Last night Conrad woke up at 2am, and for the first time I actually managed to help him settle again by just cuddling and singing to him. It was a close call, though – he was crying so I picked him up, but he was thrashing about in my arms and I had a hard time trying to avoid him clonking himself on the corner of my glasses. I sang a lullaby to him anyway, then after a couple of verses I gave up and put him back in his cot in order to go sort a bottle out. But as he was lying down again, Conrad stopped crying, started moaning a bit and then drifting back to sleep… I held fire on the bottle and soon he was snoozing away and slept until morning. So it can be done – it’s not that he’s actually hungry anymore…<\/p>\n
I took Conrad to the health visitor weighing clinic in the afternoon, which I do once a month to keep a log of his physical growth. But it wasn’t a great experience and I’m seriously wondering whether I should go back. Conrad was a bit heavy on the scales, something I would expect as he’s been feeding during the night and therefore drunk excess milk – something that will sort itself out once he starts sleeping through without night feeds, so I’m not worried. But the health visitor nurse, who weighed him, started talking about childhood obesity and ‘that’s not the way we want to go, is it?’. And then she started grilling me about his diet. As it is, I’m sure Conrad is at no risk of of becoming obese whatsoever: he eats very healthy home-cooked food and it’s not like I have or will start giving him fast food, sweets or cakes anytime soon…<\/p>\n
The last few months I have gone to the clinic, I have every time been given lots of advice I’ve not asked for or been questioned in detail about what I feed Conrad, and felt like I’ve had to defend myself. There’s no need for that. Any advice they’ve given has been basic and thereby unnecessary (I’ve usually tried it before, with Conrad’s sister, so would have known to try it already, or it’s not applicable) and most of the time I’m sure I know a great deal more than them about how to give a vegetarian baby a good, well-balanced diet. (The exception is Noreen, who was a good support in the early days when I was struggling to get Conrad to breastfeed.)<\/p>\n
Regarding Conrad not sleeping through the night, she also asked: ‘Does he get enough attention during the day?’, as apparently babies who do not can try to compensate for this by waking and crying at night. I didn’t know what to say to this. (Apart from ‘of course’.) And on the way home, I’m sorry to say, I cried. How much further off the mark could she possibly be? And how useful can advice be if the person giving it really doesn’t know anything about you or your baby?<\/p>\n
Apart from logging Conrad’s progress in weight for the baby book, there’s not really any reason to go to the health visitor clinic. Maybe I should come up with a fun activity for Conrad and me to do together on a Wednesday instead – something sociable that we can both enjoy.<\/p>\n
Gabriella<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night Conrad woke up at 2am, and for the first time I actually managed to help him settle again by just cuddling and singing to him. It was a close call, though – he was crying so I picked him up, but he was thrashing about in my arms and I had a hard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianandgabriella.co.uk\/boyblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}