Six-Week Old Baby Breakthrough: Smiles, Routines, and Sleep Tips S5|EP127

Six-Week Old Baby Breakthrough: Smiles, Routines, and Sleep Tips S5|EP127

 

After my first born was born was an absolute drown, a quagmire of complete confusion, and I’m sure it’s like that for many of you as well. You kind of feel like you’re getting it and then it just evades you, and you don’t quite know what’s going on, and that’s what early mothering is all about. So she’s now six weeks, which always feels like a milestone, mostly for medical reasons because you have to go for a whole lot of appointments and vaccinations and checkups and things at this point, so it’s been quite a busy week.

Early infant crying, which is the fussiness that almost all infants experience to some degree or another, you know, I mean it varies from infant to infant. Some little ones crying as much as three to six hours a day, others only crying for 20 minutes in a day. What other things felt like wins this week? So I think certainly finding more of a routine, and I know she’s still quite young, so routine is a fairly loose concept anyway, and certainly we’re not wedded to it, but something we have been trying, and this is also based on some advice that you gave us last time, was to… Welcome to Sense by Meg Fora, the podcast that’s brought to you by ParentSense, the app that takes guesswork out of parenting.

If you’re a new parent, then you are in good company. Your host, Meg Fora, is a well-known OT, infant specialist, and the author of eight parenting books. Each week, we’re going to spend time with new mums and dads, just like you, to chat about the week’s wins, the challenges, and the questions of the moment.

Subscribe to the podcast, download the ParentSense app, and catch Meg here every week to make the most of that first year of your little one’s life. And now, meet your host. Welcome back mums and dads, this is Sense by Meg Fora.

I am Meg Fora, and I am your guide as we navigate those first few years of early parenting. It is always my delight to be alongside you. I personally found that, certainly after my first born was born, was an absolute drown, a quagmire of complete confusion, and I’m sure it’s like that for many of you as well.

You kind of feel like you’re getting it, and then it just evades you, and you don’t quite know what’s going on, and that’s what early mothering is all about. And one of the wonderful things about this podcast is that I invite mums to come alongside me to share their journey, and we have such fun because what’s incredible about babies is as unique as they are, they seem to move along a trajectory that is quite similar from one baby to the next. And so most babies, for an example, smile at around six weeks.

And so the joys of seeing your baby smile for the first time are something that are quite common for all mums of little ones with six-week-olds. So I love to have mums come alongside me, and I know that you love those podcasts too. And this season, we are following Julia De Silva, and she is the mum to two little ones.

And Aurelia is her second little girl. I hope I’m saying that correctly. I’m going to get it.

I know I keep calling her Aurelia, and she is Aurelia. And we’ve been tracking her since the day she was born. She landed up in hospital early on, which was a very unique journey.

And so we’re kind of tracking her as she goes along her journey. So a really warm welcome to you, Julia. Thank you for allowing us to follow your journey.

Welcome back. Thanks, Meg. It’s lovely to be here again.

Yeah, excellent. So how old is little Aurelia, and what has your week been like? So she’s now six weeks, which always feels like a milestone, mostly for medical reasons because you have to go for a whole lot of appointments and vaccinations and checkups and things at this point. So it’s been quite a busy week.

And she did have her six-week checkup this week, and that was all clear, thank goodness. So we went back to see our pediatrician, who I’m happy to say we haven’t seen since we were in hospital. So he gave it all clear, and she’s doing very well.

Certainly everything’s cleared up from her illness, and she’s gaining weight well and feeling well and hitting all of the traditional kind of milestones that you look for at this stage. So that was good, and he’s given the go-ahead for her vaccinations, which she’ll have next week, and I have my checkup next week. So yeah, it’s been an interesting week, and a lot of settling in, I think, has been the story of the last few days.

Yeah, and it is interesting because that six-week mark, it is such a thing. There are kind of two marks, I think, that parents will look forward to and know that are coming. One is six weeks, and the other one is 12 weeks, and it’s quite interesting, the science on that as well.

Early infant crying, which is the fussiness that almost all infants experience to some degree or another. I mean, it varies from infant to infant. Some little ones crying as much as three to six hours a day, others only crying for 20 minutes in a day.

But all of those crying curves, no matter how much, if your little one’s on a higher end of crying on the lower end, all of those actually peak at six weeks, and from then onwards, things get easier. And this is science that’s kind of being carried out all over the world, this research. The crying curve tends to start at about two weeks, peak at six weeks, and disappears almost entirely by 12 weeks.

And so it is just a little bit of a turning point. You’ve kind of reached the end of the increase of crying or the peak of crying, and then after that, it starts to settle. So it definitely is.

And I think part of that is tied up in the fact that little ones have a new form of communication at around about this time. So up until six weeks, their main form of communication is eye contact and obviously crying, which is how they communicate. And then from six weeks onwards, a new form of communication often emerges.

And that, of course, is the milestone of smiling. So is Aurelia starting to smile yet? So we’ve had a couple of smiles. They’re few and far between.

I’m looking forward to them becoming a bit more frequent. She is enamored with her playmat, and I think she loves it more than me because every time I lie her down, her face lights up. I haven’t had as many personal smiles myself, but we are getting there.

You can really see more expression in her face for sure. Apart from just smiling, there is definitely more going on there. And like you were saying, her ability to track things with her eyes and stuff like that is really something that you can observe when I take the time to kind of watch her while she’s lying and playing or just lying in the bed or whatever.

So we’re on the way there to a smiley baby for sure. That’s great. Yeah, I mean, it is an incredible milestone and most babies do do it.

And the other thing that they often do at this age is copying our faces when we kind of pull out our tongues. I know we mentioned it last time. Have you tried it? Yes, I gave it a bash the other day and it worked, especially the tongue sticking out one.

That was hilarious. And just, yeah, just really cute. And I suppose it’s part of the nature of this thing that you do start to get a response from them.

Whereas the first many weeks of their life, they tend to be kind of blobs. And yeah, she stuck her tongue out when I did it. In fact, I got Santi involved and we did it together with her and she did it for him.

So it was really sweet. It is really amazing. It’s such fun thing to do with little ones because it’s kind of, I mean, I think it’s more hardwired than it is really social.

But the fact that she’s copying your face is really awesome. So very, very interesting. Yeah.

And otherwise, how’s the week been? I mean, let’s start with the highs. So one of the highs would have been that you popped her under the mobile and she started to on the play mat and she started to smile occasionally. What other things felt like wins this week? So I think certainly finding more of a routine and, you know, I know she’s still quite young.

So routine is a fairly loose concept anyway, and certainly we’re not wedded to it. But something we have been trying, and this is also based on some advice that you gave us last time, was to how to manage the end of the day in the bedtime. So I’ve been starting to kind of put more of a routine in place.

And so we have had more success with that. And it’s not something I remember doing with my son at that stage. I’m pretty sure I only did it when he was probably a few months old at least.

But I just sort of was trying it really from a practical point of view, because having two kids that time of the evening is kind of frantic anyway. So I was wanting to find a little bit more structure for myself. And so we have started to build more of a bedtime routine to the point where I’m now bathing her in the evening regularly rather than in the morning, which I was doing previously, you know, because it’s sort of calmer.

I’ll go and bath her a little bit earlier at six o’clock, for example, while my son has dinner with my husband, and then he will bath afterwards. So that gives me a sort of half an hour window to get her bath to keep it very calm. And then we go into the room and there’s a lullaby and the nightlight’s on and I give her her bottle.

And it’s really soothing, but it’s also a really lovely way for me to spend quality time with her, because I think that’s ultimately one of the biggest challenges when it’s your second or third or whatever baby. And that’s something I was actually hyper aware of when I was pregnant, that I would never be able to spend the kind of one-on-one time with her that I got to spend with her brother. And this is actually a really beautiful way to do it.

So I find myself really looking forward to it. And I just love spending that 45 minutes to an hour with her at the end of the day. So that’s been a real highlight for me.

Yeah, and it’s awesome that you mentioned that. And there are two things that I want to pick up there. The first is that whole routine debate.

And you said you’re not married to her routine and you’re not doing it religiously and you have flexibility, which at this age is obviously very important. But what’s quite interesting is that there’s a lot of people out there who actually really disparage and kind of talk negatively about routines for little babies. And they say, you know, it should all be flexible and routines can cause anxiety.

And of course, there was a book that came out in the 1990s called The Contented Little Baby Book that was so routine that it created P&D for half of the nation. We all tried to religiously stick to a stupid routine that could never work. So sticking to religious times is just not going to work.

Having said that, already by six weeks, we actually can start to see a routine. And I’d like to just separate out three pieces of routine. The first one is bedtime routine.

The second one is feed routine. And the third is day sleep routine. Those are kind of classically the three pieces of routine that we could start to hang our hat on.

Like if we did it the Gina Ford way, it would be a routine in all three of those demands. But the reality is that routine needs to emerge a little bit more slowly and it takes time. But there are two elements of that routine that you can already start to be quite, not religious about, but quite firm on.

And the one is the bedtime routine and the other one is the day sleep routine and not linked to the clock, but rather linked to awake times. So let’s talk about those two. You’ve spoken about the bedtime routine.

Definitely by six weeks, I do encourage people to start a bedtime routine. And we actually see that little ones that have a very good bedtime routine from early on, even from six weeks onwards, actually sleep better at night long-term as well. And they do better with toddler sleep as well.

So moms, it is time, even though if you’ve got a little one who’s six weeks old or older, you can really start to put that bedtime routine in. The way that you build it usually is that you identify the time of day that they’re going to go to sleep, which is usually, let’s say seven o’clock or half past six, let’s say. You minus one hour and everything in that bedtime routine needs to fit into that one hour.

And that one hour is quite interesting. It can happen already from six weeks of age because their awake time is stretched a bit. And all the way through into the toddler years, you keep it at a one hour bedtime routine.

So it’s quite a long time of actually really focusing in. And it does give you time to do a lovely bath, a baby massage, a little book when she gets a little bit older, a feed, a nappy change. You know, you can fit it all into that hour.

The minute you’ve got kind of half an hour, you’re just going to, you’re going to lose it. And it goes for toddlers as well. They need that time.

And so I encourage parents to just carve out an hour at the end of their day. And it’s particularly good for moms who are working because it just is, it’s real intentional quality time. So I really do think that that’s a very important thing.

And then in terms of the day sleep routine, it’s according to awake time. So like you should at this age already be religiously watching those awake times. And when she gets to the end of her awake time, then it would be time to start to settle her to sleep and then put her down in the dark if possible.

So on a dim room. So those are two parts of routine that we can start to hang our hat on and start to be a little bit more married too. Then we would be, you know, a feed routine, which still has to be quite flexible where she’ll have growth spurts and it won’t always be three hours between feeds or four hours, whatever you’re doing.

So that’s the one piece. The other thing that came up in what you were talking about that I found very interesting was the intentionality around how you are spending time and carving out time for her. And I can remember being very anxious with my third child about exactly this and thinking, oh my gosh, I’ve got a grade one son.

I’ve got a grade double R double naught daughter and their lives are busy. Primary school is like the busiest time of your life as a mother. And now I’ve got a newborn and I, and all my friends had kids who were in grade one and grade double R. And it was like, you know, those are going to be all my friends.

And how am I ever going to make friends with kids? You know, how’s she ever going to have friends like that? And I became very, very intentional around creating a network and time for Emily. And it it wasn’t something that I necessarily wanted to prioritize for my life because I was loving all my friendships with my, you know, my older kids and friends and their parents. But I knew that for Emma had to do it.

And do you know that, I mean, she’s now an older teenager, my closest friends in the world are all the people who are the moms of her kids age. And it was just because I was super intentional about it. And I think that’s such an important thing is that, you know, it’s that intentionality around bedtime routines with her that you’ve carved out that time, but also actually making the time to make sure you’re in a mom and tots or clamber club group with her so that you can actually make those networks really important.

Yeah, exactly. I agree. I think, and it feels important to me.

And like I said, it was something that really weighed on me before she arrived because, you know, I’d had this kind of blissful, I mean, it wasn’t all blissful in terms of connection. It was a three years with Santee before she came along and yeah, it’s something I want to give her, you know, and myself, I suppose. And, you know, I think it kind of speaks a little bit to that.

There can be a little bit of mom guilt associated with that as well, where we kind of think, oh my gosh, you know, I definitely was slower with him or I definitely took him to more outings or we did whatever, you know, you will have those moments, but siblings, second children, and it can also work the other way, by the way, where you go, oh my gosh, he used to have that. And now he only gets half of that because I’ve got her, so it works both ways. There’s this maternal guilt for both kids.

But what happens when you have, when they have a sibling is that they get a different level of enrichment, you know, there’s different things that come. And so that little friendship, that person to play with, and that imaginary play friend, which they are going to have, they’re going to have, they’re there because they’re close enough. And they’re three years, three months or around there, they will be able to play imaginary play games together, which is really precious when that comes.

Yeah, I look forward to that day. Yeah, yeah. So you’ve had some of the joys this week.

What have been the challenges? This episode is brought to us by ParentSense, the all-in-one baby and parenting app that helps you make the most of your baby’s first year. Don’t you wish someone would just tell you everything you need to know about caring for your baby? When to feed them, how to wean them, and why they won’t sleep? ParentSense app is like having a baby expert on your phone, guiding you to parent with confidence. Get a flexible routine, daily tips and advice personalized for you and your little one.

Download ParentSense app now from your app store and take the guesswork out of parenting. So you’ve had some of the joys this week. What have been the challenges? I would say the thing, you know, it’s fairly stable from day to day.

I definitely weaned, so that’s good. But something that still is a bit of an issue, and it kind of has been all along, are these not necessarily false starts in the traditional sense of after 40 minutes or that does happen, is settling her to the point where she can kind of drift off to sleep and stay asleep. What’s happening is that I’ll put her down to bedtime and it happens from time to time with a nap as well, and she will go down drowsy.

Sometimes she is asleep because it’s maybe, you know, it’s the end of the day and she is more tired and sometimes she falls asleep with that second bit of the bottle. And she will then wake up as soon as a dummy falls out a few minutes later. And then we’ll play that game for, you know, up to an hour sometimes, which is obviously quite tedious.

But I also just don’t know if it’s normal and developmental or if it’s something I can do something about. Great. It’s a brilliant question.

So let’s talk about those two. They’re two very different types of false starts. The one is the false start that happens in the evening only.

And what happens with that false start is that they go down, they wake up 45 minutes later. And that’s because most of the day sleep cycles have been about 45 minutes of being asleep. And then they often will wake up.

So, and this is particularly so from around about this age, from about six weeks through until about six months, sometimes they can really not ever link their day sleep cycle. So they always do 45 minutes. And then they tend to do that in the evening.

And the solution for that, which we spoke about two episodes ago, if people want to listen more about it is to give her a top up feed. And I know that we’ve spoken about that and that’s not what you’re talking about today. So that is the false start one.

The other false start that you’re talking about is what we call catnapping. And that’s when little ones go down and they kind of seemingly fall asleep. And 10 to 15 minutes later, they wake up because either their dummies fallen out their mouth, or they just wake themselves up.

And then they do a cry. And that’s a problem. That’s a real problem, because it’s not the 45 minutes where they’ve had a whole sleep cycle, they’ve literally just settled into a little bit of sleep and then woken up.

So that particular catnap is driven by what’s called the hypnagogic startle. And it’s a reflex that we all have. It’s a little reflex that as we fall asleep, we go from a light state of sleep into a deep state of sleep, and we actually lose muscle tone.

And that’s because we don’t want our bodies to be acting out our dreams. So when we’re in a deep state of sleep, and we’re dreaming in that dream state of sleep, we actually don’t, we can’t act out on our dreams. So our body gets paralyzed.

And as it does that, as our muscles lose their muscle tone, we do a little startle. Now, you will definitely know that you’ve done one if you’ve been sitting on an airplane, you know, kind of you’ve been lulled by the white noise, you’ve dropped off, you didn’t even know you were asleep. And the next thing you do this massive jerk awake, you know, you know, kind of lift your head and jerk awake as your head falls.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s a hypnagogic startle. It is related usually to a 15 to 20, 15 to 20 minute catnap, and then they wake themselves up.

So a couple of ways that we can avoid it. The first thing is we can use swaddling, because swaddling is such a deep, containing kind of sense that it actually just keeps them in a deeper state of sleep. So swaddling works well, white noise works well, because it kind of keeps them again in a deeper state.

The other thing that works well is to make sure that they don’t get overtired, because you tend to be if you’re overtired, you also tend to have a bigger jerk reaction that kind of wakes you up. And then the other one is to actually sit with her. And this is what I recommend that you do in this particular case is to sit with her until she’s moved through it.

And it just helps them to not develop habits too much, because what you’re doing is you’re just kind of supporting her, maybe just leaving your hand on her, a little bit of deep pressure, and then just letting her see her through so she doesn’t actually wake up as she gets to the end of it. She’ll navigate it, it won’t be long before she actually works out that she can just keep going and staying asleep. So I would definitely be doing that particular one with her, sitting with her.

And then just in terms of the popping the dummy back, and a lot of moms are going to worry about because if you keep popping the dummy back, you’re going to have a dummy habit. And then before you know it, you’ll be back every 15 minutes through the whole night to put the dummy back. This is where your mind goes, of course.

And is that probably what you were thinking? Well, certainly it’s something that I did with Santi for many months. Yeah. So a couple of things there.

First of all, when they’re so little at six weeks, they’re not developing habits. So if she needs a dummy pop back in, that really isn’t the end of the world. The other thing that you can do is you can actually just watch her and see what she does if you sit with her.

And so very often, if you just sit with her and pat her lightly, as she comes into that light state of sleep, instead of crying for the dummy, she just will then continue through and sleep without actually needing the dummy. So let’s see if we can try and get her through it without needing to have the dummy popped back in. But if you do need to use the dummy, please don’t worry because she can’t form habits at this age.

We have habits that are around about 14 weeks and we’ll talk about it then when we get to that. Okay. Yeah, that’s good advice.

Certainly in my experience with her, the only thing that really has worked because we have the other elements in place, the white noise, the tight swaddling, and so on, is sitting with her and having my hand on her and essentially riding the waves and just sitting there and waiting for whatever it is, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, however long it takes to get her to settle. So that is a practical option and certainly has worked well until now. I just have to find the patience for it some nights, as I’m sure lots of moms can relate to.

Yeah, absolutely. And there is another thing that you can try and those are two devices. So it’s always good to have a little tool that if you can’t be there, the tool can do it for you.

And the two tools that can help, the one is a weighted blanket and weighted blankets can be quite controversial with little babies. They need to be really, really light so they’re not terribly heavy. The brand that actually I quite like is Nurture One.

They do the little Nurture One nests and they’ve also got a very light newborn and weighted blanket. So it’s not heavy at all. And that can be used on her and just cover her from her chest down and only if she’s sleeping on her back.

So you can certainly use that. I definitely used it with my third child. And then the other thing is actually a little cot vibrator or a little rocker and you can get them.

They’re often in white noise machines or some of our camcots come with them. I used to go to a baby city and actually go and like dig through. They used to have like cot vibrators that were supposed to come with camcots.

The people would buy the camcot and they didn’t take the vibrator. And I used to go and find them for all my patients. And they are fabulous.

You literally attach it to the bed or the cot or the pram or whatever she’s sleeping in. And it does a tiny little vibration, like a little vibration for her to get her to sleep. And they tend to do very, very well with that.

So that’s another little strategy you can find. And both of those mean you won’t have to sit there. Yeah, cool.

Now that’s very useful. Actually, we did borrow a vibrating device from a friend for Sandy and it never really did the trick, but I also wasn’t consistent with it. And I was probably also just completely losing my mind as a first time mom and was chopping and changing all the time.

And so I know a lot of my friends have had success with that. So I certainly will go and dig through the bins at baby city to try that. But yeah, sitting with her works well.

And I think it’s just a case of, as a lot of these things, allowing it to pass because eventually time does and it’s not so bad. It’s only when you’re in it and you would really like to be lying on the couch for five minutes. It feels impossible.

Exactly. And of course, the best thing about what you just said there is that because she’s your second time baby, you’ve got perspective. You just know these things are not going to last whereas first time you think, well, this is me.

This is the next 18 years. I’m going to be married to this. Exactly.

Yeah. And I think the other thing you were saying about not popping the dummy in immediately, I think that’s also really solid advice. I think that when she was very, very small, I was a little bit more militant about allowing her to cry for a minute or two.

And I think what’s happening is now I’m more sleep deprived, essentially. It’s starting to build that lack of sleep and the effects of it. So I’m more likely to take the shortcut, as it were.

So I think it certainly, and again, I know we’ll probably talk about it at some point, but sleep is a big thing for me because of what I went through with Santi. So I will have a little bit more discipline around trying to let her work through it on her own and not panicking. And yeah, exactly, popping the dummy back in immediately.

Is she sleeping in her own room, your room, your bed? What is your sleeping arrangement? She’s in her own room and in a cot and has been from day one. Okay. All right.

Excellent. So, I mean, again, this is one of the things that people have very strong opinions on that are very personal about whether or not your little one sleeps in their own room from day one, in your room, in their own space or actually in your bed with you. I was like you, so you and I were quite similar.

I liked my little ones to be in their own room. I knew I could hear them. They were close enough.

And I had a baby monitor. And I just, like you, I was so terrified of sleep deprivation. I’m a better mom when I’m rested.

And so it was better for my kids all around, you know, that I got a little bit more sleep. What’s nice about having them in their own room is that you can tend to listen a little bit more. Well, we know that moms do tend to listen a little bit more.

And it’s that listening for about one minute, you know, just like literally looking at your phone as they wake up and just seeing, okay, I’ll give her 60 seconds and see what she does. And very often they’re just making a noise in their sleep. And particularly with first time babies, we respond so quickly, you know, to quickly get that dummy in before it escalates to a cry.

And then it’s going to be 20 minutes of settling them. You know, our mind is amazing at how it catastrophizes the situation. This is going to be so terrible for the rest of my life, but actually it really isn’t.

And so just listening and letting her sort herself out is a really good idea. And then quickly before we go, tell me how things with Santi, how is he coping with the transition to being a big brother? He’s doing very well. I think, funnily enough, the thing that was most difficult for him and that set off the most kind of behavioral changes, albeit they did turn out to be temporary, was the second time he went into hospital.

So the first time I went in obviously was to have her and that had happened overnight because I had gone into labor. So he’d woken up in the morning and we weren’t there. He managed quite well when I came home and was very excited to meet the baby.

Then when it happened a second time, because I’d had to take her into hospital a week or so later, the fallout from that was much more severe. And funnily enough, he was a lot more concerned about Aurelia not being there than about me not being there. And so when I came home from the hospital for a break one of the days that she was in, the first question he asked was, where’s baby sister? Not, hi mommy, I’ve missed you so much.

It was quite interesting. And then we just found in the sort of probably two weeks after that, he was very fragile. Anything could set him off and there was a lot of tears and a lot of tantrums and meltdowns over nothing and He just he’s not so you know that was a real kind of marker for us and so we tried really hard to make sure he was getting a lot of connection and doing stuff with him one-on-one and you know reading stories with him and just really spending time with him as much as we could and it has settled now. So he’s back to normal as it were unfortunately he’s on school holidays so it’s incredibly hectic at home for the next few weeks but that’s you know all moms know what that’s like but it is a whole different ballgame when you’ve got two to wrangle.

But yeah luckily we have a lot of good help and he is yeah he gets lots of outside time playing in the park and when he’s home he loves to be with her. This morning he helped me feed her for you know five minutes and he loses interest but otherwise he’s a happy chappy so yeah he’s doing very well I would say. Yeah you know it’s so interesting that separation and you know separation is it’s such a big thing in all of our lives you know that you know and for him being separated from her and separate from you will trigger a whole lot of behavior and I think it’s so important and so good that you recognize that as the source of the difficult behavior because you know when you sleep deprived it’s often it’s quite easy to label the behavior rather than what lies behind it and you know there’s a lot of evidence that reflective parenting which is understanding the state behind the behavior or the reason for the behavior is just one of the most protective things for children emotionally because if we reflect on what is what is behind the behavior we then don’t respond to the behavior in the same way we don’t label them as naughty, difficult, tiresome, you know tantrumy, terrible twos you know all of those words that tend to get allocated to children when they are behaving out or acting out.

So yeah so lots of reflective parenting and then also some one-on-one time which you guys are doing and I think I might have mentioned to you Watch, Wait and Wonder before which is just spending that really deep time with him and for moms whose little ones do battle with this transition separation so any transition can bring separation anxiety like mom goes back to work, mom has a new baby, dad goes off on a business trip, you know whatever it is, nanny leaves another one, anything like that can trigger some separation anxiety behaviors and Watch, Wait and Wonder is just wonderful. It’s a situation where you literally have a special box of toys that only come down for that time, cell phones are put away, there’s no mobile devices in the room and you literally spend 15 minutes, it’s 15 minutes of just watching how they play and you know very often kids can get quite confused as to first of all are you sitting still because they never see you sitting still you know and are you not going to instruct me and tell me what to do because they’re so used to that but it’s actually just watching them and it’s really it’s an amazing discipline and when moms do it and dads they just feel such a sense of relief because it’s wow this you know this is magical time it really is so try a little bit of that as well. Yeah I think making space for stuff like that is so important, it’s so difficult especially at this phase of life but it is so worthwhile I completely agree and you know the proof is in the pudding I mean you can see it in their behavior when you take the time to spend really good quality time with them especially allowing them to sort of dictate the activity you know the tantrums and things are definitely less intense so yeah it is it works.

And you know if you measured it time for time so let’s take it that it’s 15 minutes which feels like a massive chunk because in that 15 minutes you could have put on the tv for him and done some email or you could have done the laundry or you know caught your 40 wings yourself whatever it is you know you it’s time the reality is that on the flip side of that time is a whole lot of time that you actually do save things like damage control around temper tantrums I mean damage control around a temper tantrum will almost always be five minutes so three temper tantrums in a day equates to that watch wait and wonder time and you know so you almost save on and you know it happens in parenting a lot so another example of that is imaginary play like it can take a lot of effort to get a two to three year old to have to access their imagination you know because you have to really play the game with them initially so you’ve got to pretend that you are something and they’ve got to pretend there’s something and you’ve got to really play with them and model how to do imaginary play but once they’ve got it they’ll have they’ll have an imaginary play friend that they can go and play for two hours with you know and it really saves you a lot of time in the long run so a lot of the things that we do I mean another one is a bedtime routine a bedtime routine like I said earlier at the beginning of the podcast an hour people are going what I don’t have an hour in my day to do it but I promise you you’ll catch that hour through the middle of the night in sleep or when you’ve got an 18 month old who you’ll be able to put down because you are you know somewhere you just need them to go to sleep quickly because you’ve got to get out they’ll be able to do it you know so it saves you you know all of these kind of almost investments you make in time so yeah it swings yeah I think that’s actually true yeah well it’s been brilliant to chat thank you so much I’m very interested to hear how it goes next week I’m sure you’re going to see hundreds of little smiles coming through and so we look forward to hearing about seven week old Aurelia next week thanks Meg me too lovely to chat thanks Julia thanks to everyone who joined us we will see you the same time next week until then download parent sense app and take the guesswork out of parenting