15 minutes a day...

I have to admit, I'm losing my battle with time... I just never seem to have enough of it to do the things I need, let alone the things I want to do, and it's really starting to get to me.

I've always thought that I was pretty organised and not so bad at managing my time but I clearly do not have enough skill. By the time the girls are in bed, my "free time" is either spent running around 'getting things done' or in a semi vegetative state, slouched in the sofa with no energy left to move (or, lets face it, just plain asleep).

Well, I'm trying to be better at deciding what really needs to be done and when, and also trying to get more help with things like cleaning or doing the dishes (dreaming of a dishwasher...). I don't want to spend my weekends cleaning, doing the laundry, sorting through paperwork...I want to be able to get some of that stuff done but also just chill out with T and play with the girls... To be honest, I still manage to do the fun stuff most times, but then there's a certain feeling of desperation when I look around and the house is completely upside down (is this one of those Portuguese expressions that doesn't work in English?, not sure anymore...).

This is the only type of  mess I can cope with!

I want to have time to read books (and comics if T has anything to say in the matter), to design and make jewellery, phone friends, write emails and sometimes just be a bit lazy and sleep. I guess that's the other problem: I never seem to get enough sleep and I feel like my brain is just gradually shutting down because it can't cope with my life right now.

So... as part of my new plan to get more of the things I want to do done, I'm going to start dedicating 15 minutes a day to the blog. Let's see if it works and I manage to write more.

Something has to change so that maybe I can start feeling a little bit less overwhelmed by my daily chores, less of a robot that goes through the motions and more of a person that has a life of her own, beyond a house and two children.

Finally, the joy of breastfeeding

Being able to breastfeed my babies was always something close to my heart, something I always wished I would be able to do when I had my children. Unfortunately, things didn't go according to plan after my first pregnancy. My identical twin girls were born at 23 weeks and 2 days and life was pretty much a continuous nightmare for the first five months. My youngest twin, Isabella, lived only for two days and N went through five tough months during which she had to continuously fight to survive. Towards the end of her hospital stay I started trying to breastfeed her but it really wasn't easy. Poor thing, she was eager, but she was so very small!! To make matters worse she has a facial palsy (paralysis) on the left side of her face so it was extremely difficult for her to latch on...

In the end I decided to express my milk and give it to her in a bottle because at least that way we could put our fingers on the corners of her mouth to help her create some suction. By that point I had become an expert in the 'art of expressing milk'. It started the day she was born, just a few mls of hand expressed milk but by the second day, with the help of my trusted pump, I was starting to produce some good quantities. I was terrified of not having enough milk for my girls. I had read in the "Baby Whisperer" book that if you only express milk without breastfeeding the baby, you lose your milk supply after a few weeks. How was I going to do it?? Not to mention how important it seemed to be to have skin to skin contact. This was simply not an option at this point and I was only able to hold N when she was 11 days old.

Holding N for the first time

As it turns out, these things might be helpful but they weren't essential and I managed to feed N with my expressed milk until she was nearly one year old. For me the important thing was to be consistent and I religiously expressed milk from both sides every four hours, 20 minutes each, even if there wasn't much coming out towards the end, at least there was bit of stimulation. And things worked so well that at one point I was expressing about 2 litres of milk a day! Unfortunately N had lots of issues with her gut and didn't really feed orally properly until she was 3 and half months old. Up until that point it was always building up from 0.5ml/1ml every hour for a few days until the next infection when we would hear the dreadful words: "She's nil by mouth" which meant none of mummy's milk for my little girl. It was horrible. I was working so hard to make this milk for her (there was not much else I could do for her) and she couldn't have it... 

My freezer at home was completely full of frozen breastmilk and I ended up donating milk to St. Thomas hospital (until they told me they couldn't process any more of my milk) and Queen Charlotte's & Chelsea hospital milk banks. At least someone could have that milk. I also knew from the mothers around me in the neonatal unit that many struggled to have enough milk for their babies; it's not easy when you're living under such stress and these premature babies really benefit from having breastmilk.

Fortunately, A's birth was as good as anyone could hope and even though she didn't drink much milk in the first couple of days (neither of us had a clue about what to do...) she caught on pretty quickly and started gaining weight. My problem in the early weeks was thinking that she needed to eat for 20 minutes or else she wasn't having enough. To this day she's usually done in about 10-15 minutes and I guess it was important to learn that you need to get to know your baby. 

I'm loving being able to breastfeed her. She's 3 months old and she is always very cute with her smiles and her little chubby hands holding on to my breast. Things are so much easier this time around! Apart from having mastitis when she was one week old (scary and very, very painful...) being able to just go out and know that I can feed her anywhere has been great. With N the routine was more like feeding for an hour, expressing for 40 minutes, washing and sterilising pump and bottles and then... oh wait, it's time for the next feed...

Knowing what I know now I would never choose to express milk and feed from a bottle as a routine although I might do it eventually so that I can a have a break from the constant feeding. For the moment though, it's still really nice... just not at 2am, or 4am... 

Happy Mother's day!! (in Portugal, anyway...)

Being a mother has become a defining characteristic of who I am. In fact, as many women surely experience, once you have a baby and especially if you become a full-time mum, you quickly go from being a person with your own name to being "someone's" mum. I love being a mother, don't get me wrong, but I've found that it's only too easy to completely obliterate yourself from your own life because this other little person consumes your every thought. Three years on I've gotten better at this but I still leave the house sometimes without so much as a glimpse in the mirror, wearing whatever.

I couldn't write about motherhood without mentioning my own mother. She's the most important woman in my life, definitely the most influential, for everything she is, everything she's been through. She's a real warrior, loving and kind, and very tolerant and forgiving. We are very close and I think our relationship played a big part in the fact that I've always felt I would like to be a mother some day. And I always thought that if I could be half the mother she is, and my kids loved me half as much as I love her then it would be just great.

Unfortunately, I haven't quite managed to shake off the self-doubt that came into my life as I became a mum. "Am I doing enough?" is not so much of a constant, nagging question in my mind anymore, but it creeps up now and then and self-doubt is a powerful thing when it comes to making you feel down. I wonder if this feeling is more intense because of N's cerebral palsy? How can you be less than an extraordinary mum when you've got such an extraordinary daughter? Maybe it's because in a way I refuse to accept that her condition can't improve, that she can't acquire new skills and I feel that it's my job (literally) to help her get there. I don't want to fall into the trap of living my life (and forcing her to live hers) with the sole purpose of being "cured", but it's important to try and keep moving forward. I think these feelings are common to every mum, but with a disabled child that needs so much help to learn new things the stakes are really set at another level.

But I guess the defining thing about motherhood for me is the joy that it brings. I could be having a pretty rough day but my heart swells up with happiness when my little girls smile at me. When I go pick up N at nursery I'll have A all snugged up in her sling in the most perfect hug, and then N comes out from class and she's got the biggest smile when she sees me, giggling with excitement (it still pales in comparison to her reaction to daddy coming to pick her up, but that's a different story and I'll take what I can get). And then I walk home, 'me and my girls' and I'm happy, all my problems shoved at the back of my mind somewhere, knowing that I mean the world to them, just as much as they mean the world to me.