[0:00 – 1:44]
Meg Faure (Intro): Welcome back mums and dads to Sense by Meg Faure. As always, we are delighted to have you join us and today we’ve got our regular guest Nina who’s been joining us over the course of the last 10 months to tell us about her journey with her second born, little Josh who is almost 10 months old now. So we are very excited to have the update. Nina, welcome. It’s been wonderful to chat through his year.
Nina Clark: Is he already 10 months or is he close to 10 months?
Meg Faure: Wow, it’s incredible.
Nina Clark: Incredible. Yeah. And fast approaching a year.
Meg Faure: And how’s this year been? I mean, looking back, has it been very different from your experience with Max?
Nina Clark: Yeah. It’s quite different because, yeah. And it’s quite different depending on the place and the family that a child occupies because your first born does get complete unadulterated focused attention, but then has that massive challenge of adjusting to being part of a system when baby number two comes along. And I always felt like my son, who was my first born, James, really actually always just wanted to be an only child. I think there was a piece of him that was like, “Hold on, my nose is a bit out of joint that I’ve had to share you.” Your second born doesn’t get that opportunity of ever having been like an only child, but they get so much more in terms of the social and the interaction and there’s always company for them. So they never happen to be on their own with you as a mom.
[1:44 – 8:46]
Meg Faure: Yeah. And I mean, if you have to think about the big differences, is it that you’re more confident second time round or is it that you have less patience or more exhausted or could you outline what you feel the differences have been?
Nina Clark: I have to be honest, I am definitely finding having two little ones so much more challenging than I thought it would be. I think with Max, he was, I think looking back now, he was also just such an easy little baby. And I guess, you know, he was the only focus. So whatever he needed, he would get that attention immediately. And, you know, and now, yes, Josh is a good baby, but you are not always immediately there because there is so much else that you have to do. You have a toddler that you’re chasing after. You are trying to be a wife. You’re trying to be a person who’s still running a business on the side, a human being. And so you’re not always able to give a hundred percent of your attention at that very moment. And that’s been quite hard, I think. And on the other hand, you know, you can’t be in two places at the same time. You can’t always satisfy both kids’ needs, one hundred percent, you know, and that’s yeah, so that’s been tricky. And I think just because it feels like Max has sort of suddenly gotten all this sass from somewhere and he’s just really testing my boundaries. And that’s something that I’m also really struggling with because I do not have a cool temper. I really am quite fiery. And then it’s like two fiery people clashing constantly at the moment. And Joshie, you know, he’ll just sometimes have to wait a little bit longer than I would like for him to wait to get the thing that he’s wanting. And he’s also just been a lot more sick. He’s been sickly at the moment, which then has an effect on the sleep, which then has an effect on my ability to cope. It just feels like it all just piles up and it gets on top of you. It becomes very, very difficult.
Meg Faure: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there’s kind of two things that come to mind in everything you’ve said. The first is that the juggle is really real. And, you know, I think whether you’re kind of being a little bit A-type, like you and I were before we had children and we had our lives all sorted. And then you go into this quagmire of early parenting where you just don’t have the confidence because you’ve never done this before. Or whether the juggle is around having two children or even three children. It really, the juggle is there no matter where you are. And I think a lot of people don’t really talk about that. The other thing that strikes me in what you said is just how much is linked in with the child’s personality. Because what’s quite interesting, I have three children and that shift from being a woman to being a mother with James was an absolute baptism of fire. I mean, I loved it. I very much like you. I threw myself into early motherhood and, you know, he was my hundred percent focus, but I really lacked confidence and I had a lot of anxiety. My second born came along and I did feel like I had gained confidence so extensively, but it was a lot to do with her sensory personality. She was the most laid back child imaginable, still is. And so she just made my life so easy. So then I was like, “Oh, okay, now I’m actually, I really got this.” And then when I had my third, I had exactly what you’re describing now. James was in grade one. I was trying to teach him how to read in the afternoons, dealing with homework. Alex was five. Emily was a newborn. I had written at that point, three books and everybody said, “Oh, you know, you’re going to fall into this. You’re an OT. You’ve written all these books. You’ll be absolutely fine.” But actually the drama of Emily with that juggle of three, the managing, as you said, bedtime, bath time routines, older children jumping into the room when I’m trying to breastfeed her and my nipples are sore. Like I found that completely overwhelming, but a lot of that had to do with Emily as well, because she was definitely, she’s a slow to warm up baby. She still is, even though she’s now 20. And my word, if things didn’t go just according to how she was predicting it to be, like all hell broke loose. So I think a lot of it has actually to do with your baby’s personality as well. And in your case, Josh, he’s such a social butterfly. And so there’s, I think there’s a lot of pressure on you to kind of manage that very busy busyness of him. He really is, isn’t he?
Nina Clark: He is. My word. I was saying the other day that with the running after Max, who’s also quite a social little kid and needs his stimulation, needs his interaction. Joshie, as soon as he can walk, this boy will be on the go. He just clambers over everything. He cannot sit still for a minute. Yeah, he really is a handful.
Meg Faure: Oh, and I mean, I think that a lot of moms find that our little boys are way more busy than our girls are. The stats show it. I mean, boys are just busier. And so there are some girls who are really busy, but by and large, the little boys do tend to require a lot more activity, a lot more kind of gross motor than the girls do. And so if you’ve got two boys, like both of us have, I mean, you are definitely running on empty at the end of the day. And you just, you feel like you just haven’t got enough to give to anyone by the end of the day. It’s so exhausting.
Nina Clark: Yes, absolutely. You need an hour of quiet. Like nobody must talk to you. You are touched out. You are shouted out. You are everything-ed out.
Meg Faure: You’re done. No, no. And you know, you mentioned a milestone that I do want to just pick up on because he is clambering over everything. What is your oldest little one, Max’s age now?
Nina Clark: He is four and a half.
Meg Faure: So he’s not very old either. He’s at that stage where he also is running rings around you, needing a lot from you. And now he’s got this little brother who also now has got an opinion. It’s a tricky age, for sure.
[8:46 – 9:16]
Nina Clark: Yeah. It’s a tricky age. What I have found now with Josh, which I’m loving so much is that I’m also starting to feel like I can take him out for proper little activities that Maxie also enjoys. And it does feel like it’s becoming a little bit easier now in terms of just going out as a family and doing a fun thing instead of it being this mission because one wants a nap and the other one wants to do X, Y, Z, and it’s all, you know, all over the place. So, yeah, I do think that has made life a lot easier, for sure.
Meg Faure: And is Josh now not having that third sleep of the day? Is he only having a morning and an afternoon sleep?
Nina Clark: No, no, no. He is only on two naps, yes.
[9:16 – 9:36]
Meg Faure: And that has probably made your day feel a little bit more consistent as well. Like he’s got a nice morning sleep, a nice afternoon sleep, and then he goes to bed at night. Has that not helped to just add a bit of consistency?
Nina Clark: Yes, definitely. And I do think I’ve also just become a lot more sort of strict with the two naps now because, you know, in the beginning when he was transitioning and there was, you know, he’d be up early and then the first nap is sort of just an hour or something and he’d be awake the whole day. Then there were some days where I would put him down for a third, but now, because I can see he just doesn’t need it at all, you know, I think it helps with my own sort of routine for the day. So I’m like, “Okay, we’re doing the two and we stick to it and it seems to be working.”
[9:36 – 9:57]
Meg Faure: Yeah, definitely. And I think at this age, it really does work nicely. So, yeah, it must be quite a tricky time for you. And as you said, being an expat as well, I think we underestimate how much resilience we have to draw on as moms in the day to day. And then there’s an overlay of being an expat where you haven’t got family on tap all the time, you haven’t got friends on tap. You’re trying to make friends in a new world. And so, yeah, I think you’re doing an amazing job. Absolutely amazing.
Nina Clark: Oh, thank you. Yeah.
[9:58 – 10:28]
Meg Faure: Yeah. And, you know, Nina, it was exactly the same with my James. My first one was a complete social butterfly. He did all his milestones early because he was in a rush. So he was actually crawling properly. Well, no, actually he crawled very poorly. He had one leg out to the side, but he was crawling at speed from about eight months and then walking from nine and a half months. He was a nightmare, like complete nightmare. And I always said to moms afterwards that that nine to 18 months stage is the most exhausting because they are now on the go.
[10:28 – 10:39]
Meg Faure: You know, six to nine months is awesome because they’re actually largely sitting and moving slowly. Nine to 18 months is exhausting because they’re now on the go, but they are super dangerous. They don’t understand limits. You can’t sit down for one minute. You cannot leave them to play on their own. Like you can, when they get to 18 months, the imagination kicks in and suddenly they play differently with themselves and their toys and with other peers.
[10:39 – 14:19]
Meg Faure: But at this age, nine to 18 months, it’s just utterly exhausting.
Nina Clark: Impossible.
Meg Faure: And you know, that’s so interesting. I remember many years ago before I had children, I went on my NDT course. Now NDT is a specialisation within OT that looks at the neurodevelopment of infants and young children. And it’s quite amazing when you really mine down into it. It’s a two month intensive, you move to America and you do this two month intensive on babies. And it was an incredible experience. And in this two month intensive, you have a physio and OT and speech therapist every single day, teaching you everything there is to know about human physical development. So it’s not as much focused on the emotional side, but very much on the physical side of babies. But one of the things that they told us there is that if a baby doesn’t resist nappy changes between about nine and 11 months, it’s a red flag. It’s a warning sign if there’s something wrong, because babies should all protest nappy changes at that time. And that’s because it’s a very passive position. They don’t like it. They don’t want to be on their back. They want to get on the go. And so almost every mother, and you see the reels on TikTok and Instagram and so on, like poo flying, nappies falling off the changing table, full of poo while you’re trying to get the next nappy on. And that’s because they’re wriggling, turning over, sticking their foot in the poo. And that is exactly what they are supposed to be doing developmentally, which I found fascinating. In the moment, it’s so frustrating that you just want to belt them down.
Nina Clark: It’s exactly that. I do feel like I’m wrestling a crocodile multiple times a day. And it doesn’t help because I don’t know why for some reason with this child, it’s like every poo is a poonami. I am not getting the solid poos. And then because he’s wrestling me and there’s feet going everywhere and I am just… I don’t know what is happening.
Meg Faure: And how are you dressing him now? Is it possible to go into a pull-up nappy for him? Or have you done that already?
Nina Clark: Not yet, no. I’m worried that with his poos at the moment, it will literally just leak out because it’s a pull-up.
Meg Faure: And when you’ve got a pull-up… because I never used pull-ups. I always used normal nappies. When you’ve got a pull-up and there is a poo, does it like, how does it come off? Do you have to tear the sides or do you…
Nina Clark: Yes, that’s it. So the ones that we use at the moment for Max, there’s like a tear on the side, but it does get super messy. Yeah, exactly. The nappy’s going to go everywhere.
Meg Faure: That’s interesting. If you’ve got pants on, are they still the ones that you have to tear on the side? If they’ve got poo in them, how does that work?
Nina Clark: You do, you do. And it’s like a very quick, you have to sort of be like a bit of a magician.
Meg Faure: Oh, I can just see the mess. Okay.
Nina Clark: Yeah, no, it is. Yeah. And it’s especially when they go to school and, you know, they’ve sat with the poo for, you know, I don’t know how long at school or they haven’t told the teacher or whatever, you know, then you get a proper situation when they get home and then it’s like cleaning. Yeah.
Meg Faure: Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant advice.
[14:19 – 14:26]
Meg Faure: So we haven’t really got into our usual questions of the good, the bad, and the challenges or questions of the moment. Tell me what is going on.
Nina Clark: I feel like we’ve covered the bad. I mean, the juggle and the sass of a toddler and all of that. But I mean, you know, the good as well as what we’ve spoken about already, just like seeing him develop so beautifully and he’s so happy.
[14:26 – 14:52]
Nina Clark: But I do think, so let’s maybe go into challenges a bit because at the moment we have, well, first of all, two teething babies. Maxie’s got his four molars coming through and Joshie just cut his top two. And at the moment, because it’s still, it’s been winter here, well, it’s spring, but it’s cold, cold, cold. The lurgy of winter has hit. So we have a very snotty nose, which has now turned into a cough. And as a mom, again, this has been like, you know, I’ve had to just watch a lot of videos and reread my notes and ask the doctor what is a wet cough versus a dry cough? When do I know whether I need to give an expectorant or a suppressant? And then he is also wheezing. I’ve had to go to the doctor for that.
Meg Faure: Oh, wow. Of course. Yeah.
Nina Clark: We’ve had to do like some nebulizing. Yeah. It’s been quite a thing. So that has affected his sleep a lot. So we’re back in the trenches.
Meg Faure: Of course. Yeah.
[14:52 – 16:51]
Meg Faure: So this 10-month period is an interesting one. Nine to 10 months, there’s often a little bit of another sleep hiccup that comes up, and it sometimes has to do with, there are a couple of factors. The one of which you’ve already spoken about is immunity is really now starting to have to be established on their own because up until six months, they’re really covered by what was passed to them in pregnancy, and especially if you’ve got a toddler. So sleep will always go out the window because the toddler brings home, I mean, Coxsackievirus, which is hand, foot and mouth, is the classic one. Toddler will always bring back Coxsackievirus, and absolutely, they will get the little pox on their hands and their feet and their mouth, and then they stop eating, and then, of course, they don’t sleep well. So immunity is one. Second one around this age is often separation anxiety. They want to know where you are at every given moment. So in the middle of the night, they’re just calling you back just to know that you’re there and that you’re going to come back. So that’s very classic. And then the third one is change of day sleep routines, which we can talk about because this is a big stage now where there’s a shift in a day sleep routine, which if we don’t keep up with it, we then end up with a poor sleeper waking up at night. And then the last one, of course, is habits. So I guess what I would be interested to know is what does his day sleep schedule look like at the moment?
Nina Clark: So it’s very much two naps a day. And I would say his first one is still a 45 minute to an hour catnap. And then his second one is between two and three hours, which is just glorious. But it has meant that with this very good second nap that he takes, I’m finding that it does tend to sort of, you know, I put him down a little bit later for it than maybe what I would have liked. And so then it’s a bit of a scramble in the evening, you know, to get him awake again, get him a feed, try and do a bath time, do a dinner time, you know, and then try and do a bedtime. So the day sleep’s great, but it has now meant that the evening routine is quite hard.
Meg Faure: And does that mean his bedtime is being pushed later?
Nina Clark: Yes. Yes. It does.
Meg Faure: And then how many times a night is he waking?
Nina Clark: I would say one or two times at night. And then he does that very early, you know, four or five in the morning, which I know is quite normal. But yeah, so in that period of the night, there’s usually one or two where he’s just needing a bit of comfort.
[16:51 – 16:57]
Meg Faure: And are you still giving him a little bit of a feed at night or are you managing to do it without a feed?
Nina Clark: Yeah, no, we’re still doing a feed.
[16:57 – 16:59]
Meg Faure: So where is the other wheel coming off then?
Nina Clark: The other wheel’s coming off where it feels like every time I put him down, he wakes up. It’s that initial going down for his nap that is so difficult.
[16:59 – 17:01]
Meg Faure: Oh, I see.
[17:01 – 18:44]
Meg Faure: I mean those day sleep schedules sound very good, although slightly on the long side, nothing wrong, though. You know, I think at this age, you definitely don’t want three sleeps. You want two sleeps. So he’s spot on there. And then usually it would be it doesn’t matter if the long sleep is in the morning or the afternoon. That’s really irrelevant. There’s no need to try and wake him up from his morning sleep to shorten that. Usually you would have kind of 45 minutes for one of the sleeps and then one and a half to two hours for the other sleep. So he’s doing a little bit more than that, but I wouldn’t wake him at this point from either of them. But what’s happening in the evening when you put him down? Does he go down quite easily? And then is he waking regularly in the night? Is that what it is?
Nina Clark: No, so he’ll go down quite easily, but he’ll just wake up after an hour or an hour and a half a few times where he just needs a bit of a resettle. And I have found that with this little boy, you know, because we’re in winter, it’s just gotten very cold at night, or it was at least getting quite cold. So I tend to not make the room too freezing cold. We try and put him in a good amount of layers and that kind of a thing. But if he’s then crying because he needs a resettle and he gets himself very worked up, he then sweats. And I’m quite a sweaty person, so I can see he’s gotten that from me. But he, you know, he then gets a bit hot and bothered. And I think that also wakes him up further. So the evening resettle is getting quite hard, yes.
Meg Faure: Perfect. Yes. Perfect. Yeah, so I mean, let’s work backwards. So first of all, the 4 a.m. waking and feed is very, very common. And I don’t actually consider that a night waking as hard as it is to actually get out of bed. And for all babies, whether they’re having a 12 o’clock feed or not, and we’ll talk about that just now, I actually do recommend just giving them a little bit of a feed at that four o’clock because it sees them through to six in the morning. And I mean, to be honest with my kids, I kept it up all the way. If they had even in the toddler years, if they woke up at four, I’d give them a little bit of a feed and then they would go and sleep through to six. So I don’t have an issue with that. And I don’t really count it as a night feed.
[18:44 – 19:42]
Meg Faure: Working back and starting at your beginning of the evening where he’s waking frequently. I mean, a couple of things there. He might be slightly overtired, but I think your awake window is actually fine. So I wouldn’t actually change that. But I would do things like put on white noise and use a weighted blanket. Those are the two things that I would do for that early evening. And if he does those couple of wakings, he will actually move through it. The other thing, very importantly, is obviously absolutely no screens between that four and seven in the evening, because that will definitely impact those sort of wakings. And then that middle of the night one really is the only one of these three types of waking that you’re talking about that I would be trying to push out because A, it’s a horrible time for you to get up and B, he really probably doesn’t need that milk. And it is just comfort. One of the things you could try and do is you could try and offer him a bottle, which you then just take down to water, because it’s much easier to break the bottle habit than it is to break the breastfeeding habits. It’s almost impossible. It’s so difficult.
[19:42 – 20:13]
Meg Faure: So, you know, if you can move him onto a bottle for that midnight one and then make it eventually just a little bit of water. And then, you know, some kiddies need that midnight little bit of water, and that’s no problem. But it’s just trying to get him off the milk. Having said that, that one is obviously the one and you and I have spoken about this so many times before, where it’s very personal. There are moms who absolutely die and they do not want, they want to get rid of that 12 o’clock, in which case move him onto water and then do a little bit of sleep training. You have also been a little bit more of a laissez-faire mom in terms of that. And so you seem to, as hard as it is, have the perspective that it’s not going to be there forever. And so, you know, it’ll pass. And I guess that’s the choice you need to make. If it is something that is breaking you, then I would move him onto a bottle of water rather than the breast. But that’s kind of the only way you’ll get rid of that one.
Nina Clark: It’s doable.
[20:13 – 24:10]
Meg Faure: Yeah. The other thing, yeah. Well, the other thing I would definitely add in, and this is particularly for our social butterflies, which he is, is a little bit of swinging in the late afternoon. So between four and seven, where I’ve said you don’t do any screens, if you’ve got a swing at home, put him in the swing and swing him as much as possible, like a good 15 minutes of swinging, take him to the park or set up a swing inside the house. We actually bizarrely had one set up inside the house because we had a double volume area in our lounge with balustrades up at the top. And we literally set up a swing in there because Cape Town winters weren’t great. And we would swing James. And those social butterflies tend to need that a little bit more than other little ones. So that is definitely worth looking at as well. And then also, you know, he’ll get to the age where he’s ready for a little trampoline that he can hold onto and jump on. You know, those little ones tend to need a lot of proprioception and vestibular input in order to sleep well at night. And so, yeah, I would definitely add that in as well. And then also the last thing I would add in is just check his iron levels, make sure he’s getting either some good green leafy vegetables in a meal, and then also that he’s getting some red meat. And if neither of those boxes are ticked, then I would give him an iron supplement. Try that. And the other thing that I did interestingly, which, and I’ve always recommended in my sleep programmes, is to put little ones of this age onto a supplement called barley green or, I mean, it’s really just like green shoots. You can buy it as a powder, actually, green powder or barley green or whatever you, you know, go and find it at one of the wellness shops. And I’d make a little smoothie or I’ll pop it into yoghurt or in fact, in the case of my son, he loved it so much, I just used to put it in water. And that just, there’s something in that that just helps him to sleep a little better as well. So you can definitely try that as well.
Nina Clark: Barley green.
Meg Faure: Yeah. Well, it does taste like grass. It’s revolting. And, but James loved it. I mean, he used to, I mean, it was actually one of the first words he learned when he was like 11 months old. He used to have a word for barley green. It was so funny. And he was under a year. I mean, he didn’t say barley green. It was like, and I knew exactly what he was wanting. So he loved it. So yeah, it is worth just trying that one as well because it just is kind of on a nutritional level can help with this as well.
Nina Clark: Brilliant. Some little tips.
Meg Faure: Yeah. Pleasure. Well, Nina, it’s been wonderful to chat again. When we next chat, he’ll be very close to a year. We’ll make sure we chat just before he turns one. But thank you so much for sharing your journey. It’s just been a wonderful perspective of early motherhood. So thank you.
Nina Clark: Thanks, Nina. We’ll chat soon.
Meg Faure: Bye.
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