It took me 6 months to get back in shape, six long months. During the 8 weeks after having the baby I tried my best to stay away form mirrors. A guy I know told me “Wow, you put a lot of weight on! If I met you on a street I wouldn’t have recognized you”– and I just wanted to disappear. Honestly, I didn’t believe that those 6 kilos of baby fat will ever leave me and buying clothes 2 sizes up was humiliating. I gained 18 kilos during pregnancy and was hoping that most of those belonged to the baby, but if we really think about it - 9 kilos were all the baby supplies, 3 to 4 kilos were Eric’s and all the rest were mine.

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Don’t you just hate the parents of those perfect babies? You know, the ones that sleep through the night, eat without making a mess, never have bad days, smile all the time and quietly play on their own with their little toys.

Don’t you just hate the people that say to you: “Your baby is waking up for feeds at night? Oh, that’s awful, you poor thing - at this age he must sleep through!”

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Unlike most of the babies, Eric refused to eat solids at 6 months. I tried everything, but he would spit out any food I gave him. I was really worried because I read that between 6 and 8 months a window of opportunity opens and it is the time to introduce solid food - I didn’t want to miss that window.

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Ever since Eric was 6 months old we started to teach him the word “Mama”. Other sounds like “baba” came naturally, he was babbling them all day long but every time we asked him “say mama” he would move his lips as if repeating but made no sound.
Yesterday my baby woke up hungry at [...]

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First of all the teeth appear in pairs. Pair numbered 1-1 comes first, then the pair numbered 2-2 and so on. There is also a time frame for teeth appearance: first four pairs erupt in the first year, pairs numbered 5 and 6 – from 12 to 18 months, pairs 7 and 8 – from 18 to 24 months and pairs 9, 10 after the baby is 2 years old.

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Make no mistake: breastfeeding is natural but not easy. Even though at the hospital nurses and lactation consultants tried their best to train me (it was actually more like breastfeeding boot camp), the baby needs to figure out his own way. This is why the first 2 weeks were really stressful for me.

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We just had a weekend from hell. It was a getaway I was looking forward to for a month and Eric made it as unpleasant as it was humanly possible. He was cranky for 3 days in a row, it took me an hour every time to rock him to sleep and he was awake after 45 minutes. Rob was joking that in terms of return on investment, when you invest 60 minutes to get a return of 45, that investment sucks

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Even before my baby was born I decided he will start swimming from 3 month of age. Well, it took a bit more than 3 months because we wanted to do the 4th month immunization first, but eventually we took Eric to the Aquatic centre. At first I was only going to let him swim with the Little swimmers (or Water babies, some course of that sort) but then Rob and I discussed it and decided that we want to let him try once on his own - to see if he even likes the water.

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Why? For so many reasons:

…

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I shared my white-noise experiment (hair dryer as sleeping aid, link) with other mothers in the mums group and raised some eyebrows. A couple of mums agreed that we should use “whatever works” and one other mum said that she found salvation in sleep training.

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