Using water after The Birth

   In the first few days after the birth, your baby will be acclimatising to life outside the womb as you begin to get to know each other. It is best to keep your baby close to the warmth of your body and the familiar sound of your heartbeat most of the time.

    Being together, both during the day and at night, will help you to learn to respond intuitively to your baby’s needs. At first, most of your energy will need to be focused on your relationship with the baby, while feeding is established and you recover from the birth.

    Try to ensure, ahead of time, that you have adequate support at home so that you are nourished and taken care of and can devote your full attention to taking care of your baby. Let others attend to the shopping, cooking and housework, and delegate these responsibilities wherever possible.

    Your baby will need to be fed at frequent intervals throughout the 24 hours, which ;means that you will need to rest or sleep when the baby sleeps to conserve and build up your energy.

    Adjusting to parenthood in the early weeks is both challenging and rewarding. You and your partner can expect to experience many intense feelings, highs and lows, at this time. Getting used to interrupted sleep can be difficult and learning to enjoy and respond to your baby should be your priority.

   Try to surrender to the baby’s rhythms. If you settle into a comfortable communication with your baby with minimal conflict, there will be room for everything else in due course.

The first three months

   In the first six weeks the pregnancy hormones diminish and your uterus retracts back into the pelvis, shedding its inner lining as a blood-stained discharge called lochia.The vaginal tissues heal and the muscles and ligaments of your pelvis, abdomen and back return to normal.

    It may take several months before your body recovers fully. While you are breast feeding you can expect to retain some extra weight to supply you with strength and energy.

   Your pituitary gland produces the hormones prolactin and oxytocin to promote milk supply and breast feeding. Ovulation and menstruation are suppressed by prolacting during the breasting feeding period.

   The more you feed during the 24 hour period, the longer it usually takes before menstruation and fertility return. However, the timing is variable in different women and contraceptive precautions need to be taken if you wish to avoid another pregnancy.

   While not always the case, many women who are breast feeding also experience a loss of libido and sexual drive after birth due to the suppression of ovarian oestrogen hormones and the intensity of the new relationship with the baby. This can be difficult for the father who is also adjusting to new parenthood.

    Getting to know your baby in the early weeks is a great joy. At first, your baby is likely to spend most of the time sleeping between feeds. Sometimes, babies who have had a very gentle and tranquil birth are notably calm and adapt to life after birth with ease so that the transition into parenting flows smoothly.

    However, this is not always the case and the emotional and physical challenges of these early weeks may be considerable for both parents. There are bound to be times when new parenthood seems easy and others when you will find it quite demanding and exhausting.

   This depends on a variety of factors. Some babies have little difficulty in getting used to the new activities of digestion and excretion and the stimulation of their new environment and are calm and contented most of the time.

    However, most babies become more wakeful at around two weeks of age and will cry more as they learn to communicate. In these early weeks there is a kind of ‘settling in’ period and many babies have a fretful patch in the day when they may cry incessantly.

   Often, but not always, this occurs in the evening. It is at these times that parents may feel despairing or overwhelmed and most need support and encouragement.

    However, your baby will gradually settle and the peaceful times will eventually increase and more than compensate for the difficulties. Given time and patience life will settle down and become easier.

   Fathers can also expect to have a mixture of intense feelings in the early postnatal period. While the new baby is a source of immense pleasure and pride, there also may be times when fathers may feel irrational feelings of jealousy or anger or a feeling of exclusion from the intense relationship between mother and baby. The father may also have new financial pressures to bear and greater responsibility in the home

    Everyone who has a new baby goes through these emotional fluctuations in the early weeks and months and most manage to deal with them. However, if the difficulties are overwhelming, help from family, friends or from a professional may be necessary.

    Sometimes the challenges of parenting can bring unresolved or suppressed feelings to the surface from your own childhood. If these are understood and dealt with compassionately, then parents may feel doubly rewarded, not only by the joy of having given birth to a child, but also by the satisfaction of the kind of emotional ‘rebirth’ that follows after resolving these issues.

Nourishing yourself

• Get plenty of rest. Sleeping in bed with your baby at night is a way to make the night feeds less tiring. Also it is wise to ensure that you rest or nap in the day. It is not necessary to change the baby’s nappy at night unless it is soiled or the baby has a rash.

• Eat well – your own nourishment is vital at this time if you are to nourish your baby successfully. Bear in mind that everything you eat goes through to the milk. A good meal and a rest at midday help to boost the milk supply for the evening feeds.

• A balanced whole food diet with plenty of fresh foods and proteins, spread over three good meals a day, is essential. Some foods you eat may irritate your baby. These include alcohol, highly spiced vegetables especially in the brassica family. Nicotine from smoking is also an irritant.

• Avoid loneliness. If you are on your own with your baby, seek our the company of other moths, friends and family when you need to, or join a local postnatal support group.

• Communicate openly with your partner so that you share both the joys and difficulties you encounter and try to understand each other’s needs, making time to talk and listen and enjoy each other’s company.

• Exercise regularly, taking walks in the fresh air with your baby. At home, practising a few simple yoga exercises, breathing, relaxation and meditation on a daily basis is essential.

   As soon as you feel like it, you can return to the water, bathing and doing the exercises in chapter four. Perhaps a friend or your partner can accompany you to hold your baby while you swim.

   This will help enormously to raise your energy level and enhance relaxation and health. The same water exercise programme can be used after the birth, following the specific instructions for the postnatal period.

Your baby after birth

    In the first hours after birth your baby will be alert and will then fall into a profound sleep and feed intermittently. The new processes of digestion and excretion begin, aided by the colostrum produced by your breasts in the first few days before the milk comes in.

   This prepares the baby’s bowel for digesting milk and has a laxative effect to clear the dark green merconium which is present in the baby’s bowels during pregnancy.

    Colostrum also provides your baby with antibodies needed to cope with the bacteria which are normally present in the environment. Continuous sucking of the highly nutritious colostrum in these first few days in the wakeful periods, both during the day and at night, will help to give your child the best possible start.

    The baby is undergoing a tremendous adaption, acquiring knowledge and new skills at a rate which would overwhelm most adults.  It is not surprising that some babies find is easier than others to get into a harmonious rhythm.

    Your baby may be restless or cry at times as these new body functions are established. Some babies adapt quickly and others can be quite unsettled for most of the first three months.

    As the days go by your baby will spend more time awake, increasingly interested in communicating with people and stimulated by the environment.

   A baby has a wide variety of states of consciousness which range from deep sleep, rapid eye movement sleep with dreams, light sleep almost awake, awake and calm, awake and restless, awake and crying.

     The calm, alert state lasts for hours after birth and then occurs for short periods in the next few weeks, gradually becoming longer. You will soon learn to recognise and anticipate the calm times and enjoy them together.

Communicating with your baby is both an intuitive and learned skill and within a few weeks you will have learnt to interpret her messages and understand her needs.