Celebrating Eden's first birthday was both wodnerful and a bit sad for me. It was joyous because I could invite friends to share Eden's first year in the world and feel proud and happy of how much Simon and I had come through in that first difficult year. It was sad because I stopped breastfeeding after her birthday night and I missed the closeness and, to be honest, I probably mourned some of the loss of her dependence on me.
Eden was not a very cuddly baby and so breastfeeding was the time I could be physically closest to her for any sustained amount of time. In actuality, as most things are, the thinking about giving it up was far worse than the actuality. Eden particularly was not very bothered. She had been down to only one feed a day and getting increasingly distracted so I feel the time was right. I had also been advised by a friend to stop before they can talk and start asking for milk. To make up for this, Eden is becoming more cuddly, especially when with strangers. Everyone used to be deserving of a smile but now she has reached the stage when new people are greeted with some suspicion smiles have to be earned. Whilst this occurs, she needs to clamber over Mummy. I am at the stage I thought I would never be at - feeling nostaglic for new babies and their utter dependency - their inability to move around and chuck CDs, DVDs, papers, diaries, note around gleefully. I want to encourage independence because I suppose I value it but I also like the fact that Eden clambers all over me when she meets new people. Is this bad? Will I end up as one of those parents who clings to their child's dependency and refuse to let them grow up? I dpon't think so but there are so many parental fears about the type of parent you may become that I have to keep telling ymself it's alright to want your child to be clsoe toy you, especially if they spent most of the first year preferring almost anything to a cuddle.
I aslo am preparing to book Eden into nursery. This is something me and a friend have been discussing for about the last 3 months, saying oh yes we definitely have to look into this and then doing nothing. Eden also went through a hysterical phase when she would lose it when tired and in large groups of children and people. I could not bear the thought of this happening when she was on her own. She seems to be getting over this and I need more time to work and do the things that energise me and make me happy so nursery time it is. And only for a couple of days or half-days, not very long really. Every other mum I know who has a child in nursery says their child loves it so I expect that it can be good for Eden and she can enjoy it. I wanted to wait until she can walk as I hated the thought of her sitting in a heap, crying and uanble to move towards soemone that could help her. She still doesn't walk but I think in a couple of months she'll be up and about.
Eden's modelling career is still in progress. She had a job for baby football gear, which went fine although the clothes were all massive and we had to wait around for an hour and a half. All the fears I had seem a bit ridiculous now. Dealing with her going to a casting and not being picked is actually fine because she does not have any concept of being rejected and so it doesn't really matter whether she gets the job or she doesn't. Ideally, I would like a little selection of photos I can show her when she is older adn some money she has earned that can wait in her account until she is ready to spend it. I hope she will feel proud of what she did - and that she spends her money wisely.
As many of you are aware, my baby has been breast-feeding at night since she was born in July 2009. This has been manageable until about March, when she went from feeding once at night to feeding between 2-4 times. I did cope for a while but by late April I was shattered. I was going to bed 8.30 or 9 each night and still waking up exhausted after dealing with a grumpy baby in the early hours. I wasa keeping endless sleep logs and spending large amounts of time on baby sleep forums joining similarly deranged parents to discuss and commiserate about our lack of sleep.
I gradually realised that she wasn't hungry but was using feeding to get herself back to sleep. The next problem came from my resistance to letting Eden cry it out and not being able to find any other way to teach her to go back to sleep by herself. I tired gradually reducing the amount of milk but that merely enraged her. In the end I found a boom I'd bought ages ago by the Baby Whisperer, which introduced techniques for people not happy to let their child cry themselves abck to sleep. We made up our own version of PUPDCD (pick up, put down, cry down - all sleep techniques must be abbreviated to confusing acronyms!) called GIT ( Go In. Talk) which worked and Eden slept through on the 6th night and has been mostly doing so since.
One advantage of breast feeding is that the partner is advised to manage the visits when you are stopping her feeding so Simon got up, went in with her, talked to her (whilst checking his emails) and stayed for 20 minutes and went back in after 10 minutes if she was still crying. After the first night she would stop crying when Simon went in the room, he got to check his emails (something not always easy to manage during the day with a baby around) and Eden would go back to sleep to the sound of daddy's voice. AAahh.
Like a good coach, I have drawn out some lessons from this experience.
1. Don't underestimate other people. A 10 month old baby is able to be way more capable than I had expected and she did not cry anywhere near as much as I thought she would when no longer getting fed on demand.
2. Believe that there is a solution. Believe in your own ability to find your own ideas and your own way out of a problem. I read a lot of books and got a lot of help from a forum and in the end, Simon and I found a way to help all of us get more sleep in a way that felt right and safe for Eden.
3. Listen to yourself. Tune in what your instinct is telling you. Mine was saying 'do not let Eden learn to sleep by crying herself to sleep'. It's probably the right thing to do for some people but it wasn't for me (despite the fact that my health visitor said it was 'weak' not to let baby cry it out!).
4. Don't expect bad situations to get better by themsleves. For months I hoped that Eden would suddenly sleep through without my having to do anything or make any decisions. I could have saved us all from sleepless nights earlier had I acknowledged that I had to do something different to make things change.
5.Appreciate what you've got. After months of moaning about sleep, now that I do sleep for 6-8 hours a night, I find myself moaning about how we can't sell our flat. There is always going to be something you can worry about. If you let yourself.
I have mixed feelings about this new aspect of Eden's life, which Simon and I have introduced her to. Eden has been signed up by a modelling agency and has her first job on May 9th, a photo shoot for Mamas and Papas. I move between feeling excited about this and then oddly depressed and fearful. I think it gives me a chance to examine my fears and work out how realistic they are and how to deal with them.
My worst fears are that she gets loads of work and I end up feeling that Eden has more of a career than I do! It is time-consuming going to castings and fittings and that's before the job has even started. Also I worry that she will come to think that being pretty is more valuable and praise-worthy than anything else (the photographers and assorted staff around constantly encourage her with 'ooh, aren't you pretty' etc). I worry that she will begin to think she is in some way better than babies that don't do modelling, that other children will be jealous of her later on. And so it goes. Weird fears that have grown out of all proportion to what is actually happening. Oh, and I also worry about why I ever wanted her to become involved in the first place. What must that say about me?
To address my own fears I only need to take a big deep breath and remember that:
1. Simon and I can choose to stop whenever we feel like it
2. Eden's modelling is a tiny tiny part of her life and she is not going to become a spoilt terrible child overnight. I must have confidence that our parenting has an effect well beyond a few days a year being told how pretty she is.
3.Remember the positives. These are that we thought it would be great for her to see her photo in catalogues when she is older. She earns some money that she will be able to spend when she is older (this allows us to help her to budget at a later date). She gets experience mixing with new people. Simon and I get to have a change to the usual baby day routine.
4. Eden has no concept of modelling at the moment. She has no idea of the meaning of what is happening, She just gets to wear different clothes, sit down and have someone point a black thing at her while people around her coo and wave floppy rabbits around. Not a bad day for her really.
5. Baby modelling is less problematic for me than child modelling, when the child has an awareness of rejection and I am not sure whether I want that for Eden. Really, as yet we do not know what Eden is going to want so we can give her opportunities and wait until she gets older to see what happens next.
6. She might never get another job anyway!
To compound my ambivalence, the BBC have been following some babies around to document their first experiences of baby modelling and Eden is one of those babies. Simon and I have been interviewed at castings and fittings about how we feel about what's going on and I seem to be asked questions that had never occured to me before and end up seeming slightly vacant! The interviewer is very nice but likes to ask very open-ended questions without any follow-up questions so it's left to you to stand there and dig your own grave. What do I keep telling clients? You cannot worry about what other people think of you because their opinions are not important. Relying on other's judgements for your own self-esteem dooms you to insecurity and anxiety. Only what I think is valuable. I will hold onto those thoughts.
What to do with fear? Examine it and answer it back. My fears tell me that perhaps I am worried that I will come to value Eden for being pretty, although as I write this, I know that that will not happen. My fears are as much about me as about her. I worry about being the sort of Mum who has nothing in her life except taking her child to anotehr model casting. This also is not going to happen because I value and love my coaching work with a passion.Trust my instincts, be confident about the person that Eden is going to become and relax into what can be a fun experience that Eden can groan and laugh about in years to come.
Within my group of mums with similar age babies, Eden is definitely towards the bottom of the league regarding sleep and heading for the relegation zone! We all think it is a bit of breast vs bottle (with bottle-fed babies seeming to sleep through way earlier). I have become obsessed with sleep. Sleep is the thing we all want our babies to master. I log day and night sleep times, only to discover that there is no pattern and logic. Last night we tried letting Eden cry it out - i.e. ignore her crying when she wakes up. The logic being that this will break the pattern of night waking, fancying some breast milk and then going back to sleep after a feed. We did what you are supposed to do. Simon got up and offered he some juice. Like she was going to be fooled by that. I don't think so. She cries more when we go to her, although the health visitors tell us to 'go and pat her off to sleep' at night. We lasted 45 minutes and caved in. Thus making the whole sorry palaver a waste of time. Even more scary is that my No Cry Sleep Solution book makes it clear that many babies continue to wake 2 or 3 times a night up until 12 months. At least. It doesn't help that she is still in our room, since we cannot sell our 2 bed flat. We have tried. The second bedroom is my office. She has no nursery. Yet.
On a more positive note, she is becoming ever more adorable. She says 'dada' although she has no idea who or what dada is. It is just a thrill to hear her making sounds. She will be crawling soon. Having mastered putting weight on her hands, getting to grips with forward motion cannot be too far away. I will look back with dewey-eyed nostalgia for the times I could put her somewhere and leave her, I am sure. There is a very small photo of her new teeth in the photo album, I have not managed to position it as part of my posts yet.
How important is it to be able to turn a potentially damaging argument into a fruitful and constructive discussion? Very, I say, with the recent experience of finding out how much having a baby challenges your ability to retreat from your own self-righteousness and actually listen to a different point of view. Those of you who know me are aware of my dislike of gendered generalisation. However, talking to other mums has led me to believe that there tend to be (there I go, unable to categorically support gender differences!) distinct differences in how Mummy and Daddy interact with their baby.
Most of these differences seem to come down to different ways of viewing risk to the baby. Whilst I tend to view the world as a place of potential ongoing danger for Eden, Simon engages in what I see as more wantonly reckless behaviour with her.The kinds of Daddy does are:
1. crossing the road with the buggy at a red man (horror - what if a car turns without indicating!) It is possible to argue about this for a very long time.
2.forgetting that he has undone her highchair and then getting distracted by the weather report. This leads to Eden falling out onto her face and me becoming enraged at his carelessness, whilst forgetting the times when I have left her on the sofa for 'just a second' or placed her on a tall pile and precarious pile of differently-sized cushions with predictable results. I since discover that all parents I talk to have done such things and, so far, no baby I know of has come to any harm at all.
3.pushing the buggy along with one hand only - what dangerous casualness. This compares to me, who has relatively recently been able to give up using the buggy handstrap (which I have never seen anyone else using) as I feared me losing control of her buggy. This says so much more about me than I would like!
4.engaging in rough and tumble games involving holding Eden very high up in the air.
5.going to the playground and lettign Eden do things that I feel may be too dangerous for one so young
One very interesting thing that Simon said made me realise how much I see my view of the world as right and his as wrong and slightly irresponsible. I told him I had been discussing with friends how our partners tend to do things that we see as too 'risky'. So, I said, there are obviously 'daddy' things that men like to do. As Simon, pointed out, the need of my friends and me to try reduce risk and worry about what daddy is doing is itself just a 'mummy' thing to do and does not represent the truth any more than what he chooses to do. Good point, I thought. So maybe I tend to worry more and he worries less. Neither of us is right. We have to learn to trust each other that each of us capable of looking after Eden and ensuring that she comes to no harm.
To ask a good coaching question, what is the outcome that I want? And what I want is for Eden to feel safe and secure and not to feel that the world is a big scary place, full of potential dangers. If I measure my reactions against that, then I do manage to feel less anxious about things and have more faith that Simon and I can get it right enough to help Eden develop into a happy and confident child.
Eden is now approaching 12 weeks, the age at which babies and mothers are supposdly getting used to each other and understanding each other better. Tell me 6 weeks ago that I would ever be at a stage when I would actually enjoy being with Eden for most of the time and I might not have believed you! My experience of motherhood so far has not been what I expected. Just as I believed - in fine coach-like manner - that my birth would be calm, relaxed and almost blissful, I was also under a severe misapprehension that surely my baby would be calm, placid and easy to spend time with. Well, she wasn't and I expect that possibly no baby is in the early weeks. I realise that I had completely unrealistic expectations about how much I could control the situation and had to learn to go with the flow and accept that my new life as a mother was more difficult and frustrating than I had thought it would be.
The first month passed in a blur of tears, anxiety, frustration and occasional hyper-euphoria. It was truly terrible. Because Eden cried and cried and most of the time I did not know what she wanted. I could not comfort her, I was exhausted from broken sleep every night and I was trying to work out breastfeeding and getting through the pain barrier. I was horrified when I had to spend all day with her alone. I thought that cuddling was enough to stop a baby crying but it so isn't at the beginning. I thought I would be more patient, even-tempered and calm. Really, I was very seldom any of those things. Other mothers that I speak to report comfortingly similar descriptions of the horror of the first month.
Eden first smiled occasionally at 3 weeks and started to babble and coo and give ridiculously big gummy smiles in her fifth week. This is the beginning of the turning point for me: being able to say to myself, yes I have done something right. She is smiling at me is a great thing - communication had begun. Now is a real chatterer and a smiler extraordinaire. Most of the time I can work out what she needs and she actually lets me and Simon spend the evening together rather than roaming around our falt with Eden in a baby sling, whilst we desperately try to prevent her crying. I have discovered how much being a mum brings you, effortlessly, a whole new social circle of people in exactly the same situation as you are and how valuable this support and sharing is. There are baby groups, coffee mornings, music groups, swimming classes - so many ways to get out of the house, eat cakes and sit around chatting. It has been a humbling experience; the realisation that I am not so unflappable, that there are so many ways to learn from other women and also exciting when I gained the confidence to understand that I am the best mother that Eden could ever have.
I am now ejoying Eden so much more. It is true that there are very few experiences as blissful and fulfilling as looking at your sleeping child and feeling full of love. There will be more photos on the blog soon and much more blogging in the future.
Strange how the last post on my blog was such a pitifully long time ago when I found out I was pregnant. My daughter, Eden Alexandra, was born on 20th July 2008. She weighed 8lbs 2oz and her arrival was about as far away from my birth plan as you could imagine.
I was not scared at the thought of giving birth. I imagined me stoically coping with the pain as I relaxed in a warm birthing pool, listening to CDs of carefully selected music. The first problem was that Eden did not want to leave my womb and, at 11 days overdue, I had to be induced.
Continue reading "Story Of A Birth" »
COMING SOON
NEW COACHING PROGRAMME: THE SEX, SELF AND SPIRIT PACKAGE
This programme is unique in the UK.
Look our for full details coming up in February 2008.
My newly designed coaching programme will be available in early Spring. It is a 3 month course of coaching that can be taken between March until June. After that I will be about to give birth and will re-evaluate my coaching hours when I know how best to fit coaching in life with a new baby!
You get 3 sessions per month and each session will focus ona specific aspect of sex, self or spirit.
After working with many clients, I have been able to identify these 3 areas as having the most significant impact upon the quality and quantity of your sex life.
FULL DETAILS will be sent out in February. For those of you who would like to register your interest, send me an email at tara@aragoncoaching.co.uk and I will ensure that you will be first to be sent the information.
I can assure you that taking part in this programme will support you to:
be excited by your own sexual potential
expand your capacity for pleasure and enjoyment
develop your confidence
increase your sexual energy
make sure that the rest of your life supports your sexual growth
communicate more successfully with partner
experience the personal strength that comes from taking responsibility for your own choices
banish a blame and shame culture from your relationship
create a new, fun and inspiring sexual persona
atttract what and who you want into your life
understand your own arousal triggers
explore what you want from a relationship
know what you have to offer a partner
develop a compassionate and affectionate relationship with your body
find out how to bring more joy, optimism and purpose into your life
The programme is suitable for:
people who are single
people who are in relationship.
people who are ready to commit time and energy to exploring their sexual well-being, improving their relationship or finding a partner who can add to your happiness.
The programme varies slightly according to whether your focus is on sex, relationship or singles issues. This is discussed during an introductory chat that I have with all new clients.
I have created a series of exercises for you to do between sessions as well as working with you to try out new ways of thinking and behaving.
Remember this programme is unique in the UK.
If you would can't wait and would like more details before then, email me with any questions and I will make sure you receive full details as soon they become available.
Continue reading "NEW coaching programme: the sex, self and spirit package" »
2008 is probably the first year in many in which I actually started the year feeling full of energy. My normal January state of mind tends towards the sluggish and listless. But not now.
Partly this is to do with officially entering the second pregnancy trimester, which means that nausea and extreme fatigue recede and I now feel more 'me' and less like a host for some inconsiderate parasite that is sucking the life and energy out of me. Not the most idealised version of early pregnancy but true for me. The most difficult thing I found was the total lack of energy and need for sleep, when I would much rather be working. The ways that I got through this, apart from phoning my friends with children and begging them to reassure me how great kids are, is by (1) being kind to myself and not indulging my guilty feelings of resentment at being taken over by another 'potential' life (2) having to accept the way I was feeling and stop fighting it and (3) visualising a future when I will be able to get back to work and feel alive and enthusiastic again.
Continue reading "welcome the new year" »
