Category Archives: Early Days

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.

 

Two babies at the same motherf*cking time.

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

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I found out I was pregnant on 4 August, 2017

On 24 August, we had an early scan at a private clinic in north Cambridge. I had had a tumultuous year, fertility-wise, and I wanted to see the heart rate ASAP. Chances of miscarriage plummet once a heart rate is spotted, so I booked an appointment for the middle of the seventh week after my last period – a happy medium between the NHS’ policy of 12-14 weeks and my desire to see the embryo THIS DAMN SECOND. Plus by 7 weeks the heartbeat should be clearly visible so I wouldn’t be setting myself up for any further anxiety. One way or the other, I would know. In the meantime, I went to Asda and bought two cheap pregnancy tests to corroborate the fancy digital one that had clearly said ‘Pregnant, 1-2 weeks.’ The cheap tests came back blue – clearly, irrefutably blue – but they were slow to change and they weren’t, I don’t know, flashing neon, which is the only thing that would have calmed me down.

When I got to the clinic, a compact, no-nonsense woman with an immaculate bob gave me an incredibly firm handshake and sat me down on the ultrasound couch. No sooner had she touched the wand to my stomach than we saw a grain of rice with a pulsating heartbeat flickering in front of us. I wanted to cry with relief. All three of us stared at it for a little while and then the sonographer – who had the air of a Uterus Tour Guide – said ‘ok, let’s just look at the pla…..do twins run in your family?’

And that’s when she showed us an unmistakable second grain of rice with a second, clearly visible heartbeat. She printed a picture and gave us some time to collect ourselves. I spread the picture on my polka-dot skirt and stared at it, waiting for it to feel real.

Now that I’m a Mum of Three

19 Monday Jun 2017

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Didn’t plan on having a litter.

 

When my first child was born, I remember walking dreamily around the hospital room telling a friend that I couldn’t believe something so perfect had come out of me. Objectively, this was not true – kid was a weird looking baby. He was super scrawny, and the first time my sister saw him, she squeaked ‘he looks like an alien!’

(she wasn’t wrong)

Maybe because of the persistent anxiety that defined this pregnancy, or because they were whisked away in incubators while I still felt too shaky from the c-section to touch them, or because two babies is a lot of baby – I didn’t have that this time. I have felt fierce, and protective, and grateful, and scared. But a couple days ago, I looked at my two daughters and said to them ‘I love you so much!’ and was surprised to realise that it was the first time the phrase had come naturally to me.

I learned I was having twins ten months ago, and today, I still struggle to believe that I have three kids – even with all three of them in front of me, it doesn’t seem real. I am still recalibrating my life as a parent – this isn’t the family I imagined, and the third kid is the hardest part. And to be clear, are all the third kid: Theo, when he runs into the bedroom at 6:30 on the nose to ask if he can watch Paw Patrol; Daphne, when she screams because she’s starving but the boob is RIGHT THERE; Fiona, when…well, she’s actually a pretty chilled out baby but she definitely has her moments. I want all three of these kids, but I didn’t want three kids, and I’m still mourning the vision I had for my family, even as I feel myself falling more and more in love with what I actually have.

 

Boobs.

15 Thursday Jun 2017

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[Usual disclaimer about how I am not a medical professional, breast feeding peer supporter or anyone with any official knowledge about breastfeeding]


Its kind of lunacy to think that I can contribute anything much to the world of online breastfeeding resources when a. its extremely well-trod territory and b. my qualification is, I’ve done some breastfeeding. Both times I had a stressful start: with my first, mostly because of incompetence; the second time, there was that whole NICU thing.  But both times I gave birth, my baby had a nasal gastric tube. Theo had low blood sugar and, though he was full term, was tiny; he had a feeding tube put in directly after birth and spent an afternoon in Special Care. He was also born with an infection and was floppy and lethargic for the first 36 hours of his life, even by newborn standards.

Both times I was desperate to breastfeed. The first time I just couldn’t get the damn baby to latch. I ended up exclusively pumping after failing, every three hours, to get a latch, then dumping milk and formula down the NG tube into his stomach. The midwives didn’t believe me, but the whole depressing ritual – fail to latch, feed, pump, sterilise – took about two hours and forty minutes, leaving you with twenty minutes before it was time to start again. I have confirmed with other women: no matter how long the health professionals say it should take, it takes 2 hours, 40 minutes. For the first several days, no one bothered to tell me that you can pump on both sides simultaneously. Our hospital doled out single-breast packs (one bottle, one set of vacuum parts) and everyone on the ward shared a communal pool of hospital grade pumps.

On the third night, I called my husband, who was asleep at home, to act completely insane and accuse him of failing to support me in my attempts to breastfeed. I have no memory of what behaviour  of his set  me off, but I do remember that trying to get Theo on the boob had left me shrieking in frustration. I mean,  in the normal course of things, I’m not much of a shrieker.

Anyway. The thing that I originally wanted to impart is this: I have had three occasions where I have had kids on NG tubes and have had to introduce breastfeeding slowly, instead of doing the normal thing where you have a kid, put the baby on the  boob (or the bottle), call it a day and go home. Even if you do have a lot of success with breastfeeding (in which case, pin a rose on your nose) it can still be painful, time consuming, frustrating….my sister said she was glad she knows, from my experience, that feeding is not an easy and magical experience. And it seems obvious to me now, but three years ago I thought that I would have a baby and they would eat. I thought it was something I could prep for with classes and research. I was wrong.

That said, if you are in a situation similar to mine (especially if you have preemies) there are some things I recommend. First, it is important to be proactive, even if your child will not immediately be taking milk (ie if they are on liquid nutrition to start). You can start hand expressing immediately after birth, and – new in the last couple years – medela, the most common supplier of hospital-grade pumps, has created a ‘preemie initiate’ setting that stimulates the breast before hand expressing.

If you want to breastfeed, the best hing you can do is get after it. Milk yourself every three hours – the way a baby would if they were eating. Only expect a tiny amount at first – colostrum, the milk that comes right after birth, is meticulously collected in il syringes. But if it hurts or you aren’t getting any, ask for help: nurses, midwives and care assistants have experience milking new mums, and they’re probably better at it than you are. If your hospital is stressed for resources, ask for a lesson and have your partner help you collect it. It’s not dignified but…well…you get over it quickly. On my fourth day postpartum, I so get out one of the women who had helped me eke out my first drops and proudly showed her my freshly collected 35 mils. I actually got a little choked up – it was a mix of gratitude, pride, relief and Hormones.

Basically the biggest lesson – which I suspect is a theme – is advocate for yourself. Failing that, prep your partner and have them do it for you. There is no way to physically prepare for breastfeeding, so the best thing you can do if it doesn’t come naturally is ask for help – loudly and repeatedly if needed – and be patient with yourself.

And if, after all that, it doesn’t work out or you decide you actually kind of hate it, buy some formula and move on.