First settle-in session

Daniel had his first nursery settle-in session yesterday afternoon. It was on 2pm. I specially made him nap a bit earlier just in case he wouldn't settle in the nursery. The nursery is not far from our house (15 Min's walk), as it was not a particular nice day I drove Daniel to there. Despite its central location the nursery has plenty of parking spaces. It locates right behind a public park. This is one of the things I like about this Day Care as I will drop off Daniel by car on the way to work.

There were 8 babes yesterday afternoon. To start with, Daniel just sat there quietly watching the world around him while I was chatting with the nursery deputy manager Karen, who is holding a crying 6-month baby who just started nursery the day. I can see she was quite loving as she held the babe trying to rock him to sleep. She asked me if Daniel is always that quiet. I answered 'you haven't see his true colour yet!' After a while Daniel relaxed a bit, he started to take interest on the toys in other babes' hands, he tried to grab a rattle ring from a 20-month old baby, but didn't succeed as the other one guarded it firmly in his hands. Lucky Daniel didn't mind though! ;)i thought he might cry over this first setback in the nursery. While i was sitting there, couple of babes kept bringing toys to me ( probably thought I am one of the staff), especially a twin, they kept bringing picture books to me asking me to read to them and I did. Just after i had started reading to the twins, very quickly Daniel crawled back to my side declaring that this is his mummy.

Overall, Daniel wasn't that bad at all. The only crying incidendt was at the snack time. Just after i expressed 'how surprised i am that Daniel wasn't cry when one of the staff seated him into the high chair', he bursted into tears with handfull snacks holding in his hands, he must realised that it was not in the home...The session lasted for 2 hours, we left at 4pm and another session was booked for Monday morning...

Signed up nursery

we decided on Chatterbox.

I took Daniel to view another nursery this morning. The viewing just confirmed our first choice. Lunch time I dropped the signed forms together with the required £20 cheque at Chatterbox. Signed up Tue/Wed/Thur (I'll be working on such days) for Daniel's full day care. Also booked the first settle-in session for Daniel on Wendesday afternoon...

10 month old

Daniel has amazed us with his burgeoning motor skills on daily basis since he turned 10 month old. Terry had to tell him to slow down 'One trick at a time' he said. After months of having to rely on me to get him from place to place, Daniel now seems to have new tricks every day. My baby development recording can hardly keep the pace of his growing spurt.

Firstly he started to crawl on all fours scooting and scrambling across lounge and kitchen, then he started to crawl like a spiderman with one knee on floor and the other leg to propel him. The next day, he was chasing Terry with crawling style like a chimpanzee, one hand hold a DVD high and shouting at the same time, the other hand on floor and one knee on floor the other leg to propel. Now he can happily pull himself on a standing position in the cot or on the coffee table. He likes to practise walking with my hands under his arm to aid, sometimes he felt like running, good for him, not good for his old mummy as it's a back breaking activity for her.

One morning Daniel was sitting on his high chair after his breakfast playing the empty bowl, 'Dang,' 'Dang' he knocked the bowel twice with the spoon in his hand and tried to put the spoon in my mouth, I realised he was trying to feed me by copying my action of feeding him. Now he responded to the word like 'feed mummy', whenever I say so he would dip the spoon in the bowl then put it in my mouth. He started to give things to us to hold, he would hand a ball, a toy to us and now he even offered his dummy to me to suck. He seems to understand the concept of 'give' and 'take': Also now he understands the concept of take in turn when playing ball game with us. Whenever we say 'Danie's turn' he would push the ball.

He can speak perfectly the word of 'Mama' and 'DaDa', but I'm not sure if he truly understand what's it mean. he can say Daddy, but I have to remind him, he even said 'dirty' sometimes when I warn him not to touch something dirty...He babbles a lot and begins to respond to request and command like 'come here','come to get mummy'; 'give to mummy' ; 'open the door' etc. and he recognises lots words for common items in the house,like 'cupboard','shoes' ,'doors','windows' etc.

First office visit since maternity

I went in the office to have a meeting with my boss this morning. I emailed him last week letting him to know that I due to return work 23rd Oct and he asked me to come in to have a meeting with him as part of re-introduction to the team. Apparently there have been lots of change since I left. Lots of new faces and they now have lots of structural workloads from various sources ( good news!). I asked Terry to take half day off to look after Daniel though my boss offered to have meeting at my home if I had difficulty to arrange childcare.

I haven't been back office once since the starting of maternity leave, so it felt very refreshing driving to work on a sunny morning, especially when I chose a scenic route to one junction up motorway instead of my usual motorway exit.

On arrival office I reported to the receptionist (who is a new girl ) that I have a meeting with my boss. She gave me a visitor badge. I know I doesn't need that but just being polite. After a year maternity I found that my memory has gone down hill as I failed to remember lots of people's names when my boss briefed me the new organisational structure, some of the names rang the bell but I failed to link to particular faces. Terrifying, isn't it? The funny thing was i found myself moved up ladder when I was on my maternity. Though I told my boss i just want to work 3 days a week on return, he still seemed to keen on putting me on more responsibilities. He even spent quite a bit time telling me his personal story/advices on childcare choice to try to persuade me not engaging with guilt for going back to work. Apparently his wife went straight back to full time with their first one

Nursery Hunting

Nursery always an option for me before Daniel was born and I'd always said I would put my child into a nursery even the first couple months of maternity leave. Not wanting to do so is because of the increased awareness of the emotional risks of early separation for a baby from his mum followed by my extensive child-rearing-books-reading.

However all these readings and awareness, I kind of felt-the-fear-do-it-anyway and started nursery-hunting last week. I viewed couple of them light-hearted when Daniel was around 6 month old and now I really got my head around it. I viewed two so far and spent quite a bit time in each premise talking to staff. I have asked the questions like qualification, staff consistency, environment, diet, safety, cost, learning and emotional policy in particular. I was quite impressed bye one called Chatterbox, which came from a playgroup mum's recommendation. Maybe because i always believe that word of mouth is the best reliable source of information when it comes to choosing nursery, I got the good impression instantly when i stepped into their baby room, there are 8-9 babes of Daniel's age in the Chatterbox, they all looked very content and peaceful and engaging in what they are doing when we were there. Apparently, in terms of learning and play, they follow UK government's Birth To Three Matter Fram, also they provide daily log of baby's activity like what time they napped for how long, what time they had their nappy changed, what time they eat what and play etc... plus the observation sheet for the baby's development milestones backed up by photos ( hehe, saving me to do the blogs).. I particularly asked their emotional care and was delightedly told things like they nurse baby to sleep if the parents ask to. My own observation was that one 12 month baby cried when the manager left the room to show us around and he got picked up by her straight away , she explained that the baby was with her since he was 4 month old and he therefore became very attached to her. So it was not as bad as I thought. Regarding to ease baby's separation anxiety, she said we can visit the nursery many times as we wish for settle-in session without charge. Also they will phone parent at work to tell how the baby get on etc...

There is nothing to sad about sending your child one year old to the nursery, I love being with my son. I know I will miss him when I at work and might be shedding tears the first day when I let him go solo, but in that age old dilemma I also love being me and the freedom of being able to go on holiday and providing him a better education. there will be enormous personal cost if I choose otherwise now. I wouldn't trumpet the transition back to working life as some sort of symbol of having-it-all, like everything else in the life, there always comes with cost, I just have to get on with it!

Restless train journey

I took Daniel to Leeds to meet Terry for lunch yesterday. Normally i would just drive to Leeds, as it is just 40 minutes Motorway driving. But yesterday I decided to take train as a change. The fast train from where we live to Leeds would just take 32 minutes, plus 15 minutes walk to the train station, so it would be just under an hour journey, i thought, and it would give Daniel some fresh experience. Though it's not the first time for Daniel to be on a train, it was the first time I took him on train on my own. Terry was a bit worried about how I manage to get on and off train with Daniel, buggy and shopping, but i assured him it would be fine... I checked the train timetable on line in the morning before we set off, allowed 25 minutes to walk to the station to catch up the 10:12am fast train to Leeds. We got there 5 minutes earlier, however just to found out the intended service was cancelled, the next service would be a slow one which take nearly an hour to get Leeds and also there would be another 20 minutes waiting. Never mind! ! I was like thinking why i was so unlucky with train? This was the second time in a year when i used a train service and it went wrong. last time when i used a train service was when I serviced my car, the intended train back home was cancelled and was replaced by a bus service, which went every village and eventually took me 2 hours to get home for otherwise a 50 minutes journey. Anyway, i didn't feel that frustrated yesterday apart from the next train was so packed due to the cancelled fast servie. On boarding the train we just managed to find a seat next to the aisle. Daniel was so restless that he kept wanting to struggle off my lap, lucky i took some toys to distract him. However toys only kept him occupied for a little while, the next thing he found interesting was the newspaper that a neighbour gentleman was reading, Daniel tried to grab the newspaper a few times, but didn't succeed as i moved his hand away., then another lucky thing that kept Daniel still was that he found the conversation going on between two Indian doctors across the aisle was so interesting that he kept gazing at them, occasionally the lady and the young gentleman stopped their conversation to give Daniel a friendly smile.. Daniel fell asleep in my arm the last 10 minutes train journey.

We got Leeds just before 12am, met Terry at city Square and had lunch together in a Asian buffet restaurant near train station. Afterwards Terry went to back to his office neawr train station, Daniel and me went to shopping. The return journey was much more smooth. We got on the fast service as we intended at 1516 and the train was a lot more emptier and fast, Daniel got a spare seat to jump up and down and we got home just after 4pm.

Can't let go of co-sleeping with Daniel

I'm sure Daniel would probably be fully capable of sleeping on his own if I had practised a bit controlled-crying or I had been toughened up a bit more on him. I've been camping besides Daniel's cot for two weeks offering him my hands to hold whenever he woke up. He was doing fine and slept well, but I felt as if something missing on me, then I realised that I was genuinely missing the closeness it felt when a baby curling up towards me.

Some two weeks ago, I have finished reading another parenting book Titled The Science of Parenting by Margot Suderland, a practical guidance on sleep, crying, play and building emotional wellbeing for life backed by solid evidence from latest brain research into the impact of parenting on children's brain development and the experience of real families. It is a 280-pages thick book with lots neurological term to explain why particular parenting style is better for the child's developing brain and I read it letter by letter. In this book it states:

Sleeping in close physical proximity to a parent provides a baby with a sensorially rich environment because of all the movement, touch, smells and sounds. Skin-to-skin contact throughout in the night has been shown to regulate a baby's immature body and brain systems and can play a key role in maintaining his long-term mental and physical wellbeing. Extensive research shows close bodily contact between mothers and infants will regulate the infant's body temperature, metabolic rate and hormone levels, enzyme production, heart rate and immune system
( No wonder that it never heard Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in China where co-sleeping is the norm)

I was thinking: ' what I have done ! Instead of pressurizing myself to meet some fictitious norm, I should have just followed my own instinct to co-sleep with Daniel until he is no longer need my help to stay sleep!' That's where we are now: Daniel sleeps in the cot from 6pm to 10pm when I go to bed, from 10pm onwards he sleeps with me in our spare bedroom again.

Baby Proofing

Now that Daniel is able to crawl fast in a spiderman style. Over the weekend, we urgently baby-proofed our house , at least downstairs lounge and kitchen. Terry steam-cleaned the carpet for whole house. Terry used Daniel's old flower cushion, which Daniel never use again, to surround the house plant ( to prevent Daniel from eating compost, he was very interested in doing that) and hide the cables behind the TV cabinet (saved buying Cable Tidy). The mat from the cushion has been used to wrap around the corner of coffee table. Also, we urgently bought some socket covers and fridge lockers from Mothercare. Stair gates are the next thing to buy.

There will always be areas that are unsafe. Last night when I read this: every year children die because they pull furniture down on top of themselves, or because they scale chairs and tables to reach open Windows. Tow years olds have even been known to hang themselves from curtain cords, Terry told me to put two big vases on top of our display cabinet away immediately and I did. This morning when we woke up Terry said he had a nightmare about Daniel falling down staircase. Later I also found 3 decoration balls on the top shelf of the display cabinet has gone as well. Terry must put them away after I've gone to bed.

It has already been felt that the home is a bit like a death trap for babies and toddlers. I did remember I climbed high windows when I was a tot and jumped height. When you think about it, it's surprising how any of us made it to the adulthood.

2 months to go and separation anxiety

2 months to go before returning to work. 23rd Oct will be the Day I meant to return to work from my additional maternity leave. I don't really look forward to this for the obvious reason, the worry of how Daniel would cope the separation anxiety when he at a nursery. He 's been with me 24/7 since he was born, now merely the sight of me leaving the room would set him off crying or being in distress, and he still cannot fall asleep and stay asleep independently

Before Daniel was born I just planned to take 6 month ordinary maternity leave thinking I could go back to work easily to earn the money. However, when 6-months OML was up, emotionally I found I couldn't leave Daniel to a nursery, (parents have separation anxiety too!). Now another 6 months AML is nearly up, I found it's still hard for me to leave Daniel to a childcare arrangement.

I totally agree that one author's (she is also a psychotherapist helping parents who have children with sleep difficulties) view: she views sleep difficulties as the result of a failure to resolve issues about the relationship between the infant and parents, in particular feelings about separation. Her therapeutic work is designed to help parents and baby be better able to deal with separation. perhaps Daniel's sleeping issue is partly because of my unwillingness to let him go independently.