Being a new mum everyone wants to give you their advice about how to look after your baby. As well meaning as this advice might be sometimes you just have to go with your own instincts. There are so many things that midwives/health visitors/family/friends told me to do which a lot of the time contradicted one another so today I thought I'd share the main things that I didn't follow peoples advice on and that in the end really didn't matter.
Don't give your baby a dummy
Ahh yes the age old dummy or not to dummy question. Whether it was right or wrong we gave Mila a dummy at two days old. It was our second night home and she had been unsettled all evening fighting sleep and we were both about to tear our hair out when we suddenly remembered that someone had bought us some dummies. We gave it to her and we had immediate peace and she dropped off to sleep. Some babies have a strong sucking reflex that dummies really help with and Mila is definitely one of those babies. Now that she's a bit older we try to only use it when she needs to sleep so she knows when it is time for a nap, it's also been helping for those days where she's teething a lot to divert her attention. So for us despite a lot of people saying not to give it to her so young as she might get 'nipple confusion' dummies have most definitely been a winner in our books.
Don't drink coffee whilst breastfeeding
I've done a lot of research into this and found that food & drinks can transfer through milk, however different babies react differently to certain food/drinks, it isn't a 'one rule fits all'. Of course if I kept eating a certain thing and Mila was reacting to it then I would of course stop eating it, but it's annoying when people say 'ooh don't drink that coffee she'll be up all night!' however well meaning they may be. I don't drink much coffee in general but i've never found that it has affected Mila. Neither have strawberries and neither have grapes - the other two that people love to mention!
Don't give your baby a bottle if you want to breastfeed
Again something that some advised against and others said didn't matter. We were going to a wedding when Mila was 4 weeks old and being so new to the mama game I was feeling quite overwhelmed with my feeding duties and although I loved breastfeeding it was all getting a bit too much. So despite my health visitor telling me not to, I started pumping the odd bottle when Mila was around 3 weeks old, at this stage it was never a regular thing but I remember being worried that I would end up producing too much milk and being engorged. Neither of those happened and I found that it actually helped to regulate my milk flow somewhat. At first I pumped one to test to see if she would take a bottle and then pumped a bottle on the day of the wedding for her to have in the evening. It was nice to have a couple of hours where I didn't have to think about feeding and meant that I felt confident at planning an evening out with friends knowing that Mila would happily take a bottle and go back to the breast when I returned. From that moment on Mila would have the odd bottle of pumped milk until she was around 6/7 weeks old and I started pumping a bit more regularly.
Don't rocked/held/ fed my baby to sleep
Before I had Mila I read a lot of sleep training advice and read all about those magical schedules that will have your baby sleeping 8 hours at night at 8 weeks old. Now I'm not knocking anyone that does schedules or whose baby is sleeping through the night, i'm going to be honest I envy you massively if that is the case! But for me a lot of the 'rules' just weren't very realistic. Advice like, put your baby down in the cot when drowsy and don't give them eye contact & walk away from the cot didn't work for me and I would always resort to rocking or feeding to sleep. I'm pretty sure that this whole 'self soothing' malarky is a myth as well. At 5 months old, I have probably committed every single 'sleeping' faux pas at risk of her creating bad habits, but sometimes you just need to get your baby to nap at whatever cost, because her having a meltdown 3 hours later just isn't worth it for you or her. So far Mila hasn't created any bad habits and if I put her in the cot to sleep at the right time she will fall alseep and have a good nap. So if you're a new mum and you're worrying that everytime you feed your baby to sleep or when they cry - god forbid - you go and rock them back to sleep try not to worry, they'll decide when they no longer need you to do that anymore. On the other hand if it's getting too much and you're at your wits end with feeding to sleep everytime, then by all means be a little bit stricter if that works for you, the point being just trust your instincts, trust your baby and I'm sure that all will work out.
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