The [Dutch] first six months

- How old is your little one?
- She's 4 months old.
- I have an 11-month-old. Oh, it goes so fast.
- Everyone says that, but I find that it goes really slowly. It takes them so long to develop! Four months and she can't even move herself.
- Be careful what you wish for.

Advice! Advice! Advice! My God do you receive a lot of advice when you have a young baby. Sleep training, breast feeding, formula, co-sleeping, vitamins, vaccinations, western medicine, eastern medicine.

With which parenting method do I most identify? Do I subscribe to the attachment parenting package? Or is detachment parenting better for her self-esteem? If I pick and choose as I please will it confuse her?

I had four friends all apply different varieties of parenting techniques to their babies, generally adjusting their approach as they learnt what worked for them and their baby, and I am more convinced than ever that parenting choices need to match your own style -- you have a better chance of succeeding and being consistent if it's natural to you. And be willing to let go of parenting ideas that just are not working for your baby.

What worked for us? After health & safety, we had the following priorities:

Sleep without props 
Our first priority was to get our little girl sleeping well. We decided that all of us, including the baby, could cope with everything else if we were well rested. We implemented the "Sleep sense program", and followed the rules. We established a little routine around her bedtime and naps, and though sticking to it was woefully, painfully difficult, by 8.5 weeks old, she was miraculously sleeping 12 hours through the night. This method did not work for any of our friends.

Breastfeed exclusively, almost 
Our little one was breastfed and periodically given formula. If I wanted to go to the gym or have brunch with friends, my husband simply gave her a bottle and I didn't sweat it. For a while I tried to pump and keep up with her, and there were weeks -- perhaps even months -- when she was exclusively drinking breast milk, but it was stressful to keep up. I didn't find that the added health benefits of being exclusively breastfed exceeded the health benefits of an un-stressed mother.

Alternate who puts the baby to bed and who gets to sleep
For us, it really worked to be co-parents, and since we weren't breastfeeding her to sleep this meant that [theoretically] anyone could put her to bed. Mama. Papa. Oma. Opa. Babysitters? Date night? Yes, it's all possible. However, whoever is responsible for the baby that night is responsible for the whole night. This way rather than having two semi-tired parents, you have one well-rested parent and one sacrificed parent (who gets to catch up on sleep the next night).

Breast and bottle, every day 
Even when she was exclusively drinking breast milk, I would pump and give her a bottle at least once a day (when your baby sleeps 12 hours a night, you have to pump before you go to bed anyways -- that bottle would become the next evening's last bottle before bed time). Most of our friends who exclusively breastfed had the experienced that their babies stopped taking a bottle after just a week or so. This meant that they -- and only they -- could put the baby to bed, feed the baby every 3 hours, and, well, I don't know a baby who is exclusively breastfed who sleeps through the night.

Papadag (Papa Day)
Every Saturday is Papadag, when my husband is the primary care person for our baby girl. I sleep in, go for a jog, or even rock climbing (pictured above, when my baby was 3.5 months old) and they have the whole morning together just the two of them. We often do a lot of activities together as a family also on Saturdays, but having alone time between papa and baby -- without mama interfering or managing things -- has been endlessly valuable in our family. There are too many benefits to name, especially for our baby.

Pause & listen 
More than anything, young babies need unconditional love from their parents. You can't spoil a young baby, they don't have wants, just needs. However, their only way to express their needs, big or small, is to cry. And though your first instinct might be to go to them immediately when they cry, to hand them the toy they are reaching for, I learnt to pause and let her try to handle it herself first. Then she slowly develops the self-confidence she needs to help herself.

Don't be a judgmental parent
What I love most about being an ex-pat parent is that I'm surrounded by contrasting and varying parenting ethos, with no real societal pressure to conform to one method over another. I enjoy direct exposure to Dutch, British, Portuguese, Filipino and many other parenting styles and secrets. I have learnt so much from these families, and we have fostered a community of genuine openness, freely comparing parenting ideas, finding out what works for whom, and not judging each other.

I've learnt about the reasonable side of the anti-child-vaccinations movement from a friend who is not vaccinating her baby (my closing remarks were "But, don't you ever wonder to yourself 'if there was a nuclear holocaust, maybe the vaccinated babies with formaldehyde in their blood might better withstand destruction?'", I got to compare the hands-on experiences of one friend practicing child-lead weaning with another who described her weaning technique as "as passive a possible -- we practically tie her hands behind her back when she's feeding!"

Work three days a week
The Netherlands has the shortest maternity leave in Europe (16 weeks), but when you return to work you have the right to keep your position and shorten your work week. I was really happy to go back to work when my daughter was 6 months old, to have something that was mine, where I could have adult conversations. After a month, the novelty wore off, but at least I feel very balanced, for now.

5 months to crawling is wonderful! 
When they are so little, it was quite distressful how fragile they are. When they're 4-5 months they are sitting up, moving things and their little personalities really start to shine. What a special time! But just as you're feeling confident in your decisions for your baby, they start to move a little, and then they lose their fear of the unknown, and then they start to have wants and require some boundaries, and it's a whole new basket of skills and judgment for mama and papa.

My [Dutch] first weeks with baby

"You must feed the baby every three hours, above all other needs"
"You must listen to the baby's rhythm"
"The baby needs to eat a lot, or it won't have the energy to wake up"
"Feedings should never go more than 45 minutes, even if the baby hasn't eaten very much"
"Don't use a bottle to supplement breastmilk"
"Your feedings are taking too long, you must use a bottle"
"The baby should lay against your body with its head aligned with its stomach horizontally when feeding"
"Always have the stomach below the head when feeding"

In The Netherlands, new parents are supported by:

• A maternity nurse, who spends 6-8 hours in your home with you for the first 8-10 days of your baby's life
• A midwife, who visits you at your home twice in the first week
• The consultation bureau, whose nurses and doctors monitor your child's development until it is 4 years old
• Your family doctor
• Hospital staff from the hospital where you gave birth, if applicable

Each of these trained medical professionals gives you advice, with absolute conviction. Each piece of advice conflicts with the advice of the other trained medical professionals.

Eventually we realised that caring for a newborn baby was a matter of blindly re-prioritising dozens of "essential" needs, and blindly judging the validity of conflicting medical advice.

The Internet
- Is Amy in labour?
- Yes! And I'm on call to google anything that the doctor says that sounds dodgy.

I don't know how people -- especially expats -- had babies before the internet. Most anglo expats have more faith in their own medical systems than the country where they live, and whenever any information comes into conflict with our intuition / upbringing, we google it.

• Does she seriously need to be woken up every 3 hours? And for how long?
• How do you use a baby wrap / sling?
• How long before we can use a soother?
• How long does expressed breastmilk last? Formula?
• How to sooth cramps?
• When is sex safe again?
• Why doesn't colic exist in The Netherlands? And how long does colic last?
• When does this start becoming rewarding?

We quickly learnt, however, that Google does not simplify the whole conflicting-baby-advice issue.

Doing the math

Our Dutch maternity care nurses kept us on a busy Dutch schedule for our baby's first days. We were instructed to feed the baby every 3 hours, calculated from the beginning of the feed.

Every three hours = 8 X 3 hour cycles per 24 hour period
A feeding takes a minimum of 45 minutes, and up to 1.5 hours
Burping, soothing, and putting baby back to sleep takes a minimum of 15 minutes, and up to 1.5 hours
The baby should sleep a minimum of 16 hours a day = 16 / 8 cycles per day = baby needs to sleep 2 hours per cycle
Waking baby enough to feed takes a minimum of 15 minutes, and up to 45 minutes

[Horrible realisation]: If baby takes more than 45 minutes to feed, and more than 15 minutes to wake up + put back to sleep, baby cannot have minimum 16 hours of sleep per day! And each time baby gets less than 2 hours of sleep in an interval, baby is impossible to wake up for next feeding, perpetuating the cycle!

What was happening is the wake-feed-burp/cramps-fall-asleep cycle was generally taking 2-2.5 hours, giving baby a mere 30 minutes to an hour of sleep per cycle. Which was completely contrary to her natural rythm which meant we were constantly battling with her.

Battling to wake her up.
Battling to feed in under 45 minutes, but not so quickly that it aggravated her cramps and/or burping.
Battling to put her to sleep.

With both the maternity nurse and the midwife in the room we demanded that they make a decision for us. What is a priority: feeding every three hours vs. feeding the baby fully at each feeding vs. letting the baby sleep uninterrupted? We never really got an answer except "follow the baby's natural rythms...but make sure you wake her often enough to feed".

Feeling good
While I was on my mandatory 4-weeks-before-due-date maternity leave, my biggest job was to feel good. Sure, I had lots of little projects -- knitting a baby blanket, completing my Dutch exams, enjoying the sun, riding my bike daily -- but my primary responsibility was to feel good. In fact, my midwife repeated several times in one visit "You must take more naps!"

If I felt tired, I should cancel my plans and take a nap. If I had lots of energy, I should go out on my bike. Don't feel like cooking? Don't!

After birth, I was much more in need of care, and while I did have 3 people to help me, I was the sole food source for a little creature who needs to eat every 3 hours. And it often takes 2 just to feed her. Even though my best-husband-in-the-world (yours is too!) was doing literally everything else -- changing diapers, soothing cramps, bath time, waking her up, putting her to sleep, feeding me -- it was really a struggle to keep up with feeding her and recovering me.

- How's motherhood?
- So far I mostly lay, bleeding and feeding.

I really under-appreciated the damage to one's body that labour causes. I think we're all so focused on the labour itself and, most importantly, meeting the little "familiar stranger" (borrowed from my friend Sara) we've spent the last 9 months dreaming about, that we don't imagine how mom's going to feel after birth.

Given that we only really had 30 minutes - 2 hours maximum every cycle to wash everything, feed ourselves, wash ourselves, and sleep, the only way to survive was to cut corners. And the pressure to sleep on cue, eat on cue and pee on cue resulted in me loosing more sleep, eating less, and being too lost to remember to drink water.

Six weeks
The one consistency that seemed to pop up across medical advice, Google, and frantic phone calls to our families was that everything seems to come together at six weeks.

Baby starts to smile around 6 weeks
Sleep patterns emerge around 6 weeks
Mom's pelvis is healed around 6 weeks
Baby's cramps ease around 6 weeks
Mom stops bleeding around 6 weeks

It doesn't seem imaginable, but here we are at six weeks (which feels like forever) beginning sleep training with a smiling, cramp-less baby!