the rules are there ain't no rules

We are all born with a reflex to grip onto things. If you put your finger in a baby’s palm it will grasp it and if you put your finger under a baby’s toes, its little toes will curl under and attempt to grab. I read that this is a carry over from the time when we were all covered in fur and little (furry) babies would ride on their mother’s backs clinging on with their fingers and toes.

Aside from the being covered in fur part, this is quite a nice image. I imagine mother and baby in the cave slowly plodding along, sleeping, eating, cooing. Dad would occasionally go out with the other cavemen to hunt a woolly mammoth and for entertainment there were stories around the campfire and drawings on the cave walls. It was a simpler time. Okay, probably everybody died at twenty-five but there didn’t seem to be the multitude of stresses that we now subject ourselves to - the extra complications that we choose to add to our lives. Figuring out how to look after a baby is an area especially prone to this over-complication.

While other mothers-to-be in my antenatal class had pre-baby sleepless nights thinking about childbirth, it was my pre-bedtime reading of The Contented Little Baby, with its quarterly hourly instructions, that left me waking in a cold sweat. I thought it would make more sense once we’d actually had the baby, but a few weeks of trying to follow it (albeit vaguely) did my head in. Here’s a sample, for a one-week-old baby:

7AM
· Baby should be awake, nappy changed and feeding no later than 7am (a bit hard to enforce if you only managed to get the baby back to sleep at 6am after a night feed)
· He needs 25-35 minutes on the full breast, then offer 10-15 minutes on the second breast after you have expressed 60-90mls. (Romily would have 20 minutes max at this age. Expressing is fiddly and time consuming so why bother with expressing if you’re not planning to use the milk?)
· If he fed at 5am or 6am, offer 20-25 minutes from the second breast after expressing approximately 90mls. (These ‘if…’ instructions add to the confusion).
· Do not feed after 8am, as it will put baby off his next feed (the use of bold type is especially terrifying)
· He can stay awake for up to one and a half hours (at one week Romily was doing well if she was staying awake for up to one and a half minutes).

And on it goes, followed by another four and a half pages of detailed instructions to get you through the rest of the day. At two weeks the routine changes, then again at four weeks, with ten routines in the first year. For night feeds there is to be ‘no talking or eye contact’; naps must be ‘fully swaddled and in the dark with the door shut’; baby must be tucked up in bed each night by 7pm (good luck with this one!)

Criticizing this book is like shooting fish is a barrel but for the clueless first time parent its tempting to believe that an established set of guidelines will work and make your life easier. In reality I would like to meet the infant and parents who conform exactly to its rule (although I wonder if they could find the time to fit meeting me into their timetable).

Following my extensive (i.e. nine weeks) experience as a parent I am planning to pen a baby care manual of my own. It’s tentatively titled The Baby Cuddler and here are some of main points:

· As long as the baby feeds every two to fours hours and basically knows the difference between night and day, what she chooses to do with the rest of her time is up to her.

· You can’t spoil a baby. They know how to do a few things but manipulating you isn’t one of them. So go ahead and pick her up when she cries. It reduces her stress levels as well as yours.

· Cuddle your baby to sleep. Okay this may turn into a habit, but what else do you have to do?

· Do not follow this advice! It works for us and our kid, but who’s to say it will work for you? And it’s just working for us now. Things change all the time. Any minute things could all go pear-shaped.

· Slow down. Think ‘caveman’. Hope for the best.