Category Archives: Early Days

This shit is hard.

12 Monday Mar 2018

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Before I had kids, I read a blog post about a woman who had three kids (singletons, its worth noting) and she talked about how intimidated she was by the prospect of taking all three out by herself. And I thought, in my infinite childfree wisdom, ‘why would you have three kids if you couldn’t cope with it?’

And then in the midst of the UK version of Snowmageddon last week (it snowed, like, a quarter of an inch. Everybody freak out), nursery was closed, I was home with three kids, and I just…couldn’t. In the end, a very kind friend brought her kids over because their nursery was closed too, and I had to admit that I couldn’t handle the prospect of hauling three kids out for a playdate at 4 pm. Or maybe, more broadly, I was kind of at my threshold, in terms of my ability to successfully parent three children at the same time.

Lately I’ve been making a real effort to parent more intensively, especially with the littles (I’m less worried about Theo. He had three years as an only kid). I’m trying to stay off my phone, verbalise more, focus on each girl individually, be a more present parent in general. And I’ve been proud of myself, because I’m succeeding. Bu I saw something on Facebook a couple months ago that really resonated with me. It was a meme that said ‘I’ve been dieting ALL DAY, am I skinny yet?!’

That’s how I feel about parenting babies. I can do a bang-up job for about thirty minutes at a time, and then what I want most in the world is to dick around on my phone. Or drink coffee in silence. Or fold laundry. I want to do anything but sing ‘zoom zoom we’re going to the moon’ for the 37th time that morning.

I also vividly remember watching ‘Master of None’ when I first brought the girls home (pre-Aziz Ansari sexual harassment drams). At one point in the show, the central character is feeling lovelorn and confused and he goes for a walk around New York. I saw him do that and thought ‘Efffffffff YOU! You just leave the house whenever you want. What’s that like?’

There is a reason that babies generally come in ones and parents usually come in twos (at least to start). The reason is: babies are a crap-ton of work, and multiple babies are more than double that. It is relentless and hard, and man oh man do I love my kids, but I would also love to see a little less of them.

So, to the mum of three on the internet whom I judged when I was pregnant, I apologise. I still think having three on purpose is kind of nuts, but I understand how great they are once they’re here, and I also understand how, some days, leaving the house just isn’t happening.

So this blog has an Instagram account now.

04 Sunday Mar 2018

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I love Instagram. It is my social media drug of choice. But I try to be judicious about how much I post because, you know, everyone has That One Person who is always clogging up your feed with pictures of their baby in every conceivable holiday getup. We don’t need to see your baby in a four-leaf clover onesie, alright? I got the gist after New Years, MLK Day, Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day. Just be cool, ffs.

I don’t want to be that person.

But I do kind of want to be internet famous.

It turns out I don’t really have the stamina – I started this blog in 2011, dropped it in in 2013, started again in 2017 and this is my first post in 2018 – but that also there is some sort of magic ingredient in monetizing your social media presence that I haven’t figured out. There’s one blog I read, which was part of my inspiration for returning to blogging, and its just her talking about her boring suburban life. Seriously. Kids, pets, house on a cul de sac and not much else. And yet I read it – along with thousands of other people. She’s wrangled free holidays out of it!

Anyway, I’m at it again. I started an Instagram account – @snacksandadventure – to match my mummy blog. This evening I’ve been going back through my photo archives and posting my favourites from the girls’ first year, which was kind of cathartic. I carried so much anxiety home with me from the hospital, and through that summer. I can’t remember if I’ve written about it before, but when Daphne was five weeks and six days old, she smiled. The entire week before that, I was a wreck. At one point I had her in my arms while I sobbed into her peach fuzz, whispering ‘I just want you to be ok!’

Going through the pictures and posting them on the internet was much more fun than actually living through it, for the most part. And since this Instagram feed is specifically public-facing, for people who want to see pictures of twins, I can post every day if I want to and I won’t piss anyone off.

But I also feel a little…well.  Greasy, maybe? I don’t know exactly what my goals are for this project, but I certainly wouldn’t hate it if I ended up with thousands of followers. Its not purely catharsis, or an online cache of the best pics I took in the last year.

So I’m grappling with the question of what is appropriate. The internet is full of mummy blogs, full of stories of NICU survivors and full of people peddling twinhood in one fashion or another (for example: @trendy_twincess is an actual Instagram account with 5,219 followers. The kids are gorgeous but I can’t even.) It wasn’t gross when I did a #thisgirlcan photo shoot while I was pregnant; I had no compunction about that, though you could argue I was monetizing my pregnancy. And it certainly doesn’t feel gross to suggest that being a parent has given me new skills that are applicable to the job market (just because our society doesn’t value caregiving doesn’t mean it hasn’t taught me a whole bunch of shit), or that I would take a job offered to me through a parent network. Buuuuut…I know there is something a little yucky about actually pursuing notoriety. Its gross if you do it on your own and its worse if you do it with your kids. I know because I follow celebrities and I judge them for their own ambition and judge them worse when they use their babies to bolster their own fame.

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SO with all of that said, if you want to see a bunch of cute baby pics, check out @snacksandadventure on Instagram.

The Tiny Baby Blues

26 Tuesday Dec 2017

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I met a family last week who had an extremely premature baby. I had two extremely premature babies, but this baby was so premature that I was reduced to saying, essentially, ‘oh, shit, that’s an early baby.’

I have been thinking about that family a lot since. They arrived at the NICU – our NICU – a couple months after we left and stayed for a long time, though they are home now. But I keep feeling regret for them – not that they spent four months with a baby in the hospital, though that sure sucks a lot – but that they left the hospital without the resources that they would have had if things had gone more smoothly. Its hard to make friends with other parents when your experience diverged so sharply from everyone else’s so early, and its hard to settle into a rhythm as a new parent when you feel alienated from everyone else and their robust, healthy, oxygen-free newborns.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I did a birth-prep class. We had been warned that the content was not especially useful (it wasn’t), but that there was a lot of value in meeting your classmates – classes are organised by neighbourhood, and we live in an extremely fertile area, so our classmates lived around the corner, down the road, up the street – we were extremely geographically concentrated. When one of the babies was born early, the father sent an email to all of us saying how nice it was to meet everyone and he hoped to see us again soon sometime.

We had a good laugh about that at our fourth annual birth-prep group holiday in October. We saw each other almost every day all summer, and are still in regular contact with virtually everyone in the group, which has swelled (with second and, in our case, third children) to 32 people.

My group are outliers; most people don’t end up taking regular vacations with their parenting classmates. But most people do leave the hospital with a roughly shared experience of birth and new parenthood. Plus a baby. Most people leave the hospital and take their child with them.

For NICU families, it isn’t like that. I found it relatively easy to leave my daughters behind, not because I’m a callous witch, but because they were clearly…not finished. They were in incubators and they clearly needed to be. I found it harder at the end, when we were in sight of a finish line that never seemed to get any closer, and the girls looked and acted like babies instead of fetuses.

Still, from the moment they were born, I thought they were perfect. I wanted to tell people about my gorgeous twin daughters as much as any other new parent. When I was two weeks postpartum, I took my son to a birthday party and people asked how I was. It was only as I watched their eyes widen that I realised I had to adjust my rhetoric a little. ‘I just gave birth to tiny, perfect, extremely premature babies!’ isn’t exactly cocktail fodder. No one knew what to say. I skipped the next preschool party.

Of course there are families in the NICU who are going through something similar to what you’re experiencing. When people ask if I made friends in the NICU, I say ‘well – Facebook friends.’ I did meet people whose acquaintance I value, but none of them live within a twenty mile radius. Catchment areas for Category III (most intensive) NICUs can be huge; there are only a few in the UK. There are always families coming and going, and there is a hierarchy. One woman took weeks to warm up to me, presumably because her kid was having a rough go and she didn’t want to deal with another baby having an easier time than hers.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this family I met recently, who had four crummy months in the hospital only to find themselves starting from a different place than everyone else who has a baby the same age (actual or adjusted) after they got discharged. I’ve wondered what could be done to make it easier for them, and I’ve wondered what I could do without coming across as an overzealous weirdo. I haven’t come up with much so far.

 

 

I Hate Santa.

22 Friday Dec 2017

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My paternal grandmother invented the Elf on the Shelf about sixty years before you ever heard of it. She didn’t profit from it – but she created a household elf, McGiffiny, who would come to Shorewood, Wisconsin around Thanksgiving, spy on my dad and aunt and uncle, and have little tete-a-tetes with my grandmother about her children’s behaviour. To say she cultivated a belief in Santa would be an understatement. When my dad found out the whole thing was an adult fabrication – from a friend of his older brother’s – he felt duped and betrayed. And while he’s not exactly losing sleep over it at age 67, it was sufficiently unpleasant that he and my mother went out of their way never to endorse Santa mythology to me or to my sister.

When I was in first grade, I asked my mother where presents came from if Santa didn’t bring them. And she told me. I have been grateful since then that my parents never tried to bullshit me about Santa or about various other imaginary creatures – the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, etc.

Now that my son is old enough to understand the narrative about Santa, I appreciate more than ever the way my parents never endorsed the myth. Because it is a difficult fricking line to walk. This year, Santa has made appearances at nursery and my husband’s office do, and my son is a firm believer despite the fact that my husband and I have gone out of our way to avoid encouraging him.

And so we find ourselves hamstrung: when Theo met Santa last week, he looked completely star-struck. There is no doubt in his mind, despite the fact that he met two different Santas on two consecutive days, that the whole shebang is real. If, come the 25th, there aren’t presents from Santa under the tree, we will have to have a reckoning. But if there are, we are playing into this weird fantasy about a fat man who breaks into people’s houses every year that is perpetuated by adults for their own amusement. I know some people argue that its fun to believe, but I don’t think anyone enjoys learning that they have been lied to. Stop deceiving your children because you think its cute!

And McGiffiny notwithstanding, don’t even get me started on that damn elf on the shelf. Creepy AF.

World Prematurity Day 2017: Reflections

28 Tuesday Nov 2017

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Last week was World Prematurity Day, and I took the girls back to the Rosie Hospital & Addenbrookes NICU – the hospital where they were born and the ward where they spent the first two months of their lives – for a reunion with the staff and some of their old roommates.

The event was 100% totally sweet. We paraded through the halls of the hospital with little tea lights, wearing purple (the colour of prematurity and also, I recently learned, of pancreatic cancer), and then convened in a hospital seminar room with a table of cakes and tea and coffee for a reception that lasted about 45 minutes. And then we left. It was perfect.

Many of the NICU staff had provided baked goods and there was a great turnout from consulting doctors and a few of the nurses (many, of course, were working and not able to come). Seeing the staff, the people who literally saved our children’s lives, was fantastic, and while I appreciate it wasn’t at the top of their list of things to do, I wish I’d been able to see more of them. Sarah and Sophie from room 7 or Denise and Ben from room 12…I get a little emotional thinking about it, even now. The NICU staff made it possible for me to go home and sleep every night even when Fiona’s oxygen needs were going up or when Daphne had green goo coming out of her stomach. They took care of my daughters when I couldn’t, and I will never be able to say thank you enough. I hope they know that.

None of the midwives or maternal consultants were there, which is a shame – because as critical as the NICU nurses were, the only people I wanted to see more were Kasha and Catherine, the doctors who watched over my uterus week after week and then ultimately delivered the girls by emergency C-section. Catherine came to debrief me before she left the hospital, as I was coming down off the heroin derivatives you get when you have a c-section, too, which was awfully kind,

There were probably about fifteen families, mostly with children under a year old, including at least two women casually slinging oxygen for their baby and a six-month-old three-month-old who looked like the tiniest old man you’ve ever seen.

A number of our girls’ NICU contemporaries were there. In December of last year, there was a family of quads born at 27 weeks at the Rosie, and the smallest of them ultimately spent over five months there. They were all there and were, naturally, like visiting celebrities. There was another family of twins born two weeks after mine who were our roommates for a couple of weeks and two other single babies whom I hadn’t actually ever seen in person – I’d just seen their mums in the pumping room.

It was a funny thing. I know these women (it was mostly women, because the milk kitchen was where the bonding happened) from one of the most difficult phases of  our lives. Our children spent months occupying the same rooms and our breastmilk sat side-by-side in little purple trays and we passed each other in the halls wearing pyjamas, or swallowing tears en route to the toilets. We chatted through the beige curtains to  background music provided by Medela breast pumps and then swore at the bizarrely hot tap water we used to wash our pump parts, exchanging small talk as we each microwaved our steriliser bags for three minutes.

I liked a lot of the people I met in the NICU. The super-religious family; the family with a silent husband and a wife with more than enough personality for two; the couple with a dad who was always dressed in expensive loungewear; the French woman who showed up two days postpartum with perfect hair and makeup; the ones who always ate tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches in the parents’ room and the American military man who thought my excitement over Teddy Grahams was hilarious (I mean, it was). But when people ask if I made friends, I say ‘well…I made Facebook friends.’

It was so good to see these families again – with parents looking less wan, mums looking slimmer, and babies looking chunky and normal. I’m so pleased I got to go, and to show off the girls a bit too. But it is also funny to think – given all the solidarity I got and gave with these people – that actually, half an hour of shmoozing turned out to be just about right. I walked back through the hospital and packed the girls into the bike, grateful to have seen everyone and even more grateful to be leaving the hospital behind for a while.

Poop.

14 Tuesday Nov 2017

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Theo has discovered toilet humour. So that’s awesome.

He’s actually a little late to the poop party – most kids discover it around the time they get toilet trained.

I understand. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman and I love a good fart joke. But most of the time, I don’t want to listen to a preschooler sing ‘poop poop poop!’ at the dinner table. Some of the parents and carers I know are really keen to shut it down, but to be honest, I’ve been surprised by how little I care.

What I HAVE been surprised by, on the other hand, is how vehemently I care about my kids’ ability to read the room. I don’t mind if he talks about poop. But my line has been ‘I’m not interested in talking about poo, Theo, so let’s please talk about something else.’

It turns out toilet talk isn’t an issue for me, but instilling in my kid the sensitivity to change the subject definitely is – in fact, it is one of my Core Parenting Values. Talk about poop with your friends, kid. Don’t talk about it with me.

Most of my revelations about parenting have come that way: I establish a policy about a fairly prosaic part of everyday life, only to realise that it stems from something deeply held. For example: you can go up the slide instead of down, but not if someone wants to use it properly. Not because I care about slide etiquette, per se, but I care about having a child who is aware of other people and will be respectful of other playground users.

Broadly speaking, I came to parenting with my Core Parenting Values fully fledged: I want my child to be kind. I want my child to be respectful. I want my child to be feminist and generally anti-discriminatory. And there were a few specific things I felt strongly about, mostly drawn from my own childhood: I wanted girls to have my name, for example, because I have my mother’s. I felt strongly about not propagating ideas about Santa Claus, because duping children for the amusement of adults seems gross to me. I didn’t want my son to have clothes with cars on them, because I think that’s weird, sexist, outdated and unfortunate: I hate cars (I’m an urban planner).

Like any parent, many of my strongly held beliefs have disintegrated in the face of, well, reality. My daughters DO have my name, but Santa Claus is a losing battle: I haven’t endorsed the myth, but Santa made appearances at nursery, at my husband’s office party, the Christmas market, and pretty much everywhere else, too. And cars – well, yeah. That didn’t happen, either. I’m hardly the first parent to give birth to a kid thinking I can control some aspect of their life, only to find myself proven fundamentally, laughably wrong about five minutes after the kid was born.

And as someone parenting a preschool boy and baby girls, I find myself navigating new territory in terms of gender expression and identity. The onslaught of sweet frilly things has proven way harder to resist than I expected, because it turns out I like sweet frilly things way more than I expected and I like NEW frilly things even more than that. I thought that putting my kids in gender neutral clothing would be an expression of Core Parenting Values – but actually it turns out, what I care about is that my children not feel oppressed or constrained by their gender, or frame their sense of self-worth in terms of their private parts. I don’t think the adorable pink overalls I inherited from a friend are going to factor in, long term.

I let this post marinate for a while now – I started it back in October – because, you know, who cares, right? In parenting, you learn by doing. Shocking surprise twist. But I think the takeaway for me is that in parenting, the personal is political, in that everything is a proxy for a more deeply held belief that I often have not thought to articulate until it is expressed via a stupid or seemingly trivial rule.

Don’t talk to me about poop, kid. Talk about it with your friends.

 

 

So we’re sleep training now.

26 Tuesday Sep 2017

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September has been a rough month: the girls went from being pretty solid sleepers to, well, the opposite. I felt like they were trying to break me (and a couple times, I think my husband would say they succeeded).

I don’t remember being this tired the first time around, although I’m sure I was – in fact, I had undiagnosed Graves’ Disease, so from months 4-6 I had brutal insomnia most nights and ended up taking long naps in the morning to try to get to a point where I could function. This time, though, the morning naps haven’t happened; the girls’ daytime sleep hasn’t aligned well enough.

Sleep deprivation isn’t a good look on anyone, but I’ve had a couple of weirdly unhinged moments – like once when I got so frustrated I threw my giant feeding cushion across the room, or another time when I ended up lying on my stomach on my bed and kicking my feet like a tantruming toddler. Most of my symptoms have been more prosaic, though – incidents when I’m so tired that I can’t remember a word, or I start a sentence, forget where I’m going, and then think ‘oh eff it, nevermind, I can’t be bothered to formulate that thought after all.’

So we decided to start sleep training. We used Ferber with Theo and it worked so well that we are trying it, with some trepidation, on the girls. They feel too young. It seems too soon. But I am damn near catatonic, so last night I gave Daphne extra squeezes and lots of apologies, put her in bed, and walked away.

And….she just stayed asleep. I’d let her fall asleep on the boob, like an amateur. Fiona, on the other hand, started squawking almost immediately. With Ferber, which is a method of controlled cry-it-out, you go in every few minutes to reassure the baby. But it doesn’t calm them down at all; I just felt crummy for failing to comfort my child, and in the end I ceded as much of it to Ian as I could.

With both girls, their first experience of being left to self-soothe lasted about 25 minutes. The second took about ten. And then I fell asleep feeding Daphne and screwed it up AGAIN. But still. We have begun. We are on our way.

I am a sleep-training evangelist. I know the internet (and the world) is full of people who say ‘oh but I just couldn’t.’ And that makes me angry. I appreciate that sleep training is not for everyone, but it is not something I take lightly. When we did it with Theo, it was by far the hardest thing I had done as a parent, and it was 100% the right thing for all of us. When people say ‘oh, I can’t,’ what they are implying is that they are more sensitive or empathetic or more devoted to their children’s wellbeing than I am. And maybe they are, but if so, it has nothing to do with their willingness to engage in sleep training. I believe in sleep training as one of my core parenting values, because I will parent better if I can formulate complete sentences and deal with frustration without throwing things (even cushions) across the room.

So we’re sleep training now. It was a little sooner than we meant to, but it turns out its time. Wish us luck.

Prematurity on TV: Black-ish Season Finale

10 Sunday Sep 2017

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I’ve seen a few episodes of the American sitcom Black-ish, which will be returning for season4 on 3 October (in the US. in the UK, who knows? I saw the finale at 10 am in the morning on ITV. I think.).

Season 3 had centred on the late-in-life pregnancy of the female lead, Rainbow, and the finale gave a mostly-accurate depiction of a sudden, scary turn: she developed pre-eclampsia and delivered the baby two months early (so about 32 weeks gestation).

I wrote about prematurity as depicted by Pampers  a couple months ago – in general, I would say, pop culture doesn’t have much of a track record addressing prematurity. Which makes sense: prematurity is not telegenic. Preemies can be ugly or scary or just a bit too….fetal…to be comfortable to look at. They are tiny and fragile and hooked up to all sorts of crap.

Black-ish did a pretty great job with the maternity stuff; everything they said about pre-eclampsia was correct, and the parents’ fear and panic was pretty on point too. But then the show was stuck with a premature baby that they had to deal with, and that’s where I thought the show went off the rails a bit.

First of all, that baby was gorgeous. Small, but chubby. Not hooked up to any breathing apparatus. No long lines, or lines of any description. No incubator. Just a few monitoring devices so we knew this was Not a Normal Baby.

I mean, I understand. I thought Daphne was gorgeous straight out of the womb. In the first picture ever taken of her, she has one eye just cracked with Not Impressed expression that remains her trademark seven months later. Watching from the operating table, I saw the nurse hold up my tiny 2 lb baby and I knew that things couldn’t be that dire or they wouldn’t be hoisting her up like Simba for photo ops. But really, to the untrained eye, she looked pretty raw. I had that picture printed but my mother suggested I not send it to my grandmother. I look at it and think, ‘damn, my baby is a fighter’ but in retrospect I can see how other people would just react with alarm.

Preemies are alarming. But the show could easily have circumvented the need for a close-up by showing an incubator (also called an isolette), or by simply reporting on his condition. Instead, they made it look like the scary part was over. Anyone watching would see that baby and think ‘oh, that’s not so bad, he looks fine.’

I realise I am complaining about a sitcom, and I shouldn’t hold them to documentary standards, but the experience of having a premature baby doesn’t end a couple days postpartum. The fact that the girls were early is still very much with us seven months later (five months adjusted), and will likely stay with us forever, in the form of soft teeth of poor vision or attention or behavioural disorders. We are very lucky that the biggest thing they faced in the NICU was ‘smallness’ – they were just really, really tiny. Daphne was so small that, for a long time, she kept cutting off her own airway when she moved her head. She just didn’t have the strength/maturity not to.

September is NICU Awareness Month. The show originally aired this spring, but it seems fitting to me to talk about it now, after it ran in the UK. Most NICU babies are, in the grand scheme of things, Just Fine. But they are fine because they have the benefit of an incredible amount of care and support and science: they NEED incubators and long lines and various unpleasant, humming machines, and for a television show to skip that part of it – while demonstrating the very accurate fear and anxiety of the parents – is to do NICU babies, and neonatology in general, a disservice.

Why I Need New Mum Friends

30 Friday Jun 2017

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A few weeks ago, I met up with some friends who have pre-schoolers and younger children for a Friday afternoon out. I pulled Theo out of nursery early, certain it would be a Grand Adventure, and schlepped one three-year-old and two twinfants to the Botanic Gardens.

Things immediately began to go awry. Moments inside the Gardens, Theo began nagging me to play video games on my phone. Then he asked to go to a different park. Then he licked the snacks the other parents had brought and put them back, declaring them ‘disGUZting!’ (but he ate all the raspberries, because of course he did). Then both girls started screaming and I had to tandem-feed them while yelling at my child not to trample all the rosemary varietals.

The whole event came to a head when the other two boys fell/jumped in the fountain. We ended up with two naked three-year-olds running laps around the centre of the gardens, with one ripping off his Pull-Up and waving it around his head like a helicopter and wiggling his hips at the spectators in the Victorian greenhouse. At that moment, with two sleeping babies and one fully clothed, dry child, I said ‘So I’m gonna go.’ I swooped up my spawn and headed for the door, feeling smug about the fact that I had somehow come out ahead despite the inauspicious beginning and – oh yeah – that whole two babies thing. But I was exhausted, and we had been there barely 90 minutes.

At that point, I realised I needed to make some new friends. I had an incredible baby group the first time around (which is how I have a posse of pre-school parents to hang out with now), but I don’t actually feel the need to take three kids on superfluous excursions far away from home, even if I get to hang out with the women who were so critical to my maternal homeostasis last time.

Thankfully there are tools available to me that didn’t exist three years ago. I downloaded two apps, Mush and Peanut, intended to help new mums connect (either for adult or child friendship — the apps are pretty agnostic as to their purpose). I never used dating apps, but Mush has what I imagine is a pretty standard format for traditional sites. Women (its all women) enter their age, location, age, basic info on their children, and a small bio. They choose from a selection of really cringey hashtags about you as a human and you as a parent, and you’re matched up with other people who live near you, have kids your age or, presumably (based on your hashtags) share your values as a parent. It is mesmerising.

You can filter for people near you, people with kids your age, etc., and then you can add friends and chat (or group chat) within the app. I live in a very fertile neighbourhood, but after about an hour, I had exhausted the possibilities. I added about 8 women as friends and called it a night.

That was about two weeks ago. Since then, I have gone on two friend dates through Mush. One women is an American expat (like I am) and lives just down the street from me. Her son is about a week older than my daughters, and they were in the same room of the NICU at the same time (though he was a NICU tourist – only there for a day). Its not clear to me that we will be besties, but she seemed cool, and we have a follow-up outing planned for later this week. The other date was similar – I liked her; we might hang out again; it wasn’t a total love connection. In both cases, the women lived in my neighbourhood and are people on whome I could presumably, at some point down the line, have a more casual relationship with – someone who could watch the girls in an emergency, or who might be available for spur-of-the-moment coffee.

Peanut, unfortunately, was a total bust. It is like Tinder in that it involves swiping, but I got way less visceral pleasure from it than I expected. I’ve barely opened it since my first foray.

As a friend said, one of the hard parts about mum-friending is that its like an awkward, alcohol-free cocktail party – at which you’re trying to figure out who you’d want to drink with if you had the opportunity. Mush doesn’t make the initial conversations any less awkward but, when I’m meeting up with other parents of infants, we are both clear on what we’re looking for: we want a village. I don’t think anyone is looking for their new bestie, but they want to feel like they’re part of a community, and a village that originates online is still a village.

The That Stupid Pampers Ad

27 Tuesday Jun 2017

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pampers

Still from the exploitative Pampers ad

Maybe you’ve seen it – a Pampers nappies ad full of premature babies looking impossibly tiny and fragile (one looks a lot like Daphne did when she was a few weeks old) with swelling music and captions like ‘when you arrive early, every day is a battle.’ There are packs of Pampers nappies interspersed throughout the ad and a close up of adults hands holding a doll-sized nappy, for scale.

Pampers has unveiled their micro-preemie nappy – until recently, the smallest available (for commercial or hospital use) were for 2-5 lbs (1-2.5 kilos). They have donated three million tiny nappies to hospitals around the UK and have also sponsored a social media campaign, #powerofbabies, where parents are invited to tag pictures of infants with a raised fist. For every hashtag, Pampers will donate £1 to Bliss, a charity that supports families of NICU babies (‘For babies born premature or sick’ is their tagline).

I have a lot of feels about this ad campaign, which was launched on 26 April 2017 (or at least that’s when the HuffPost published an article about it). They are mostly negative feels.

On the one hand, it is amazing that Pampers has found a way to support micro-preemies, who are classified as babies weighing less than 800 g (1.8 lbs). Daphne was 820 g when she was born, so I have a firsthand understanding of just how tiny that is. The partnership with Bliss is great – they were amazing when we were in hospital. And three million nappies is a lot of nappies.

On the other hand, the ad feels exploitative and gross. It has a triumphant narrative – as, thankfully, most NICU journeys do – but it shows actual footage of preemies and parents in the hospital. Its using people’s personal tragedies for commercial gain. Furthermore, those nappies are not commercially available: they don’t need to be. There is no world in which a 1 kilo baby is anywhere but the NICU. And while Pampers may have made a cracking nappy, we used generic micro-preemie nappies for Daphne with no visible advertising before she graduated to Libero premature newborn nappies, so I can confirm that their claim to have revolutionised micro-preemie diapering with their new nappy does not hold up. And the #powerofbabies tag, which as of today has 1,517 posts on Instagram, is another opportunity for Pampers to leverage premature babes’ tragedy for commercial reasons. The one-minute advertisement has 90k views on YouTube.

In the end, it feels exploitative: the advertisement is leveraging people’s tragedies to hawk a product you can’t even buy. The donations with which it is coupled feel mercantile rather than altruistic. And while I am very much a believer in the #powerofbabies, I can’t quite bring myself to start tagging my Instagram posts accordingly.