What the baby books forget to tell you

Six years ago tomorrow I became a mum.

I’m sure I’m not alone in having read every single book I could get my hands on, scoured the internet obsessively and attended my ante-natal classes and listened and learned like an A-grade student in preparation for being the perfect mum.

I envisaged whiling away the hours with friends, drinking tea and eating cake as we cooed over our babies, relaxing with a glossy magazine while my baby slept, enjoying long hot summer days strolling through the park, sun kissed and contended (me and my baby). I mean that’s how it is isn’t it?

Wrong! My moment of realisation came as I found myself battling with an every-two-hours feeding schedule. I was determined to breastfeed but my little baby was a very sleepy feeder, which meant that one feed could take an hour and a half, with a half hour break and then off we went again. I barely had time to get myself in the shower let alone out of the front door!

I felt quite a failure during those early weeks – the highlight probably being when the health visitor came round two days after we’d come home from hospital, for a weigh-in. Having just fed and changed, I laid my baby on the sofa to undress her and at that moment she projectile pooed a stream of yellow stickiness on me, the walls and the cream sofa (fortunately missing the health visitor). As if that wasn’t enough, this was followed by a big wee and then she was sick. I didn’t know what or who to clean up first and I just stood there, mouth agog, holding up my naked baby. By now I was convinced the health visitor would see right through me as a total fraud who simply couldn’t be trusted to be in charge of such as small, fragile being.

Fortunately, things started to improve. I eventually managed to get out of the house and plan my power-walk dash to the shops or the park in between feeds or bundle us both into the car and drive as fast as I could (safely) to our destination before my daughter woke up.

As an aside, trying to fathom out the supermarket with a baby in tow was another story altogether – no one tells you about the special trolleys that enable you to shop and have your baby with you at the same time. I only found out about these trolleys after my first trip when I’d taken my mum along to push the baby in one trolley while I ran around pretending I was a contestant in Supermarket Sweep with another!

I also got to enjoy some of the summer during my maternity leave drinking tea and eating cake with my friends – although my sun kissed and contented look was definitely replaced with a sleep-deprived pasty complexion and stress.

Six years on – in spite of all the stresses and strains of parenting, it’s been the most amazing experience watching my daughter grow from being a little baby into a beautiful, sweet, happy little girl (even if our lives are still dictated by her need to eat little and often – some habits never change!). Happy birthday little S!

Bring the Baby's first steps

So how is Bring the Baby going to take shape? And what are we setting out to do?
It’s a grand vision but we want to change the face of baby friendliness in this country. There seems to be such huge inconsistencies in baby friendliness, not just between our high-street businesses, but within those businesses themselves. Research (that’s a loose term for cyber-stalking the parenting forums) has thrown up enormous differences between baby changing and feeding facilities in supermarkets and the big high-street names (even those whose main focus is the baby and parenting market) in towns just a few miles apart.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There seem to be some places out there that are bounding ahead with their parent-friendly facilities – some of the larger out of town shopping centres for starters and Ikea for example seem to score highly.
So the first steps are to continue gathering information and use Bring the Baby to centralise it all so that we can start to identify what the key issues are that parents would like to see addressed. Number one appears to be combined baby changing and breast feeding facilities (such an obvious no no!), followed by overflowing and smelly nappy bins and dirty nappy changing facilities. Please add your comments to this list so that we know what the issues are that you want to be taken forward.
Thereafter, the plan is to contact companies about their policies and to flag the concerns raised by the Bring the Baby community. But we’re not going hell for leather for just the bad guys – I strongly believe that you can effect change by highlighting best practice and encouraging others to follow suit – so I think there should a combination of carrot and stick. But this is your campaign too, so if you have any thoughts or ideas, please share them.

Thanks to everyone who has joined Bring the Baby in its first week. Please continue to spread the word.