My take on the postnatal period and early years! How I kept positive and coped with three under three...

This week we’re talking all about my experience with the postnatal period and early years, and how I coped with three under three!

I’ve been contacted directly to discuss this, and have received a few questions along the same vein from others, so I thought I’d try to cover as much as I could on my journey in this blog post and video.

First up, it’s important for me to say that I am not an expert, and that if you are feeling under the weather or you are struggling in any way, you should reach out for help. Here’s a list of some wonderful companies that can lend you a hand, but do remember that your local doctors surgery will be able to help you too. Just talk to somebody.

Family Lives - https://www.familylives.org.uk/

Tommys - https://www.tommys.org/

NCT - https://www.nct.org.uk/

Sigh and I had three children in two and a half years. I know, it was mayhem! We really struggled to conceive our eldest Archie, but once he was here the other two came much quicker than anticipated!

Sigh is an older dad and he longed for children, as did I. He is brilliant, amazing and really supportive, but when the children were all babies he wasn’t hands on. He was however incredibly supportive of me, brilliant at cooking and keeping me sustained. He’s incredible with the children now.

This brings me to my first point.

SUPPORT SYSTEMS

I was pregnant with Archie when we moved to Sussex. I had absolutely no-one here, no friends, no family. I was commuting every day to London up until my maternity leave.

To say it was a lonely period would be an understatement! That was until I enrolled in two antenatal classes, one in London and one down here in Sussex that I found through my new local doctor’s surgery. The antenatal group in Sussex was absolutely life-changing!

The people that I met in that group where all going through fundamentally the same process as me, so I wasn’t alone in that anymore and had fellow travellers on the same path! They were such a diverse group of wonderful people, and many of them have become lifelong friends to me. If you are feeling isolated or alone, I cannot more highly recommend that you call your doctors surgery as soon as possible and get yourself enrolled in those classes. Doctors surgeries have amazing support networks for parents pre-birth and post-birth, please do get in touch with them.

Archie was very ill a few weeks after he was born, and had to spend quite a time in intensive care. It was overwhelming and very scary, especially as having been so desperate to become a Mummy I had an idea in my head of how it should be and it wasn’t quite matching up to say the least - but having that support network there made it all the more manageable and again, I felt as though I found strength in that group. Enrolling in that antenatal class ended up being a real lifeline to me.

If you aren’t in a group, reach out to your nearest and dearest. I know we’re in a time of particular isolation and it’s not at all easy to all meet up, but give them a ring, Skype or meet for a socially distanced walk in the fresh air. Connect with people. I cannot stress this enough!

ROUTINE

There are lots of wonderful books out there, but I was advised to pick up Gina Ford’s by our paediatrician. I thought ‘Oh my god there is absolutely no WAY I am going to do this!’ but in the end, I went for it and it worked a treat.

The thing with a good routine and babies is that you can be much more confident in knowing why they’re potentially unhappy - are they crying because they’re hungry as we’re approaching our scheduled feed time, are they crying because they’re tired as we approach our lunchtime nap… this obviously evolves as the baby grows, but it particularly helped massively during the early years.

It also meant we could plan our day accordingly, tackling the jobs we needed to get done etc. Also, when you have subsequent children, you can plan when you’re going to have that special time with them so that your nurturing is well balanced!

And lastly, we knew when we ourselves would have some ‘us’ time - which again is super important!

JUGGLING MORE THAN ONE

Again as mentioned above, when you have a schedule in place you can anticipate when you’re going to be spending time with each child, which makes life so much less stressful.

I always used to make sure I had something in place to amuse and entertain one of the children whilst I was feeding the baby, so that they weren’t all clambering for attention! Have little activities in mind for your baby feeding time and the other children will look forward to doing those and hopefully leave you to concentrate on feeding.

I did make sure as each new baby was born that they weren’t in my arms all the time. I ensured I gave the older children time and attention too, and when the babies were born I actually gifted the older children a ‘present’ from them.

The first time your older child meets the baby, it’s important to hold the older child to introduce them to the baby, not the other way round! We had baby gates, playpens, Moses baskets inside playpens, you name it as at one point we did have two toddlers running around with a baby in the house too! I did have to have eyes in the back of my head for a while!

SLEEP

When my darling Coco arrived, and suffering with such a bad case of reflux, there came a point where I had to throw my hands up to Sigh and say ‘I’m struggling’. Coco in particular was a very unhappy baby bless her, she screamed almost the entire time she was awake for the first six months of her life and I wasn’t getting the sleep I needed to be the best I could be for them.

We didn’t have anybody nearby to help or call upon, so we did employ a little help for a while. We were visited by the most incredible Night Nurse, who visited a few nights a week for a couple of weeks, and completely changed the game.

She explained to us that the babies needed real, proper, undisturbed sleep through the day to reach their sleep quota. This in turn would produce a much better night. So no more sleeps during car rides or pram walks as this was not a ‘calm’ sleep - the children would always be bouncing around and not entirely still enough to enable full deep sleep. For their morning sleeps I would sit them under a shade in the garden whilst I did some gardening, and for the lunchtime sleep they would go into their bedrooms, curtains closed, quiet and undisturbed until wake up time.

GENERALLY KEEPING SANE!

Fresh air was a godsend during the juggling act of those early years for me. We used to go out every single day whatever the weather, I would wrap them up and off we would go to get that blast of fresh air. That was really essential, to get out of the home and get outside. Who cares that the house is a tip or that you haven’t got your sh*t together! Just be kind to yourself and cut yourself some slack! Leave it until later.

When we found out we were expecting our third, Gussie, we had actually just got planning permission to completely rebuild our house, and therefore had taken on an enormous building project for which I was the project manager whilst Sigh worked on his business full time. We were moving out for what we thought was going to be 6 months, so we did actually opt for a Nanny at this point. She was amazing, and stayed with us until Gus started back at school, by which point I was also back working.

There are so many different types of child care; child minders, nursery etc, and of course they all come at a cost. At that point it was sensible for us to have a Nanny who didn’t live in to help with the essentials.

I think the important thing to remember is that all of these phases are just phases, and you will get through it. We don’t have any help now and it’s fine because the children are older and they help me when and where they can. I think when you’re in the midst of that phase you can’t see when it’s going to end, but it does! You just have to hang tight, and try to enjoy it as much as possible.

I hope there has been something within this blog post that you may find useful! And good luck with your little ones!

Love,