• About

snacks & adventure

~ oversharing is a way of life.

snacks & adventure

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Thank you, NHS

06 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

I live in the UK and have for seven years. In the last two  years, I have used the National Health Service about as intensively as anyone I know: first I had a high-risk pregnancy that involved in-patient stays and a large amount of facetime with senior doctors; then, I had two very fragile babies who spent ten weeks in the NICU followed by months (and years) of follow-up from various teams who monitor the girls’ development. I have nothing but gratitude for the way that I am my daughters were cared for; I’m getting emotional thinking about it as I type.

The consensus among Brits is, I think, that when you have a life-threatening condition (as my daughters and I did), the care you receive from the NHS is first-rate. If it is something less pressing, you will be seen…eventually. And if it is an elective procedure, well, it is very hit-and-miss.

This was the experience I had when went to my GP with an elevated heart rate and various other symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as Graves’ Disease (an overactive thyroid). Although I had lost dramatic amounts of weight and had various unpleasant symptoms, like anxiety, tingling in my feet, and CONSTANT hunger, I was not in any immediate danger. It took months for me to get an appointment with a consultant, complicated by the fact that, when I started seeking treatment I was pregnant, then lost the pregnancy, and then went to one fertility/endocrinology clinic where the doctor (later my doctor, with the girls) apologised profusely for bringing me into a ward full of pregnant ladies a few weeks after a miscarriage. When I finally saw the right person, I was given medication and sent on my way in a matter of minutes – because that was all I needed, not because anyone was being flippant about my health.

During the months that I waited for treatment, and waited for the green light to start trying for another baby, I was so frustrated and fed up: I needed five minutes with someone who could give me a prescription, and it took me five months (from the first GP visit) to get it. If I hadn’t had to wait, maybe I wouldn’t have lost the pregnancy in the first place. Maybe I would already be pregnant again. Maybe things would have been different.

Recently a friend mentioned that she was having suspicious, potentially thyroid-related symptoms, and that she was not optimistic that the response from the NHS would be speedy. And that’s when I realised that I was completely at peace with my thyroid experience: if I hadn’t manifested Graves Disease the way that I did, I wouldn’t have the girls, and they are exactly the babies I want to have. I spent so much energy wishing they’d just get it sorted only to end up grateful, in the end, that they took their time.

I mean, I learned after the disease reappeared at the end of 2017 that I will likely be facing surgical removal of my thyroid in the relatively short term (a couple years) and until then I will be on medication to regulate my hormones. It meant the girls were carefully monitored, as they had a higher risk of thyroid complication, and its a genetic disease so they might have it later in life – all of which is not great. I’m not thrilled to be ill, or to have passed my wonky genes to my kids.

But. The only way I was ever having three kids is if I had twins, and it turns out I love it. So thank you, NHS. Your peculiar brand of efficiency and ineptitude brought me these children, and I can no longer imagine my family any other way.

Advertisement

So this blog has an Instagram account now.

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Early Days, Parenthood, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

fame whore, Instagram, internet famous, narcissism, Parenthood, parenting, social media

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.

…

…

…

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

Christmas frickin’ Magic

29 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Parenthood, pregnancy, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christmas, christmas brunch, Christmas magic, Family, holidays, hospital, miscarriage, multiples, placenta previa, preemies, pregnancy, pregnancy complications, twins

The last two Christmases have not been fantastic.

Last year, I finished work on Friday, 23 December, and sat at the kitchen table ready for the holidays. I remember saying ‘I am so excited!’ about an hour before I went to the bathroom and saw blood in my underwear.

For most women, that’s called a menstrual cycle. But I was 23 weeks, 6 days pregnant. I had had an ultrasound earlier that day and it had been positive – it was a high-risk pregnancy but things were generally stable and I left feeling lighter than I had in the past. I was on the cusp of viability! This was HAPPENING!

I was at the hospital less than half an hour later.

The same doctor who had scanned me earlier that day came in, and confirmed that I’d had a bleed but that both girls were still moving. It looked like it might just be a one-off, and then it happened again. And again. And faster and faster.

I chugged water from paper cups in the triage area, running laps between the bathroom and our curtained-off area. A couple hours later, I was transferred to Labour & Delivery – not a positive sign – where I thankfully had a private room with ensuite bath (not all rooms do) and could schlep between the bed and the toilet. I noticed a tiny new stretch mark, running north from my bellybutton, and stared at the blue screensaver on the computer kiosk in a corner of the room, only realising the next morning that I could have turned off the monitor. But by midnight, the bleeding had just…trailed off. The same doctor – bless you, Catherine Aiken – came in to discuss delivery and steroid shots (I got one) and the NICU team came to prep me for the worst. Daphne was 400 grams at that point, and would not have been expected to survive; Fiona, at about 540, stood a fighting chance. Ian went home at about one in the morning and I spent the rest of the night the same way – staring numbly into space, trying to sleep, punctuated with trips to the toilet that confirmed I was mostly not bleeding anymore.

The next morning, a midwife’s assistant brought me tea and toast. I sat on the inclined bed with a Styrofoam cup of tea in my lap and sobbed and sobbed, while my daughters – now an even 24 weeks, and officially Viable as far as the medical establishment was concerned – wiggled and thumped inside me.

I was retrospectively diagnosed with a partial placenta previa, a complication that can be fatal to mum and baby – or can be so minor as to barely register as a complication at all. I left the hospital on Boxing Day, and we had family Christmas two days late. A week later, I had another bleed – a much more minor one – and spent New Year’s in the hospital. And that was last year’s holiday season. Yippee!

That would be enough to feel like I had to bring the Christmas Magic this year, but it turns out there is a theme. Two years ago, I had a miscarriage at 11 weeks pregnant (later diagnosed as having been caused by Graves’ Disease – basically an overactive thyroid), on the 17th of December. It had been an easy, breezy pregnancy to that point – things had gone 100% according to plan with minimal morning sickness, and once we crossed the 9 week mark I thought, ‘well this is fantastic; my chances of miscarriage now are like 2%’

Well, someone has to be in that 2%.

My memories of the miscarriage mostly involve crying: at the ultrasound, when they confirmed there was no heartbeat; in the shower, on the toilet, in my mother’s arms when I found the ‘big brother’ shirt I’d ordered to my parents’ house. Eventually I found a grief anthem: I would sing a chorus from a Ben Folds song and allow myself to feel All the Feels – sometimes I sang it twice – and then I’d pull myself together. All the same, it was a rough few weeks that stretched into months, when we learned that I had to wait until my thyroid was managed to try again.

This year – and every year from now on – I am free from reproductive stress. Our family is complete; this uterus has closed up shop. But as the 23rd of December approached, and I realised that last year would cast a longer shadow than I had anticipated, I felt a lot of self-inflicted pressure to make this holiday special. To start new traditions that would drown out the stress and disappointment of previous Decembers. To celebrate that we had come out of a difficult couple of years with three healthy children. Basically, to create Christmas memories that would drown out the crumminess of the last two years.

Here is the problem: my baby daughters don’t care; my husband doesn’t care (at least not nearly as much as I do); and my son just wants to eat treats and open presents, and will have only the haziest memories of this year if he has any at all. All five of us have colds, except for Theo, who is stuck at home because nursery is closed for the week and is going stir crazy. Holiday perfection has taken a backseat to sleeping and trying not to succumb to our desire to just plop our three year old in front of Paw Patrol and call it a damn day.

Where there has been magic, it has been incidental, which I guess is a good lesson to take from the festive season. Daphne waved at her grandparents and aunts during a Skype call on Christmas, a development that is way ahead of schedule and for which there were many witnesses. In the last four days, Fiona has become an indisputably mobile baby. She doesn’t go fast or far, but she doesn’t stay where you put her, either. Theo’s math skills have taken a step forward – when counting pound coins he received with a piggybank, he got to 8 and said ‘I think I have ten!’ And all three children started playing together for the first time when their new toy, Wobble Bear, was placed between the three of them, which felt like a freaking Christmas Miracle. Some of this stuff was facilitated by Christmas, but its mostly every day stuff that we noticed because we’re all sitting around driving each other a little nuts.

It will take more than one week of bad weather and sick children to erase the scary sadness of the last two Christmases, and an insistence on a CHRISTMAS FAMILY BRUNCH, DAMMIT are probably not going to help. But that’s a lesson in and of itself, and I will take it.

The Tiny Baby Blues

26 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Delivery, Early Days, Parenthood, pregnancy, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

complicated pregnancy, early days of parenthood, Family, iugr, multiples, NCT, NICU, NICU aftermath, Parenthood, premmies, sIUGR, twins

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

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Early Days, Parenthood, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Christmas, elf on the shelf, Parenthood, parenting, presents, Santa

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

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Early Days, Parenthood, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Addenbrookes Hospital, babies, NICU, preemies, premature babies, prematurity, Rosie Hospital, World Prematurity Day, WPD

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.

Festivals: not what they used to be.

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Last year, when I was the parent of one child, I got tickets to the Cambridge Folk Festival. The plan had been to go en famille, but my husband was out of town. I considered throwing in the towel on the whole damn weekend. I booked a babysitter, then cancelled the babysitter, then considered ringing the babysitter and begging her to come after all, then finally took a deep breath, packed my picnic blanket, hauled my kid to the festival and hoped for the best.

I was so amped up when I got home that I sent the following email to a friend:

HE WAS SUCH A CHAMP I AM SO PROUD OF HIM IT WAS AMAZING.
I saw KT Tunstall and Glen Hansard, who I wanted to see the most in the whole festival, and in between sets he said ‘more music! Music, mummy!’
You know how when you first fall in love, and it just seems like an utter miracle? That this person exists, and they’ve consented to hang out with you? Having kids is, at its best, 1000x better than that. Theo was sitting on my lap, clapping at the end of every song and saying ‘another song?’ and I felt like my heart was going to burst.
We didn’t get home until after 10, which we’ve never even attempted before. He negotiated a couple extra stories, which seemed ridiculous because it was 10:20 by that point (inhaler, tooth brushing, offering him the potty, etc.) but then he jumped off my lap and marched to bed as agreed and I haven’t heard a peep. I am just so proud of him. He held it together the entire time we were there, the entire way out (it was a little walk) and the journey home, and then he was almost exclusively perfectly behaved once we got home.

We went to the festival Friday-Sunday last year, and while nothing was quite as magical as that first day, I booked our family tickets as soon as they became available this year, ready for Round 2.

So naturally Theo didn’t give a shit about the festival this year. He loved the ice cream van, and he loved the trampoline in the children’s area, but the actual music he could take or leave.

This year, though, the festival was very good for me. Ian took Friday off work, and so I was able to cycle over to see the She Shanties on Friday – an all-female sea shanty group. I love sea shanties (really. I love them.) so I made a special trip and stood surrounded by old people and teenagers, yet all by myself. The music was lovely. Later that night, I went back and met up with friends for the Indigo Girls. I sang Galileo and Closer to Fine and the Wood Song. I felt like a person with a life.

We hauled our kids to the festival all four days, too; it wasn’t just me sneaking out for an hour at a time. Theo was indifferent to the music but I loved being there. More than that, it was significant that there was an ambitious thing we wanted to do – go to a music festival – and we had done it, with minimal drama. The girls were great, the weather was marginal, Theo was disinterested, but I had a great time, and I felt like I’d taken a significant step forward as a parent of three children.

The 90s was a golden age of music.

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I went to see the Indigo Girls a week ago, on my first evening out since the girls came home. The whole thing particularly delighted me because my first arena-rock concert, in 1997, was Lilith Fair – Jewel, Indigo Girls and Sarah McLachlan at the Marcus Amphitheatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Almost exactly twenty years later, I went to see the Indigo Girls again. The experience sparked a major 90s lady music kick: I have been listening to Lisa Loeb, Four Non Blondes, and a whole bunch of other gems in the week since (sidenote: I am shocked/appalled at how many lyrics I remember. When I told my husband, he said ‘have you met you? of course you remember that shit’).

There is one thing that has made the Nostalgia Tour 100% better: my daughters seem to love it. They burbled their way through Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever’ (not a good song, by the way, but very good for singing to babies). We did three rousing rounds of Dixie Chicks’ ‘Wide Open Spaces,’ which will give any parent of daughters some Feels. I sat on the floor in front of their bouncy seats and sag the chorus with gusto. And also with jazz hands.

But the song that sealed the deal for me was ‘Wonder,’ by Natalie Merchant. The song was released in 1995, when I was 12 years old, on Tigerlily – one of the first CDs I owned (I didn’t remember that until I looked at the Wikipedia page, and the green and orange CD case brought it back to me immediately).

I’ve had a lot of anxiety about my daughters’ development, because preemies are at an elevated risk for behavioral and developmental disorders (the most likely are autism spectrum disorder and ADHD). Now, with the girls having hit all their milestones at nearly-four-months adjusted, I have relaxed substantially. But (as with any baby), there are no guarantees, and we will know when we know. To say that I have relaxed is more a comment on how tightly wound I was in their early days than how easy-breezy I am now. No one wants their kids to face a struggle.

And so in my heightened emotional state, Natalie Merchant gave me enormous comfort. The lyric ‘know this child will be gifted/with love, with patience and with faith,’ sung to a smiling Daphne on a Saturday morning as we danced around the kitchen, was more reassuring to me than any blog post or statistic I’ve read yet. She’s doing great, you guys. She rolled over today. And love, patience and faith – well, we aren’t the most patient household, but we have love and faith down. It feels like its going to be ok.

 

Welcome to the (Crummy) Club

27 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Not premature babies – just babies.


A couple days ago I was walking over the cycle bridge near the Cambridge Rail Station with both girls when I passed a lanky, heavily tattooed man in his early twenties talking on his mobile phone. As I went by I heard the words ‘they’ve got her on a ventilator, so she won’t have breathing problems when she’s older.’

A few meters past the man, I stopped and did an awkward two step, then turned around and interrupted him.

‘I’m so sorry to interrupt,’ I said. ‘Do you have premature babies?’

‘I do,’ he said, undoubtedly alarmed that he was now being accosted by suburban looking mummies.

‘These guys were 31 weekers,’ I said, eager to be helpful.

‘Mine are 24.’

And this was the moment where I screwed up. I have the world’s worst poker face, and I knew my alarm and concern was washing over my face. ‘They’re doing well,’ he assured me, and I felt more like an asshole with each passing moment.

‘That’s so good.’ I said. ‘Good luck.’ And I moved on, leaving him to his phone call.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot in the last couple days, for a couple reasons: first, I hope those babies are ok. I have thought about that guy, and his partner, sitting next to those babies’ incubators and watching the monitors the way I did. I have also thought about the ways in which I could have done better. Most of all, I wish I hadn’t put him in the position of having to reassure a stranger. That’s the thing I had dwelt on: I wanted to be helpful but I’m pretty sure I failed. But here is what I would have told him, had I done it right:

From the moment I found out, at about 16 weeks pregnant, that we were facing a particularly difficult pregnancy (even by twin standards) and that the girls would have a tough start, I hunted down success stories on th internet – and there are a surprising number, because the internet is a big place and people like to share happy stories. I joined Facebook groups, read memoirs and blogs, and even managed to talk to an incredibly kind mum of triplets, one of whom was born at 530 grams at 31 weeks and now, age 4, is cognitively just fine: bilingual and counting to 100. Someone told me yesterday about 22 weekers, now 3.5, who show no trace of prematurity.

I know, of course, that my case-study approach has limits. And I also know that my girls are still very much at risk, relative to the general population, of developmental and attention disorders. I relax a little with every passing development: Daphne started blowing raspberries a couple days ago, which hardly makes her a genius, but does seem to indicate that she’s learning and processing as she should. It’s a linguistic development.

Despite my own emotional post-NICU progress, I am still occasionally dismissive of people who had a more straightforward experience – when I encounter people who say ‘baby boy was FINALLY able to come home after two weeks in the NICU, ten days after his sister,’ my first visceral reaction is to blow a raspberry of my own. ‘You have no idea,’ I think – but of course, what do I know? A lot can happen in two weeks in the NICU.

So, to the Dad of Twenty Four Weekers: it is so hard, but you and your partner are not alone. You and I are reluctant members of a special tribe, the NICU Long-Termers. It is a larger group than I ever imagined before I became a part of it, and that is a good thing: we live in a world with many people born prematurely, who weighed less than a bag of sugar at birth but now lead rich, healthy lives: they are bike mechanics or cab drivers or Stevie Wonder, to name a few examples I came across shuttling back and forth to the hospital (I read about Stevie Wonder but I met the first two).

Someday soon, your premature baby will just be a baby, but in the meantime, I know something about what you’re going through, and it sucks, and I’m sorry. I hope your babies are okay, and I hope you are too.

Tandem Feeding is Weird

17 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

After a rocky start, I breastfed my first kid for way longer than I ever intended. I thought I might make it to six months; then I thought, I will definitely be done at a year.

In the end, it was Theo who decided he was done: at 16 months, I went away for a few days. When I came back, I lifted up my shirt and Theo reached up and put it back down, like he was pulling down a blind. I tried a few more times, and the same thing happened. And that was it – that was the end of breastfeeding.

I’m lucky it happened that way, because breastfeeding was wonderful for me, but I definitely didn’t want to be the person still boobing her pre-schooler, and I goggled when women in my acquaintance said they hoped to cut their kids off by age three (because, I mean, to each their own. But that’s a whole lot of breastfeeding. No thank you).

This time around, both girls came out ready to go – some of my first interactions with each girl involved them smacking their mouths against my collarbone, desperate to get going. Babies don’t develop a coordinated suck-swallow-breathe reflex until about 34 weeks, and then our hospital has thresholds for how self-sufficient they have to be (high flow level 4 or below, to be specific). So I didn’t start the girls until a few weeks later, and then, the hospital deliberately staggered their feeds so I could do them sequentially.

I vividly remember my first time tandem feeding (I mean, it was only a few months ago). I had a Boppy pillow, which allowed me to hold both girls, each of whom still only weighed about 4 lbs (Fiona more, Daphne less). Once I got Fiona started, a nurse with a trendy brown bob plopped Daphne down and kind of shoved her into me while I adjusted the nipple shield (damn nipple shields) and got her latched. And then we were off.

In the hospital, I usually used the Boppy across my stomach but didn’t worry about any type of nursing cover or modesty shield – in part because tandem feeding was enough of a challenge, and in part because our corner cubicle gave me enough privacy (and anyway, everyone there had seen plenty of breastfeeding). The NICU had folding screens that they could set up for shyer parents; one woman (well, girl, really) set up a breastfeeding fortress every time she nursed her daughter. I just went for it.

Since coming home, though, I have struggled a bit more. My Peanut & Piglet nursing pillow – a formidable piece of infrastructure I have taken to calling ‘the baby shelf’ – has been a lifesaver. But feeding twins is both time- and space-consuming, which makes leaving the house a different proposition altogether.. The parents’ room at John Lewis – which is a lifesaver for many other new parents – has small vinyl chairs that do not accommodate two hungry babies (it is also windowless and smells like poo, so there’s that). I have not figured out a way to feed the girls that does not involve a substantial amount of boob exposure, a couch, and at least 45 minutes of sitting.

The other day, hunched over to feed the girls in bed, one baby head balanced precariously on my thigh, I googled ‘Tandem Breastfeeding’ to see if I was missing a trick. Surely there is a better way – a way that would allow me to leave the house for more than three hours at a time. Right?

There is not a better way.

What I found is that there is a vibrant subculture of women who breastfeed their babies and their kindergarteners simultaneously, and occasionally take professional photos of themselves and their children dressed as wood nymphs with heavy mood lighting. There was not a lot of practical advice for women who want to breastfeed twins without flashing the barista or looking like an image National Geographic rejected for being too sloppy and pathetic.

My google search was ultimately a little frustrating. I am pro-breastfeeding – its been great for my family – but I don’t really feel like a FUCK YEAH BREASTFEEDING type (also, hopefully it goes without saying, Fed is Best). I’m FYB-adjacent. And as such, looking through the images, I felt a little discouraged. I want to breastfeed, but I don’t want it to be a Whole Big Thing every time I try to feed my kids outside the house.

So this is the reality I’ve reluctantly come to accept: there ain’t no way to feed two kids in public without a degree of public spectacle.

Tandem breastfeeding is weird. That is a fact.

 

← Older posts

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 172 other subscribers

Adventure or Snacks?

  • babies
  • Delivery
  • Early Days
  • Parenthood
  • pregnancy
  • Snacks
  • Uncategorized

Click me, big boy!

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Blogroll

  • TAMBA
  • Twinny Life

TwitRoll

  • RT @mollyfleck: Scenes from Chicago’s premier car-free space during my bike commute this morning 🙃 https://t.co/2XKGIQPZtO 3 months ago
  • .@DivvyBikes I spent 20 minutes looking for a dock in the Loop this morning. When I finally left the Loop to dock,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 8 months ago
  • RT @WorldBollard: Bollards save lives AND bring immense joy and happiness to the world. #WorldBollardAssociation https://t.co/4IjwPZS1Nb 8 months ago
  • RT @kathleen_belew: One historian of abortion argues that abortion stays at pretty much the same rate per capita over time whether it's leg… 9 months ago
  • I've supported this project as a consultant since I started at Sam Schwartz and I'm so excited to see it go live. C… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 9 months ago

pinterest!

Follow Me on Pinterest

The Gist

adventure Amsterdam architecture art babies baking Bath Beer Belgium book review books breastfeeding Brussels Cambridge Christmas Cornwall cream tea cupcakes design England entertainment Family feminism food football Freiburg friends Germany Ghent Great British Summer high risk pregnancy hiking historic architecture history holiday holidays identical twins internet memes Kings College London Made In Chelsea media Mill Road movies multiples My Friend Jaime my friend kamilla My Friend Lauren nature NICU outdoors Oxford Parenthood parenting photography preemies pregnancy premature premature babies pubs rock climbing snacks summer the Peak District This American Life Toronto travel twins UK urban planning vacation Valencia Wales walking yoga

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • snacks & adventure
    • Join 172 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • snacks & adventure
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...