laurasaur

What an amazing week. Reuben started to sleep through the night this week. By sleep through the night I mean I give him his last feed (supposed to be a dream feed but normally he wakes up fully) around 10.30pm and He is in bed by 11.15. He then wakes anywhere from 6-7. You may know I am following the BabyWise schedule – and it states in the book that from 8-12 weeks your baby will start sleeping through the night. I personally think this is more dependent on the weight of the child and sure enough it must have been the day he hit 12lb he slept through for the first time.

He is also having a super happy week. He loves his independent play time on his playmat, and has started to reach out and grab things. Nappy changing has even become less of a drama because he will do these super cute huge smiles half way through instead of screaming.

Feeding has also improved dramatically, I have been struggling the whole time with breastfeeding but this week it just seems to be a lot less painful and he is feeding for about 30 minutes total most times – although he will still have the occasional long feed of an hour but no more than once a day and I am confident he will speed them all up soon.

A couple of people have asked about his routine for this week so here goes:

6.30am – 8.00am Feed & Play time. This is still more than an hour off from his proper wake up time of 7.30am but I’m very happy with his progress. Have some play time with mummy and then some independent mat/gym time while I have a shower/breakfast.

8.00am – 9.30am Nap & nap time for mummy too!

9.30am – 11.00am Feed & Play time – this is his happiest time of the day. Try and do some tummy time and gym time.

11.00am – 12.30 Nap

12.30 – 2.00pm Feed & Play time

2.00pm – 3.30pm Nap

3.30pm – 5.00pm Feed & Play time

5.00pm – 7.00pm Walk/Nap time

7pm – Feed & try for bed time. He pretty much either is going to go to sleep or is not, and I can tell by how he has been so I either put him straight down or have some quiet time for an hour then put him down.

10.30pm Dream feed time – try and feed him quietly so he doesn’t wake but hubbys love for loud tv often kills this.  Straight back to bed after. I don’t change him at this time unless he has made some poop lol.

Time is of the essence for me at the moment. In between feeding, changing and playing with my baby (and changing and changing and changing), there is precious little time to do anything other than get myself showered and dressed – some days I even fail to do that!

I find most cheesecakes very easy to make except for the part where you must have patience and leave it to chill down overnight. This is no exception and the combination of white chocolate and raspberries is heavenly.

Like any baked cheesecake this must be made the day before you want to eat it.

ease:  4/5
mess factor:  3.5/5 – few bowls to clean up
cooking time:  1 hour
total:  11 hours

taste: 4.5/5

Ingredients
1 x 250g packet of biscuits
100g ground almonds or hazelnuts
150g melted butter

750g cream cheese (3 x 250g packs)
140g (2/3c) caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract
3 eggs
200g good white chocolate chopped into chunks
200g frozen raspberries

Grease a 20cm springform pan. Place biscuits, ground nuts and butter in the bowl of a food processor and process until finely crushed and well combined. Transfer mixture to prepared pan. Use a straight-sided glass to spread and press mixture firmly over base and side of pan (Try to get it all the way up the sides – I was using the wrong size pan). Cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge for 30 mins.

Preheat oven to 160°C. Use an electric beater or mixer to beat together cream cheese, sugar and vanilla until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Use a spatula to gently fold in chocolate and raspberries.

Pour mixture into the biscuit base. Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour until just set in the centre (Gently shake the pan, the middle should still wobble a little). Turn oven off. Leave cheesecake in the oven, with the door open a crack, for 2 hours or until cooled completely (this *should*prevent cake from cracking). Cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge overnight to chill.

What a week! This week was a week of learning for me. Learning how to breast feed, learning how to change nappies (!!), learning that you can function on so much less sleep than you ever thought possible, learning that 0-3month old clothes are way too big, newborn clothes are too big, and tiny baby clothes are still a little too big! And of course you only bought 0-3m clothes (thank goodness for grandparents!)… learning that you still look 5 months pregnant straight after having a baby!

Baby on his birthday:

I also found that as happy as I thought I was about his birth there were so many things that bugged me about it – and writing his birth story was very therapeutic for me and helped me feel much more positive about it. All I will say on the matter is that my next birth experience will hopefully be very different. And being back home in New Zealand where you can choose your midwifes and have much more say in your healthcare will facilitate this! I also learnt that no matter who is with me, I need to stick up for what I want and stay strong, not just about the birth but also with regards to parenting etc, because I am the one that has to deal with the outcome.

Parenting is way, way harder than I could have ever imagined. Yeah everyone says its hard and maybe I was just naive but really there is no way to explain it until it happens to you. It’s not that I’m not really enjoying it as well, but I think its good to be realistic about it! I have a whole new-found respect for all Mums & Dads, and especially single parents, I just couldn’t have got through this week without the support of my wonderful husband and my parents.

All in all this week totally flew by in a mixture of tiredness, nappies, feeding, emotions and wonderful snuggly new baby-ness. Having a baby is the most awesome thing I could ever imagine.

Highlights of the week:

• Having a tiny baby that is mine to hold and cuddle and kiss whenever I want!
• Seeing my husband in a whole new light.
• Having my Mum & Dad here to help with everything.
• Seeing what Reuben will look like when he smiles! (Yeah I know it’s just gas haha)
• Having a happy, alert baby. He really is such a chilled out little man, he seems such an old soul. I can’t wait to get to know him better.
• His cord falling off! Such a relief that it fell off so early, just 4 days after he was born. It made me nervous cleaning around it and making sure it was safely out of his nappies etc.
• Learning that after only 5 days Reuben had regained his birth weight. Go me, I am a feeding machine haha..

Lowlights of the week:

• Learning that breast feeding hurts way, way more than I could ever have imagined. Reuben has a pretty bad latch on at the moment, and is really ‘nipple feeding’ instead most of the time.
• Sleep deprivation. Enough said.
• Crying at everything for no reason. I had to go to bed one night when my parents and husband were watching a movie it was making me so ridiculously sad.
• Still not having a name for baby! (obviously I have changed this post to update his name )

Baby day 1 (after scratching himself in the eye and having it get a bit swollen):

Newborn babies sleep so much more than I could ever imagine. He is only awake to feed and then he goes back to sleep! When he is awake though, his eyes are so big and wide. I wonder how much he can see and what he is thinking…

Well I did it! Giving birth was by far the most excruciatingly painful experience of my life, but at the same time, so enjoyable and amazing – I got to have the home birth I wanted (but only just!), and gave birth to a gorgeous (albeit massively cone-headed) baby boy weighing in at 7lb and 5oz, way less than I was expecting.

He is the most alert little guy ever. He came out with his eyes wide open and looking around, no crying or anything like that, just breathing well and taking everything in his stride. This photo was taken right after he was born and before he had even been cleaned up! So fresh and new to the world. The first photo was about an hour after he was born and on the bed he was born on!

I’ve stuck my birth story after the jump if you want to have a read. It’s pretty long and involved and sort of TMI but there you go… Read the rest of this entry »

Its been a long long time since I have updated. I’m so slack. I don’t even have a good excuse.

I’m still a long way from the lovely country I call home, New Zealand. While everyone there enjoys stunning summer days and long evenings, we have rain, sleet, snow, and darkness at 4pm.  The last 6 months have brought an entirely new way of life for me, and one major unexpected change.

You know that saying about plans going astray, well, yeah, I can verify that is true Still, my life is very nice right now, just a bit different from our plans of just a few months ago. We always had planned on coming to London for a few years to work. We planned on having a baby at some stage and coming back to NZ to settle. Little did we know that I was already pregnant when we left glorious New Zealand! So that was one small spanner in the works. I looked for work solidly for a few months once we arrived, but there was just no software development jobs going. In hindsight I should have given up looking a lot earlier and worked in a cafe, but I didn’t, and well, then it became too late because I sprouted a somewhat huge baby bump. Thankfully my husband landed a sweet job very soon after we arrived (and they love him, he has just had a promotion!), otherwise we would have been on the next plane home.

on the tube, blissfully unaware of the baby growing in there

So, here I am, jobless, and growing a baby in my belly. People ask me what I do and I have a hard time answering – what on earth do I do? Well, I spend a lot of time on eBay, that’s for sure. Having a baby has increased my addiction even further and opened my eyes to the designer baby second hand clothing market. Thankfully we also bought a car that turned out to be a piece of crap, because I spend lots of time fixing it or visiting our mechanic, who I am getting to be quite good friends with haha. I go for walks, I go shopping and have hot chocolates, I cook and sometimes I even clean.

Yeah. My life is pretty sweet. And on top of this I seem to have been blessed with the worlds easiest pregnancy. I haven’t had any morning sickness, or anything weird like that, and I’m only just getting to the uncomfortable stage where I walk the poor baby into door frames and stuff.

31 weeks pregnant!

What else is going on….

Read the rest of this entry »