No prizes for guessing that my preferred coping technique is information gathering. Buying books was the first thing that really made me feel pregnant, a bit like when you start planning a holiday to somewhere you’ve never been before. Like most people, I prefer the books that tell me what I want to hear, so I haven’t read anything by Gina Ford or any of the baby trainers, because our library doesn’t seem to stock them, and I can’t bring myself to buy them.
So, what have we got?
The NHS Pregnancy book
This is a freebie that comes in the big wallet full of marketing material that they give you, when you register your pregnancy with your GP. It covers everything, but not in great depth. Apparently you get another book when you take the baby home from hospital, and probably another wallet full of straight-to-recycling adverts from Bounty.
Child Care & Health for Nursery Nurses
Picked up for a quid in a charity shop, because I thought it might have some useful stuff about chicken pox etc in it. A preliminary glance suggests that it is full of old-fangled nonsense about not letting your baby twist you round your little finger, and blah blah blah.
The essential Dr Miriam Stoppard book
Lovely hardback full of photographs and diagrams, with lots of stage-by-stage stuff and only a few silly contradictions about sharing your emotions with your growing baby. On the whole, probably not a necessary purchase; all of this is available online, for example from the excellent BabyCentre website, which has a nice pregnancy calendar and weekly emails telling you which fruit we’re comparing the size of the baby with this week.
What To Expect When You’re Expecting and What To Expect The First Year
Two very different books. WTEWYE is very good indeed. Packed with information, mostly presented in a question/answer format, and does exactly what it says on the tin. This guide originated in America, but to some extent it has been adapted for a UK readership. The only thing I didn’t like was the highly prescriptive pregnancy diet, but that’s because I can’t get on with any kind of prescriptive diet, and have found it hard enough just cutting out the blue cheese.
WTETFY, on the other hand, is just wrongheaded. I put it down when I got to the section on Why you should supplement with formula milk, which astonished me. When I went back to it, it continued in the same sort of annoying vein, with lots of advice about the blah blah blah stuff. Happily, I bought this for £2 at an NCT sale; I’m in two minds about whether to resell it at the next one, or burn it.
Vicki Iovine’s Best Friend’s Guide to Pregnancy
Borrowed from my pregnancy guru Lisa, this is a light-hearted book which I only skimmed through. I might well have read it cover to cover if I’d had it earlier in the pregnancy, although I found the style a little off-putting.
So That’s What They’re For, by Janet Tamaro
Recommended by Lisa, this is an excellent book, and I would strongly advise you to read it or buy it for all your pregnant friends. Very american, and you just have to get over that [sorry american readers, it's just a style thing]. Lots of information about the benefits and the mechanics of breastfeeding; a really, really good book.
When Your Baby Cries, by Deborah Jackson
This is a good little paperback full of ways to cope with and minimise crying; highly recommended because what it says makes so much sense, and there’s none of this just walk away rubbish.
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth, by Henci Goer
Another one borrowed from Lisa, which I will be taking with me when I go into hospital, just in case I need to defend my reluctance to be intervened. This book covers caesarian sections, induction, episiotomy, ventouse and forceps deliveries – and why these are so often unnecessary, and how studies do NOT demonstrate a significantly better outcome where intervention takes place. It’s really good. If you want a natural childbirth, then you need this book.
The Blokes’ Guide to Pregnancy, by Jon Smith
Pete says it’s light-hearted but informative. I think it’s rather sad that all the tomes are aimed at women, and men just get the Nick Hornby-esque paperbacks.
I also got a Sheila Kitzinger book out of the library last week; something about the first year after birth. It’s beautifully written and easy to read, and although it does rather present a doom-and-gloom scenario, does at least give you lots of tips for coping. I’d be interested to know if anyone has had a look at her Grandmothers book.
A big fat Sears book arrived from Amazon in the last few days. It is some sort of manual for the first two years, and I’m slowly ploughing through it. It’s all about attachment parenting, which is a system that appeals to me very much, being about as far from the evil Ferberism as it is possible to get.
I anticipate your eye-rolling in advance, but believe me, nine months is a long time, and reading about it all is helpful in so many ways. For one thing, our midwife has been exceptionally uninformative, and as the classes didn’t start until well into the third trimester, there were many many things that I needed to find out for myself. It’s also all about anticipation, passing the time without too much future-based daydreaming, which is something that the expectant parent can’t really afford to do. There are lots of other books out there as well, and some people might actually want to train their babies like little pavlovian dogs, in which case there are books by Gina Ford and Tracy Hogg, which have been written especially for you.
I rather like being described as a guru!
Great post, I”m a fan of all of these books (that I know something about). There are a lot of other good books by Dr. Sears if you like that one.
On walking away from a crying baby:
on the whole I agree with your general sentiment about walking away from a crying baby – the baby is usually crying for a reason and, if you are able to identify the reason, you should try to do something to put it right.
However, there are a couple of instances when I think it is appropriate to walk away:
the baby has been crying for ages. You and your partner are at the end of your tether. You’ve tried offering food, changing nappy, playing, rocking, singing, looking for sore bits, Calpol – everything you can think of, all to no avail. At this point, I really recommend that you both put the baby in the cot, shut the door, go downstairs and have a cup of tea and a Digestive. These moments usually occur at 4am when you are delirious with sleep deprivation. We found that we’d start snarling at each other, at Tom, at the cats, at just about anything or anybody. Never under-estimate the restorative power of five minutes peace with a decent cuppa – nothing adverse will happen to the baby if it yells its head off for five minutes on his/her own. You will return to the fray refreshed and better able to cope. This was one of our major coping strategies during the "dark days" (which occur when all your friends have stopped visiting because they’ve met the baby once and they now want to leave you alone; the baby is now growing rapidly and has learnt how to use his lungs and you’ve had three weeks of reduced sleep). If we hadn’t had this strategy, the local police would probably still be mopping up the blood.
the baby that won’t switch off. Tom is now at a stage when he is hyper-curious. He doesn’t want to miss anything at all – a passing bird, a swish of the cat’s tail, Dad sneezing. These are all mundane to us, but to him they are new and exciting – and it’s brilliant to watch and see all this development going on. However, because he doesn’t want to miss anything, getting him to go to sleep can be really difficult. So we are now employing a walk-away strategy and it seems to work. Tom gets so tired from his exertions and concentration that he starts crying. You can see in his face how tired he is – enormous bags under the eyes, grumpy demeanour. The problem is, if we stay with him when he is crying, he just wants to yell and see what we are doing in case he misses anything. So we now make him comfortable and then remove the distractions by leaving the room – usually, he falls asleep within five minutes and, once asleep, won’t wake for anything (I dropped something really noisily next to him the other day – not a twitch). If he doesn’t sleep, then we try soothing him for a minute, then leave him again. If that doesn’t work at the second attempt, then we’ve missed something and start going through the checklist (food, hot/cold, sore, nappy, etc.).
I know some of these books advocate a cry-to-sleep method. I don’t think that is right – you have to identify the reason for crying and deal with it. But you also have to preserve your own sanity.
ooo! nifty box thingies!
Gosh, I didn’t know about those. They are nifty, aren’t they? Funny the things Pete does to my site when I’m not looking.
You interpret me at the extreme, as usual Graybo, but it’s my fault; I don’t know how to explain myself without sounding totally black and white about it, but the style I’m rejecting is the one advocated by my mother, whereby any crying that isn’t instantly appeased must therefore be the baby trying to manipulate me, and so I must teach it not to cry by ignoring it most of the time. I don’t know much about babies yet, but I feel doubtful that something so unformed and inexperienced can master the art of manipulation to this extent. Unless my mother teaches it, of course…
ooo no, I wasn’t interpreting you as extreme at all. I was, in a poorly-worded way, agreeing with you. And, at the same time, offering that "helpful advice" that parents-to-be and new parents hate. Damn – it’s an easy trap to fall into.