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This shit is hard.

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Early Days, Parenthood

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babies, identical twins, Parenthood, parenting, twins

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.

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World Prematurity Day 2017: Reflections

28 Tuesday Nov 2017

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

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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.

Prematurity on TV: Black-ish Season Finale

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in Delivery, Early Days

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babies, black-ish, high risk pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, preemies, preemies in the media, pregnancy, pregnancy in the media, scary pregnancy, television

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

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Early Days, Parenthood

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babies, community, mush, Mushapp, Parenthood, tinder

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.

Two babies at the same motherf*cking time.

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in babies, Early Days

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babies, high risk pregnancy, pregnancy, pregnancy test, twins, ultrasound

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.

Tips on Surviving the NICU

09 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

babies, breastfeeding, high risk pregnancy, hospital, NICU, parents, preemies, pregnancy, premature, premature babies, self-care

Daphne getting moved into special care!


So first of all, my post on do’s and don’ts for supporting families in the NICU has resulted in a few really sweet but totally unnecessary apologies. People took amazing care of us, and when missteps were made, it was always with the best of intentions. It was not at all my intention to make anyone feel guilty because my overriding sentiment is that people were amazingly kind and generous with us during the ten weeks we spent in the NICU. Which is particularly worth mentioning because that sort of emotional support is hard to sustain for months on end.

Which brings me here. I asked my husband for tips on the NICU and he said ‘Don’t.’

Spot on advice, I have to say.

I was lucky (as these things go) in that I knew I was facing a long time with babies in the hospital. When they were born, they were pretty fetal. I found it relatively easy to leave because it was so obvious that they couldn’t come home. It was later, when they looked and acted like regular babies and we had been in the home stretch for weeks that I began to really ache to have them home.

I prepped for the NICU by reading Alexa Stevenson, who wrote the book ‘Half Baked‘ and also gave a useful interview at Alphamom.com (I actually read the book twice – once while pregnant and once while in the NICU). I also listened to a really lovely interview with Rob Huebel on Longest Shortest Time, a parenting podcast that has hit some really high highs in the course of its five year (?) run.

Forty percent of NICU parents have some sort of PTSD (my coping strategy is…well, this). Here are the things that helped me (worth noting: I’m an urban planner, not a medical professional, so all the medical stuff in here I either picked up in NICU or googled. I’m pretty sure its accurate, but…).

  1. SLEEP. This one is pretty obvious, but it bears repeating, because if you have just given birth you have Hormones, and you might be expressing, and you might still be staying in the hospital or a place that isn’t home, and you are going through something that is just ridiculously stressful – but sleep (and self-care in general) is pretty critical.
  2. Express breastmilk (this one is for the birthing parent, obviously). Fed is best – I’m not hating on formula per se – but babies that receive milk in the NICU are less likely to develop infections. Infections are the worst. They can set your baby back weeks, and in the worst case scenario they can be fatal. Furthermore, breast milk is medicine. Some parents won’t even be able to hold their babies, but this is something you can do that is concrete and incredibly useful to your child. Its also good for women: it reduces the incidence of post partum depression; it burns calories and helps shrink your uterus; breastfeeding (if/when you get there) releases oxytocin and helps with bonding. There’s another weird thing about pumping, though, that I didn’t expect: most of the socialising I did with other parents, I did in the expressing room. I didn’t make any lifelong friends, but I did make some Facebook friends, and I was grateful for the interaction with people who knew what I was going through. Our hospital had a small room with three little cubicles separated by sheets, and while I often listened to podcasts or watched shows on my phone, I would occasionally chat with other women through the curtains. I suspect American hospitals don’t have pumping rooms (because babies have rooms rather than bays), so this may not be relevant to you.  But my point is, there is value in NICU solidarity, and there will always be ‘long termers’ both ahead and behind you. Its not a community anyone wants to be part of, but knowing other parents on the ward is certainly useful.
  3. Don’t be afraid to advocate for your baby, or to ask questions of the staff. My girls were on high-flow oxygen forever. FOREVER. They kept taking Fiona off high-flow, only for her oxygenation to dip into marginal territory. Her monitors would alarm on and off for an hour and then they would hook her back up. Finally, one day, as they prepared to turn her machine back on, I said ‘could we try low flow?’ (low flow is what you think of when you hear someone is on oxygen – tiny little nasal prongs that hook over the ears). Low flow is better because its easier on their lungs, it makes them much easier to handle (better for parent cuddles) and, on our NICU, it meant they could be moved into Special Care, which was quieter and calmer and less stressful for everyone. Anyway. Fiona killed it on low-flow. And then, a couple weeks later, almost the exact same thing happened with Daphne, except this time I spoke up earlier. The staff know what they’re doing, but you know your child best.
  4. If you live far away, or are unable to spend time at the hospital, ask if there are ‘cuddle clubs.’ Babies benefit from being held – they gain weight more quickly; their blood oxygenation goes up; and their breathing rate can slow too. A cuddle club is a program where volunteers hang out with a baby for a couple hours – the same way a parent would. The nurses will hold babies when they can, but it never hurts to ask for more.
  5. You can always call the NICU. I tried to call when I was pumping, or before I went to bed at night. The reports got less detailed as the girls got bigger and healthier – after Fiona moved into Special Care, I called and the nurse was like ‘…yeah, she’s fine. She’s settled and sleeping.’ and that’s when I realised we had entered a new phase of the NICU journey. But it meant that I never went to sleep worrying that I was missing something, and it also meant that I knew who the nurses were, and they recognised me as well. Once they started breastfeeding, I called to let the nurses know I was coming, and that was really helpful for the staff. Its also THE WORST when you show up to breastfeed your kid, only to realise you’re a little late and they’ve just been given a feed by the staff. The staff hate it too.
  6. Please please please take care of yourself (see: SLEEP). Eat real food, seek help if you need it (most hospitals offer grief counseling and/or have counselors on the NICU, which you may as well use, since its there and you’re clearly going through some stuff)(even if you don’t, make allies in the NICU. I was so grateful for a lot of the staff, but particularly the breastfeeding consultant and speech and language therapist, both of whom had more flexible schedules than the rest of the staff and were more available to answer questions and help  me chart a path through the NICU).
  7. Get some fresh air. NICUs are hermetically sealed so if its gorgeous outside, take a walk. In fact, unless its a torrential downpour or subzero degrees (Fahrenheit), I would suggest spending some time outside.
  8. Accept help when it is offered, and remember life is long, and you can reciprocate later. People want to help, so let them.

It turns out I had to really curb my instinct to write a LOT about boobs, so I think I’ll write more about that next time…? Lucky you.

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