Baby Blogging - My First Month Back At Work After A Baby!

Where do I start this post.....

I started it yesterday having just run full out across London Euston train station to jump on a 5.43pm train that arrived back in Birmingham at 7.03pm. I hoped to jump on a local train and be home some time before 7.45pm. Annabelle's bedtime is 7pm. The sprint wasn't just for the train, the sprint was to have some vague hope of seeing Annabelle's face before bed. Even if it is just for a hug. I made it, just.

I saw Annabelle at 6.17am. I didn't think I would see her at all today but due to teething the poor baby woke up at 4.15am - and was settled by Laura - then again at 5 something am and then 6.17am. At that point I abandoned the pumping I had been doing downstairs and raced up to sweep her into my arms and give her breakfast straight from the source.

It was 10 mins I didn't allow for in my morning routine but 10 mins I am glad I took. That 10 minute session will get me through the day and console me if I do miss bedtime tonight. 

After feeding was done I raced to throw my bag together, wash out the pumping equipment and get to the station for my 6.47am train. I made it. Just. And without my phone.....although I later discovered Laura had left Annabelle with my Mum to try and catch me to give me my phone - only to arrive as my train was leaving. 

Thankfully not all days start that way. 

In fact most days we are doing a good job with our new routine. Bisbee has no idea what is going on but the rest of us have found a rhythm. I have been back over a month and unlike when I wrote this post my emotions have balanced out.

So here's a quick run through of how life is running currently:

Monday - if I a lucky I have the day off as I have plenty of annual leave to use OR we are both lucky and there is a bank holiday. I am usually home for bed.

Tuesday - Annabelle goes to nursery and I usually head to London. Either I drive to the train station for the 6.37am train or Laura drops me and I get the 7.46am train. There is no middle ground. Or I work from home and Laura drops Annabelle at nursery. I try to make it back for bed.

Wednesday - is usually a lot like a Tuesday. Except I add netball in after putting Annabelle to bed. 

Thursday - my Mum looks after Annabelle and either arrives at 7.30am if I am heading to London or at 8.30am if I am at home. If I am at home I get to feed Annabelle before naps and spend the evening with her. If I have been in London I don't.

Friday - our favourite day of the working week for so many reasons. My Mum has Annabelle in the morning and Laura finishes at 2pm. I am rarely anywhere but home so get to feed Annabelle for naps and see her in the evening.

My crew picking me up on a Friday

And then we hit the weekend and want to lock the front door and do nothing expect be a family. Reality rarely allows it but we try. We can at least guarantee whatever we do we do it as a family. 

Birmingham Pride was a great event for us. It ticked a lot of boxes that make us happy:

• Family Time
• Supporting the LGBT community
• A chance to enjoy nice weather
• Spending time in our city

We have always loved Birmingham Pride - well the parade part - we have never got to the event part. The city really puts on a great show. This year we stood in a new location - Carr Street - right by a church that were handing out water and love hear sweets to the parade participants. There was space to stand and a Tesco for everything we had forgot - like water!

As the parade came down the street Annabelle would stare, intrigued by all the noise and chaos. Bisbee would prepare herself for fuss - she always does well for attention at Prides.

We just stood there and took it all in. We received occasional hugs from friend we know and photo requests from strangers - a perk of dressing up (Laura enforced :))!

Life may be busy but at least we are busy together - most of the time!

Baby Blogging: The End of Maternity Leave!

It's been 3 days of being back to work after maternity leave. My wonderful wife helped me time my return so that I had a bank holiday at the end of my first week and start of my second. So even though Annabelle and I have had 3 days apart we will have 4 days together to make up for it.

How have I felt? Well where do I start. Emotional. Pleased. Sad. Positive.

I had grand plans to be in London twice in the week to see my team but last minute the company who acquired us announced we had a company day in Bournemouth on the Wednesday. On reading the email my heart sank. I had prepared myself to head to London for the day and race back to see Annabelle at bedtime. I hadn't prepared myself to be away overnight immediately.

After a few deep breathes, a lot of tears and a period of gathering myself Laura and I started on a plan for the week. If there is one thing Laura does so well it's plan. And once a plan was in place things didn't seem so bad.

Lovely good luck messages

Rather than heading into London on Tuesday I would work from home clearing my inbox and completing eLearning. The urgency of seeing my team was lessened as they would all be in Bournemouth the next day. Laura dropped Annabelle at nursery and she popped home for lunch. We went to pick Annabelle up together so we could both get the low down on her first day at nursery. My first day was a dream.

Heading to nursery

The good news is nursery went well. We have video access that means we can log in and see how she's doing. We saw her eating, sleeping and crawling around the place. No tears and no drama. She is a superstar. Laura and I on the other-hand had a kind of heavy sadness and missed her all day. The sadness only lifted when the nursery staff said she had a great day.

After I finished work we spent the evening as a family, this included bathing Annabelle as she stunk of the mackerel she'd had for snack at nursery. We played, we made her smile and it felt so good to be back in our bubble. After getting Annabelle to bed I then hit the road.

A three hour drive from Birmingham to Bournemouth meant I arrived at my hotel at 10pm. Well I say my hotel.....they had no record of my room being booked and there were no rooms left. After 45 mins and the receptionist rushing around looking stressed they found me a room and I fell into bed at 11.15pm.

My trip to Bournemouth left Laura to get Annabelle up and ready the next morning. Not a major challenge except as I have never spent the night apart Annabelle has never had a bottle in the morning - first thing feeds are our thing. Laura rocked it though, after initial tears Annabelle took the bottle and made it to nursery in time. Laura is a hero!

My all day meeting in Bournemouth had an end time of 4pm (and then drinks which I skipped). As soon as I could I rushed up to my colleagues room where I had my bags and where I been pumping. Turns out breast feeding and work - especially all day meetings - are not good combinations. I had to leave the meeting twice (although timed one pumping session for lunch) and pumping is not a 2 mins task. Each time I was gone for almost half an hour. What with the sterilising and the prep and then the pumping. Oh and then having to have storage - I went with bags and ice packs that the hotel kindly kept in their freezer.

So after getting all my stuff together it was 4.30pm. A 3 hour drive - at rush hour - made the likelihood of getting back for Annabelle's bed time unlikely. I was devastated. I had consoled myself on missing the morning by being home in time to see her face before bed. Throughout the journey the traffic got worse, then better, then worse, then better and then by some miracle cleared so that my journey took 2 hours 48 and got me back for 7.20pm. Laura had kept Annabelle awake and it was so worth it. The smiles and hugs were amazing. My heart was so happy.

And then as all my team stayed down in Bournemouth it made my Thursday trip to London  redundant as there was no-one there to see. Instead I worked from home getting myself set up for the next week and getting all my log-ins restored. It meant I could have from 7am until 9am with Annabelle before my parents took her to theirs. It made up for the being away from her the day before.

I know the whole work/life balance is a challenge for everyone and our challenge isn't unique. What I am proud of is the way we handled this challenge. I know we are 3 days in and it's nothing to get excited about BUT Annabelle got on well at nursery, Laura managed to manage everything and I managed to go to work. We managed, we succeeded and we survived without too many tears! And our reward - four glorious days together, back as a four, back in our bubble, back being us.

The new us can wait a few days, we'll figure that out soon enough!

Baby Blogging: Maternity Leave - My Story

While pregnant with Annabelle I read quite a bit about 'what to expect on maternity leave' - and I don't mean the pay. I wanted to know how other Mum's had found it, what they had wished they had known and what I could start mentally preparing for.

Let me start by saying that here in the UK I am appreciative of the fact that we get good maternity leave benefits; that I got 6 weeks full pay and get statutory maternity pay until 9 months. I know I am super fortunate and I honestly can't get over the fact that the situation in the USA is so bad when it comes to maternity leave.

Having 9 whole months with our little girl (7 so far) has been one of the best experiences of my life. Our little moments, our morning snuggles and afternoon giggles, our silly faces and ridiculous dance routines - the lot of it- that's what I'll remember.

I also want to say that the views shared in this post are my own. I, in no way, want to assume, presume or anything else that these feelings are shared by everyone else. I just wanted to record my own thoughts and if they resonate, then great.

Before having Annabelle I dreaded maternity leave. I thought I would be stuck at home with a screaming baby, unable to do much and eagerly awaiting Laura's return each day just to have some conversation. At the start there were definitely days like that. Rather than the crying though, it was the fact that Annabelle slept so much.

After a few weeks I got into the habit of using Annabelle's sleeping time to tidy, clean and get stuff done. During particularly long naps I could even write a blog post. After figuring out how to keep Annabelle alive, this seemed a productive habit.

Then the naps got shorter. At 3 months, Annabelle was enforcing a routine - bed at 8pm, 2 or 3 night feeds, then waking up at 8/8.30am. Naps then followed every 2 - 2 1/2 hours after that. Naps were 30 - 45 minutes in length and all of a sudden my 'productive' nap times were over before they started. Bye-bye blog writing, hello racing around putting on washing, cleaning/tidying. With every wake up the to-do list seems to have grown rather than shrunk!

This to me ushered in the hardest part of my maternity leave. I wrote about the Sleep Situation here but the summary is this: at 4 months sleep regression HIT us. We all got way less sleep and we suddenly realised just how lucky we had been at the start.

The quicker naps, coupled with a baby who now needed entertaining, meant my initial feelings/worries about being bored disappeared. Bored! Now I don't get 10 minutes to myself. I relate to the memes joking that Mum's hide in the toilet.....although that's not a safe zone as Bisbee likes to join. I don't want to hide so much, I just want to check my phone.

Laura and I try our best not to be on our phones constantly around Annabelle. That's why you'll see us update our Instagram stories in one go after 8pm as Annabelle is in bed. However, despite our best efforts, the phone is still something Annabelle wants to get her hands on....as is the TV remote (anything that's not a toy right?!) - but the phone when in the hands of Annabelle is subject to chewing and all other delights. So my 'me' time is my checking my phone time.

Give me the phone.....

The routine we have leaves no time for thinking about work or the outside world. I thought I would miss the daily chat and banter. I thought I would miss work and its challenges. I thought I would be lonely. And yet I don't really miss of it and I am far from lonely!

That's not to say I haven't missed work on occasion. On my KIT days, when I am back in the swing of things, I feel like the old me. I enjoy it and feel reassured that I can still do it. I do miss the chats but I have great friends who constantly fill my WhatsApps (although I have gone from having work as my reason for not replying to having Annabelle - sorry!). But more than anything I have Laura. I have chats and banter with Laura that make me feel just as fulfilled. She listens to my 'day' updates with just as much, if not more, interest as she did when I when I came home with work news. The added bonus is that Laura and I now get more time together and that overcomes any feelings of loneliness that come up on the days when Annabelle just won't nap or is having a hard day.

In addition, I am fortunate that our local church (less that 3 minutes walk away) has a playgroup on Tuesdays and Fridays (with no added religion) so if the weather is awful or we haven't been out much we pop down there, mainly just to watch people and for Annabelle to play with different toys. I also have a development class on Thursdays and a few of the Mum's and I have gone since our babies were tiny so it's cute to see how they recognise each other.

I actually find by the weekend I am glad to have Laura to share tasks with as time in the weeks seems so busy. I almost feel naive that I thought I would be bored. Shopping trips take triple the time, a walk with Bisbee is at least double because the preparation is more involved, hell I can't even pop to the garden without prepping. I mean when I do return to work my preparation skills will be much improved!

I know I am so lucky that my maternity leave has been nothing like I thought. I am not bored raising a baby - I am entertained, enamoured, slightly obsessed, totally in love, amused, impressed, shocked, proud and happy. I also get extra time with Bisbee and that always puts a smile on my face.

My girls

There are hard days but they are few and far between and even the bad days still have moments of pure joy.

Referring back to one of the articles I read before having Annabelle (it's here) 30% of Mums feel the opposite to me - they enjoyed maternity leave LESS than they thought. 59% feel lonely and 49% feel obliged to be positive about maternity leave, even when they don't feel it.

One thing that does resonate with me is the 'sense of self'. Becoming a new Mum challenges that anyway and I have struggled with the 'how am I meant to feel' part. Ultimately I don't feel different, I just have someone new to love. But then sat on a train heading to Bournemouth for a KIT day I am sent a picture of Annabelle, of a moment I am missing and the tears start. I'm not sad. I'm just sad that this is what being myself, my old self, involves. It involves leaving, even only for a short period. I struggle with what my new self will be, what my new sense of self will be. I know I'll figure it out but my new self will definitely have to work on the tears!

As Annabelle gets older I know that the leaving will be different, not easier, just different. She'll love nursery as she'll get to play all day with kids her age and with new toys, it'll be way more fun than Mummy and the same toys. She'll have the space to run around and learn new things. We'll have a new normal and we'll all be thriving.

Seriously such good entertainment though - right?!

But for now I'd like to stay as stay at home Mummy for just a little bit longer. I'm happy as that me.