, it was quite fun trying to recognise the different sights and sounds. But on the whole, an entirely avoidable experience.
Peals of laughter
There is something so endearing to hear your child laugh loudly for the first time. Everyday we discover new things to make her laugh and when we do, we repeat it over and over like a broken record. Her all-time-favourite song to make her laugh is "The Wheels of the bus"..But just yesterday, after going through the day's post, I was tearing away the envelopes (I know, I know i should be recycling.. but in my defense, my block of flats does not have a recycling scheme in place yet. I have written to the council to request this, if you should know :)) and my daughter squealed with absolute delight..not just a normal smile, but giggly peals of laughter. It was wonderful. Obviously, since then our household has turned into a "paper-tearing" household. We tear paper and she squeals in delight.. Takes so little to crack them up.
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