My Lockdown In One Vid

I have been on an inadvertent posting hiaitus during the (first) COVID-19 UK lockdown of 2020, for the following reasons:

1. Two toddlers, nowhere to take them, no childcare, no family nearby. We have been ON OUR KNEES EXHAUSTED
2. As a healthcare professional I have been going to work throughout. Work has been an ever-changing learning curve, both rewarding and intensely draining.
3. The toddlers’ push-back to all this change (and from their POV, inexplicable monotony) has been later and later bedtimes. 🙈

Hence, no writing. Or nothing of much coherence, anyway!

But now we’re well into the (first) easing of lockdown, my brain is starting to move out of survival mode, and I’m feeling a desire to jot down some of this strange brush with post-apocalyptic parenthood. So there may be a few more posts coming soon.

For now though, here’s my lockdown experience summarised in under 30 seconds:

Weaning ABC part 3. Compromise

Final chapter in my ABC of Weaning:

• A. Allergy
• B. Baby Led Weaning
• C. Compromise

[NOTE- written before coronavirus hit, and wow does it show! Stay safe you guys.]

I wrote the first two Weaning ABC posts for a friend with twins 3 months younger than mine, so I was trying to be encouraging that BLW is totally doable with two. Rereading now I’m out of the haze of the first year, I’m worried they come off somewhat preachy. If so, I AM SO SORRY.

I generally try not to be a knob, and contributing to the preachy parental one-upmanship (one-upmumship??) culture is a knobish thing to do. I certainly don’t want anyone to feel rubbish about their weaning choices: FFS we’ve all got to teach them to eat, and there really is no right way. Aspirational instagrams are all very well, but the reality is that time and energy are in short supply in most parents’ lives. There has to be a compromise between lovingly prepared and speedily convenient: and that is no bad thing.  

Boob Minefield: The Reality of Breastfeeding A Newborn

“Some women can breastfeed several children without ever feeling let-down, whereas others feel let-down every time they pick up their baby.”

They’re talking about the “let down”, ie the tingly feeling some women get when the milk starts flowing through their boobs in response to their baby sucking (or indeed, in response to a variety of stimuli eg clothes, a passing baby’s shriek, a particularly heartstring-tugging instagram…), and yet I can’t help but feel the statement stands for breastfeeding as a whole, really.

Top 5 most irritating things about… breastfeeding

Breastfeeding is brilliant and all, full of benefits, but also undeniably hard work. Even once you’ve got through the first few gruelling weeks, when you’re confident it should be plain sailing, it often just… isn’t. Which is incredibly irritating, as on an evolutionary level this is the baby’s ONE JOB. And on a practical level, you’d think doing something approximately a million times per day since birth would make a 7-month old pretty damn good at it; and then something like a heatwave or a leap or weaning happens, and it’s back to square one.

Silver boobies 🥈🥈

So I made it to 6 months of breastfeeding twins!

It’s been a road with a few twists and turns… read on if breastfeeding journeys interest or intrigue you!

1-pot 10-minute SOS Veggie Breakfast

Save Our Stomachs! We are living on coffee and catnaps at the moment… it’s been 3 weeks now of the babies sleeping like newborns i.e. NOT A LOT AT NIGHT. When they do sleep, they take it in turns, so there’s pretty much always one baby on the go.

Time and energy for food prep is in short supply, so I’m falling back on some old favourites. This breakfast/lunch/saviour meal takes 10 minutes, all in. It is protein packed, healthy, hearty vegetarian fare. And it tastes so good.

#4monthsleepregression

Do they sleep?

Why yes: but only on me. 😬

It wasn’t always like this. They are now 22 weeks old, which puts them right in the middle of the tricky (hellish) period known as the “4-month sleep regression”.

Double-F Flapjack

In the early weeks of learning to feed my twins, I was breastfeeding them both every 2 hours, including overnight, as well as giving top-up bottles, and expressing, every 3-4 hours.

Each night felt like a surreal marathon running parallel with the time when I should have been being rejuvenated. By 6am each day I would already be a wreck. These flapjacks helped. A lot.