Pregnancy and Birth

Pregnancy
Brandon was born in December 1994. His pregnancy had been fairly straight forward, except for my constant "morning sickness" which stayed right up until birth. Brandon was very active as an unborn baby - he used to kick and throw himself around, giving me the most amazing stomach-turning flutters. He was more active at night time, I suspect this was due to the fact that in my final months of pregnancy I was working night shift. I developed pre-eclampsia (toxaemia of pregnancy) and my blood pressure rose somewhat dramatically in the final months of pregnancy. I was two weeks "overdue" and with the combination of these two factors, the doctor decided to induce labour.

Birth
Easier said than done! I am one of those women that just does not go into labour naturally, and it took a few doses of induction medicine for things to start happening. At which point they did. It was strange because the midwife was worried about Brandon´s lack of foetal movements during labour, I personally felt that he was just relaxing. There were no other signs of him being in distress. He was born with vacuum extraction assistance and came into the world with an Apgar Score of 9/10 at birth and 10/10 afterwards.

After the Birth
We had a lot of problems with gastric reflux and breastfeeding in hospital. Despite the midwives´ good intentions, I finally decided "enough was enough" - we were getting nowhere, after some period of time, Brandon did not want to latch on, nor suck, and our bonding was becoming comprised by nasogastric tubes for supplemental feeds and third-party insensitive input. He settled quite well with formula in a bottle although the gastric reflux continued. Coming home was a rude shock - not just the normal crazy adjustment period, but the start of no sleep for all, horrific colic, and a screaming unsettled baby. During the day, as he grew a little bigger, he became settled more, but rarely napped, always got up at the same exact time, and was alert, demanding attention constantly, bright as a button but needing what seemed an excessive amount of visual input. Every time I moved out of his line of sight, he screamed. He loved to watch the world go by, but hated to be moved, picked up and cuddled or go driving in the car in his baby seat. He would arch his back out and stiffen when I picked him up and cuddled him. Yet he cried if I put him down even for a second. It was a constant process of elimination to find out what was paining him so. In the end, despite input from the Child Health Nurse, I just accepted it and hoped he would "grow out of it".