A month of Hazel

How can this be possible? Hazel a month old already?!

The last 30 days have seemed to come and go so quickly that I feel I must have missed a couple of weeks somewhere along the way. I think I have experienced every single emotion over the weeks from highest of highs to lowest of lows.

Life before Hazel seems a distant memory each and every day as she gets older I love her even more. I thought I was prepared to have a baby, people say your life changes but to me that last part never really sunk in….how could life change that much? I don’t think anyone can really be prepared for how much time and attention a baby needs, once again in my delusional mind all I thought a newborn baby would do is sleep the majority of the time only waking occasionally to feed and to be changed – yes you can laugh, I have since had a reality check

Bringing Hazel home was a weird feeling, bringing her inside our home was an even weirder feeling, she was asleep in her capsule – so what were we meant to do with her now? Do we leave her in the capsule and where do we put the capsule? We settled for the dinning room table and proceeded to check on her every minute just to make sure she was ok and we waited for her to wake.

The first couple of weeks were a major adjustment to me, no longer were my needs and wants a priority I now had to put the needs and wants of Hazels before mine for me this was tough, I felt like I no longer existed, when was it my time?? I was just the milk machine and if I wasn’t feeding her she was crying, I didn’t think I was cut out to be a parent - some people just have that maternal instinct and I was yet to find mine. I didn’t like being a parent at all, the thought of her waking up use to make me cringe because she would cry and I had no idea what she wanted, I was struggling with breastfeeding - I had the milk, she had no problem attaching and sucking I just couldn’t handle not knowing how much milk she was getting –was that why she was crying because she wasn’t getting enough milk? I also didn’t enjoy breastfeeding and the time it took up, I didn’t like sitting there for what felt like hours on end. Bottle feeding seemed to be the answer for me so I could control something and be sure that she wasn’t hungry and make the feeding process quicker that also meant Keegan could help with the feeding and Hazel didn’t need to be attached to me 24/7. I started to express and bottle feed her what I had and top up with what ever I was missing. A midwife came and checked on me at home and I told her my concerns about the feeding and she told me to have another go now that Hazel was a bit older. I started fully breastfeeding Hazel again and everything seemed to be going ok, I still expressed some milk to keep as back up in case I was out and didn’t want to feed in public or just wanted a rest from her on the boob. Everything was going fine until she was about 3 weeks old and she was really hard to settle I couldn’t get her to sleep or sleep for a long period of time during the day the thoughts that maybe my breast milk wasn’t cutting it again crept into my mind. I fed her by the bottle and she scoffed the 60ml up easily and wanted more. No longer was she drinking 60ml per feed now she wanted the 120ml and more. To ease my mind that Hazel is getting enough milk I now feed her with a mixture of both breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Breastfeeding solely wasn’t for me. I like to know how much she is consuming but I also didn’t want to express to feed her everyday. I feed her by the bottle before she has her big sleeps and by the breast when she is snacking during the day and this seems to be working for us. Keegan is able to help out when he comes home and usually feeds her the last bottle before bed and this gives him some time with Hazel.

One area we are really lucky with is Hazel sleeping at night. I only need to get up once during the night as Hazel has always seemed to sleep 6 or more hours in a row. We tend to put her to bed at 9:30pm and she generally wakes up around 4am. Occasionally early on she might of woken up at 3am but more often then not now it is closer to 5am. I feel so lucky that I am able to get a decent chunk of sleep at night, I could only imagine how crazy I would be if I was also sleep deprived. With the good sleeping at night comes with a downside – Hazel is a bit scatty sleeping during the day. She is currently going through a phase (well I hope it is a phase) where she wont sleep in the cot during the day, put her in the pram and go for a walk or go somewhere in the car and bam she is sound asleep. I was getting a bit worried about this because I didn’t want to start a bad habit of her only being able to sleep in her capsule, but each day I work on her going to sleep in her cot and today I succeeded for 2 whole hours. I’ve given up on trying to work Hazel out – the one minute I think I know what’s going on then she changes the story but I have worked out that babies do as they please like this phase she is going through only sleeping in the capsule will go as quickly as it came (I hope) for the most part she is a good little sleeper and are very fortunate of that.

My days seem to go so quickly now, I hardly have time to do the most simplest of things like hang washing out or have a shower, every job I do has to be carefully calculated around Hazel's eating and sleeping schedule, sometimes having lunch seems like an impossible feat. I now wonder what did I ever do with all my time before Hazel! The one good thing is now I can do everything twice as quick and most things one handed, I'm sure these new skills will come in very handy during the rest of my life.

I’m not ashamed to admit that early on there where days that I just cried my eyes out for no reason at all or over the most stupid of things, I constantly doubted myself as a parent and my capabilities of looking after a baby, there where even times when I wished I never had a baby but as each day comes and goes I settle into the role of being a mum, each day gets easier and I’m at the point now where I think I know what I am doing and beginning to enjoy Hazel as a baby. She seems to be growing before my eyes, I don’t think she looks like a little newborn baby anymore she is so alert and bright eyed she loves looking at the world. I love waking up in the mornings getting little smiles out of her on her cheeky face, she looks at me in the eyes like she knows who I am and enjoys just cuddling. Hazel seems to be a happy and content baby and I’ve grown to be a happy and content mum. My maternal instincts are finally kicking in and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else now.