On a babywearing blog, I suppose the argument I’m going to make here isn’t that surprising. It’s the cure, not the cause.

Here’s my story: I have a high needs baby.  She’s mindblowing. There is only one person she wants to hold her (and, sometimes, touch her): me. At 11 months, it’s been a long and draining year so far. At first I wore her because it was the only way she could be comfortable. She can sit independently and move around quite a bit these days, her reflux is largely resolved, so I don’t have to wear her so often and as such haven’t been (see the injured shoulder saga).

But she’s still very, very anxious with other people and is unwilling to let anyone else care for her. Funnily enough, on the days I wear her all day long (she comes to work with me once a week), she’s as happy as a clam.

Here’s my plan: I’m going to wear her. I’m going to wear her every opportunity I get- not just when she asks for it, not just when she needs it. I’m going to actively hold her as much as she’ll permit. If holding my clingy baby is the cause of her anxiety, then her behaviour won’t change. However, if (as is my theory) responding to her need to be near me and embracing it will help her grow through this stage, we should see some improvement soon.

I’ll report back soon and let you know how it’s going. (Wish me luck!)

Do you have a high-needs child? How do you cope? What’s your strategy for dealing with a child who needs you All. The. Time.? Leave a comment and let us know!

She’s a’coming and she’s going to be a biggun.

Where: Parliament House, Canberra (Australia)

When: 7th September, 2009,  11:30 am.

Why: It’s Homebirth Australia’s rally.

It turns out that a lot of babywearers are either homebirthers or supportive of a woman’s right to birth at home. Many of us are going. Are you coming too?

This is the first in a series of posts aimed at helping parents with special needs. Here, we look at babywearing with a shoulder injury.

You’d like to wear your baby or older child, but red-hot pain is holding you back. Depending on the extent of your injury, it may be possible for you to wear your child while supporting the healing of the afflicted area. In this post, I’ll take you through babywearing with an injured shoulder(s). It’s an area of personal experience for me. My right shoulder has had (at various times) bursitis, tendonitis, a thinned distal portion of the rotator cuff, dense calcifcation in the tendons, possible cartilage damage and “changes to the tendonopathy of the region”, whatever that means. I didn’t understand much of the preceding, but my GP summed it up nicely when she looked at the xrays: “this shoulder is stuffed“.

If you have any injury, shoulder or otherwise, it’s important to define exactly what the problem is. I’m going to divide the possible problems into two areas: reduced range of movement and reduced ability to weight-bear. Each of these can occur independently or together, but the consequences for babywearing are quite diffferent.

Reduced Range of Movement

A reduced range of movement can occur for many reasons, but the main consequence for babywearing is difficulty in getting the child into the carrier in the first place. In this case, the simpler the better. In my experience with shoulder injuries, long wraps were disastrous- passing fabric to and fro was very painful and practically impossible. Simpler carries and carriers like short wraps, mei tais or SSCs were easier to get on with less pain. Ring slings and pouches may also be an option if only one shoulder is injured and you can bear weight on the uninjured shoulder.

When wrapping, your strategy depends on what portions of your range of movement are affected. Carries starting with a chestbelt may provide support while you wrap through your available range of movement. Alternatively, back carries tied under the wearees bottom may be impossible.

Lifting a child onto your back may be difficult in itself. It may be worthwhile reviewing other options if your regular method doesn’t work. Superman tossing is my usual method of initiating a back carry, but when lifting my arm above my head was intensely painful, lifting 9kg of baby didn’t seem sensible. The hip scooting method proved to be an acceptable compromise.

Reduced ability to bear weight on the affected shoulder

Let me be very clear: if it’s painful to wear your child, it may be wise not to do so if you want the affected area to heal. However, if wearing is important to you, there may be ways to get around the problem if you are unable to bear weight on the affected area. There are several options:

1. Avoid the area altogether. If you have two injured shoulders, it may be well worth looking into torso carries and carriers, which will eliminate any weight on your shoulder. These include torso carries with long, short wraps and straight-strapped podaegi. If you have a single injured shoulder, you have the additional option of one-shoulder carries in a short wrap, ring sling or pouch and modifying certain wrap carries (such as the BWCC with chestbelt) to avoid the affected shoulder (this was my personal favourite for extended carries. If anyone wants to know how it’s done, hit me up in the comments section!).

2. Reduce the weight on the affected area by distributing it to other parts of your body. Depending on the extent of your injury, you may still choose to bear weight on the affected shoulder(s). Carriers such as SSCs, chunei and mei tais tied tibetan or with straps crossed in front will distribute weight to your hips and across your chest, reducing the weight on your shoulders. Wrap carries with chest belts, tied tibetan or tied at the waist will do the same.

3. Teach your partner to babywear, put your feet up and wait to get better. More seriously, you may need to re-evaluate your babywearing goals. In my case, it became apparent that attempting to tandem wear 20kg+ of children at once was no longer the best option. I bought a better stroller and put babywearing on the needs-only list for awhile. It doesn’t make me a bad person! And, as a result, I’m now able to lift a coffee cup without wincing.  It was one of my better decisions!

Hopefully, this post gave you some ideas for babywearing with a shoulder injury. Look out for our next installment on babywearing with a back injury.

Have you continued to babywear with an injury or disability? What were the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them? Leave a comment and let us know!

Thanks for bearing with us. I’ve shovelled my way out and I’m back to blogging!

 Stay tuned for babywearing while injured (ask me how I know), slip knot tutorials, high needs kids, more on breastfeeding hands free, the mother of all slingmeets and plenty of other exciting babywearing blogging!

This is a story of how babywearing helped us cope with a sticky situation, in this case an unplanned birth…

A year ago yesterday, my wife Mel was 37 week pregnant with our third son. Our two older boys (then-5-year-old Sam and then-22-month-old Isaac) were born exactly on the due date, so we thought that this baby would follow in the footsteps of his brothers. We were planning to have this baby at home with the help of our lovely midwife, who helped us birth Isaac in the Birth Centre. My mother-in-law, who lives overseas, was planning to be here a week before the due date so she can help out with the older boys just like she did when Isaac was born in the middle of the night (Sam was fast asleep then). She had called earlier in the week to ask if she should come earlier, but we confidently said this baby is staying put for a few more weeks. Little did we know…

I was in the office at 1pm when my phone rang. Mel was on the other line, and she sounded calm but I could sense worry in her voice. She told me that she just woke up from a brief nap with Isaac (she had put Isaac to sleep on her back in a woven wrap as per usual and fell asleep after she put him down on the bed) when she felt a gush of liquid between her legs. She thought her water had broken but when she looked it was blood, and quite a lot of it. It reminded her of the bleeding episode she had at 12 weeks. She was also having some contraction pain. I told her to call the midwife and rushed home. When I got home, I found Mel squatting at the foot of our bed. She was clearly in pain but was calmly breathing through what she felt were regular contractions. The bleeding was still continuing. Not long after I arrived Isaac woke up from his nap. He was a bit cranky and wanted to be carried. I grabbed a nearby ring sling and popped him in a hip carry so I can attend to Mel. He instantly calmed down in the sling.

Our midwife came soon after and did a check of the blood and said that she was not comfortable with the amount of blood loss so far (definitely more than a bloody show) and that something could be happening with the placenta. She gave us a choice: we could wait and see how it would progress at home, or we could go to the Birth Centre so if something else more urgent were to happen there was already help standing by (the Birth Centre is right next to the maternity unit inside the Royal Brisbane Hospital). We decided that the latter was the best thing to do under the circumstances, so I popped Isaac on my back in a Mei Tai so I could have my hands free to quickly pack our bags. By this time the contractions were stronger and Mel was clearly in a lot of pain. We left home just before 2:30pm. Mel was squatting on the back seat and Isaac was in the car seat next to her, watching quietly as his mum let out screams of pain every few minutes and his dad driving like a maniac through Brisbane afternoon traffic. We arrived at the hospital 20 minutes later (though it seemed more like forever to me!). I parked at the emergency space in front of the hospital, quickly threw Isaac on my back in the Mei Tai (in probably my fastest-ever back carry as Mel was yelling at me to open the back door because of child-lock!), and helped Mel up to the fifth-floor Birth Centre unit. It was an interesting experience seeing the reaction of an elevator full of people to a pajama-wearing, bath-towel-toting woman in obvious labour pain, who was trying her best not to scream in front of strangers and clutching the arm of a man wearing a toddler on his back. And of course the damn elevator had to stop at every.single.floor all the way up to level 5! I felt like yelling, “Yes people, she IS in labour! Now move out of the frickin’ way!!”

When we got to the Birth Centre our midwife had already set up the bean bag and mats on the floor just like the way Mel preferred it when she gave birth to Isaac. She had also started filling the birthing tub as we had also planned for a waterbirth. But when Mel dropped on her knees everything suddenly progressed very quickly (and blood was still coming out of her in gushes) and suddenly the head was crowning! Isaac witnessed the whole commotion from my back in the Mei Tai and got very excited when he saw the baby’s head and wanted to get down so he could see it up close. I didn’t think that was a good idea so I just turned around to give him a better view. The midwife asked if I wanted to catch the baby like last time, but I didn’t want to risk having an extra pair of little hands helping out. With one final push, our third son Efram slid out onto the midwife’s hands and his loud cry immediately accompanied our tears of joy. That was 3:10pm, only 20 minutes after we had arrived at the hospital. He latched on to his mum like a pro and breastfed for a long time afterwards while the three of us quietly marvelled at this little creature who clearly wanted to make a grand entrance into this world. I continued wearing Isaac on my back for about an hour after the birth as he became a little distraught when he saw the new little person in the room. It was only when his brother Sam joined us after school that he was happy to go down. Sam was completely surprised to see his new baby brother who was still in mummy’s tummy in the morning, and was a bit disappointed as he had been looking forward to participating in the whole birth experience at home but just missed out.

After carrying a 12kg toddler for a few action-packed hours, my body was very relieved when it only had to wear a 2.75kg newborn. After a big feed, Efram slept blissfully in the sling for 3 hours until we all went home early that evening.

An examination of the placenta afterwards revealed a small rupture, which was probably what caused the bleeding and triggered the labour.  It was a rollercoaster of an afternoon for sure, and while we didn’t get the calm homebirth we were hoping for, in the end we got the same desired outcome: a healthy mum, a healthy baby, and a relatively fast labour (plus a happy toddler and a slightly tired dad). Babywearing certainly made handling a toddler during the whole ordeal a lot easier, at least for me.

Has babywearing ever gotten you out of a sticky situation? Share your experience in the comments below!

Please support the future of homebirth and private midwifery in Australia: http://www.homebirthaustralia.org/

I’ve had a lot of carriers go through my hands. I often refer to the beginnings of my retail business as “dealing to support my own addiction”. But I don’t think I’ve ever owned a purple sling. And yet, this is the colour that seems to sell best. What the? Certainly got me thinking about the reasons for popular colour choices.

My gorgeous boy in a purple carrier - not from my own stash!

With soft structured carriers, I’ve noticed that manly colours do well: olive greens, beige, blue. I’ve also noticed that light colours do better in summer than dark, and the reverse is true for winter. In doing demos, people often talk about choosing a colour their male partner will wear too, or dad is there helping pick it out. Possibly it helps that I point out the dirt-hiding benefits of those colours, and that fading is more noticeable on black carriers.

Stretchy wraps are another case of dad-friendly colours being popular. I’ve yet to see anyone choose a pink stretchy wrap. Beige, mid blue and green are the most popular colours. There may be some changing fashions here: three years ago, navy was my best seller, with maroon/burgundy/red the next best seller.

Mei tais often have the benefit of being reversible. So mum sometimes goes for a very girly print on the feature panel, and dad can just wear the reverse side if he feels threatened by florals. But still, pink and shimmery fabrics aren’t popular. People go for stripes or abstract prints. Perhaps looking for something that will suit their every mood or outfit, rather than multiple slings in case they’re not in a very girly mood some days. Mei tais are popular with dads too, so perhaps they’re worried that he won’t even cope with florals on the “other side” when he’s wearing it.

Ring slings are where personal preferences really come out. Most of my ring sling customers have been mums, and most don’t expect their partner to share their ring sling. Despite all my demos of how you can take the sleeping baby in sling off your own body, hang it over dad’s head when he walks in the door at 5pm, and walk away to have a long hot shower… Anyway, if it’s just for their own use, they choose whatever colourway they personally prefer. Still can’t get anyone to go for luxe shiny fabrics like silk. But florals, dragonflies, retro 70’s prints, and a bit of pink are all popular.

But no matter what style of carrier, purple is perennially popular. I’ve even watched my ex-demo carriers get a higher price on the second-hand market just because they’ve been dyed purple. Maybe because it’s a little feminine, but more dad-friendly than pink. Maybe for mums who would normally go for pink, but don’t want to carry a baby boy in a girly sling. Maybe because purple is good at hiding a multitude of spill sins (true… I dye my kids nappies purple to hide stains). Maybe because purple is said to be appealing to people in a transition phase of life, such as pregnancy. Whatever the reason, my green/blue/brown preference probably lowers the value of my stash on the second-hand market!