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!

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/

 Birth doesn’t always go to plan. Sometimes it does go to plan and that plan involves a caesar. This can present its own babywearing challenges and Rae, who’s been there twice, lets us in on her strategies for babywearing after major surgery. 

“I’ll be back in a minute…” so said my husband, as he popped his brand new baby, all of one hour old, into our nice, clean ring sling. It was new and crispy. I was exhausted and sore, and, well , very high on the drugs from the c-section. Those first days in hospital are truly amazing - the desire to keep our babies close is so overwhelming.

But how, post C section?

In those first days after the birth, the best place for Mum and baby is in bed, snuggled up skin to skin, getting to know each other. On our way out of the hospital, I finally got a chance to use that ring sling:

For the first six weeks or so at home, I remember being just SO sore, as my body slowly healed. The best sling for this period is just a simple ring sling. There are several ring slings commonly sold through baby stores, but they are all too structured for my taste - too much padding- they severely limit the comfort possible for Mum and baby. They are designed for a very loose cradle carry, which will sit just above the stitches - way too low for comfort!

A simple, unstructured ring sling can be worn initially in a cradle hold and also in a tummy to tummy hold. Both positions keep the baby well away from the incision site, and allow the Mum to sit down and rest in a chair whilst snuggling the baby - a definite plus in that hectic time of adjustment! Instructions are available to make your own, perhaps from a sarong or some fabric from Spotlight - a wonderful thing to do prior to the birth of your first baby!

Once the scar had started to heal, it was time to get some exercise… and the next sling we found really helpful was a simple mei tai. A soft structured carrier would be equally as good for this stage, as would a wrap - they each have their advantages. I have and love each of these styles of carrier:

• A mei tai is easy on and easy off, placing the straps comfortably for a front carry post c-section is very easy, a great help with muscles that are easily tired out.
• A wrap can be worn in Front Cross Carry, which was incredibly easy and supportive of those weak tummy muscles!
• Finally, a soft structured carrier is simply wonderful - there are some really comfortable ones out there. These two shouldered carriers are characterised by a lovely fit through the waist straps, and the baby being placed close to Mum’s tummy with very supportive, comfortable shoulder straps. The more structured waist, with some padding, can be a nice help to remind you to pull the tummy muscles in.

When our second baby arrived three months ago, after another c-section, I took out that ring sling and got to wear it all over again! Only this time, I was running around after a busy toddler all too soon..

This time, I really found a wrap worn in a Front Cross Carry was invaluable. It was so handy to be able to pop the baby in and out of the wrap for feeding, whilst being able to spend some time with my daughter.

This particular wrap carry is very fast and easy to learn, and provides lovely back support for those weak muscles! I also left it on all day long - so we could drive to the park or shops, then pop the baby back in, get the toddler out of the car - and enjoy some time together. Here we are at about 3 months post c-section.

Thanks to Rae for her insight into babywearing post-caesar. Have you had a caesar? Did you babywear afterwards? What worked for you? What didn’t? Leave a comment and let us know!

Welcome to the Carnival of Breastfeeding! Our theme this month is “Personal Stories” and my story of traveling to one of my favourite places, nursling and wearee in tow, is below. If you’ve arrived here for the first time, you might want to check out our series on breastfeeding hands free. If you’re a regular, make sure you check out the other carnival participants below.

He stirs beneath the mosquito net. He edges closer, still half asleep. I know it must be close to four since the monks are chanting in the grey pre-dawn and the valley is silent but for their hum. He breaks the stillness, demanding my sleepy attention. I roll closer and feed him. He drifts off to sleep and I am left listening to the Buddhist cannon chanted across the valley.

An hour and a half later, the Imam chants the call to prayer and his voice sounds across the town. The Buddhists have finished their praying before the Muslims have begun and my little one has felt the passage of time too. He edges closer, pressing himself into me. As the sun is dawning, I feed him again, listening to the Imam’s prayer, piercing and clear as the day brightens.

By the time the church bells begin to toll, I am out of patience with my nursling. His father has taken him away and I luxuriate in my loneliness beneath the mosquito net listening to the bells ring out from just down the hill.

After the Christians have finished, a new hymn begins. Staccato and impatient, a language all of its own, the car horns signal the beginning of a new phase in this valley’s daily round of devotions: commercial enterprise and the accompanying traffic chaos has begun.

This is Kandy, Sri Lanka. There is no other place like it.

These sounds are a morning ritual in Kandy, an  ancient city tucked into a valley in the mountains of central Sri Lanka. Those frequent night-time and early morning feeds were our personal experience of that cultural ritual.

My son is Sri Lankan by descent, though Australian by birth, and in the New Year holiday of 2007-2008, we traveled back to the place of his father’s birth to introduce him to his extended family and his second home.

Travelling in a foreign country with a small child can be a challenge at best. Travelling in a poverty-stricken foreign country can add a new dimension to that challenge. We were lucky enough to take our son at a stage in his life when he was still worn and breastfeeding regularly. All too regularly at night, alas, which is one of the reasons I’m so very familiar with the sounds of Kandy in the early morning!

Breastfeeding helped us negotiate the intricacies of travel in several ways. Firstly, we never had to worry about clean drinking water for him. He drank water when it was safe, but if it wasn’t convenient to find it at any given point, there was a ready-made drink on hand. As a toddler, he ate solid food and was very familiar with the local cuisine, but there were inevitably some changes and differences. Breastfeeding allowed us to make up any nutritional gap. Breastfeeding also provided an important part of our routine that helped him cope with the changes that traveling entails.

Breastfeeding was a way for me to connect with the other mothers in the family. We were vastly different people from vastly different places, but our children were all fed in the same way. In a country where extended nursing is the norm and poverty is rife, it’s obvious that breastfeeding provides an important protection for infants and small children. There was a respect for the process that we shared on both sides of the cultural divide, but at the same time it was just a normal part of mothering.

The other major part of our traveling experience was babywearing. I remember tucking him up into a wrap one tropical night in Negombo and feeding him to sleep as our relatives chatted about us. The mosquitoes were ravenous that evening (and dengue fever was rife), but the wrap mercifully protected most of him from their attention, acted as a light blanket in the tropical weather and screened him from outside distractions as he drifted off to sleep in an unfamiliar place.

 
From his vantage point on our backs, our son was able to experience the full richness of Sri Lanka for himself. Whether it was getting Kozy with the elephants, attending temple for the first time with his father or walking the beaches at sunset, our son experienced all of it.

Like breastfeeding, babywearing was certainly useful from a practical standpoint. Negotiating multiple airports with a toddler who’s not just out of his time zone, but totally out of patience is much easier when you’re not juggling a pram. At our destination, however, babywearing was essential.

As a traveling rule of thumb, any street that’s just as likely to have elephants in the traffic stream as motorbikes is probably not a place where toddlers should roam freely and prams run easily. Another important piece of information for travellers: elephants do not follow road rules. Because when you’re driving an elephant down the main (one way) street of a major city against the traffic, it’s up to the rest of the city to get out of your way.

We are returning to Sri Lanka again this year with our son and our younger child. Another nursling, another wearee. More elephants to avoid and monkeys to fend off. Poverty to attempt to explain, thousands of years of history to observe. There are more memories to be made, more experiences to share. I’m quite certain I’ll be breastfeeding and babywearing on this trip, once again. I don’t know if I’ll be doing those things in tandem, but the unknown is one of the wonderful parts of traveling.

Other Carnival of Breastfeeding participants who are sharing their stories today:

• Breastfeeding Failures and Success at GrudgeMom
• Hannah’s Weaning by Amber at Strocel.com
• Weaning a Toddler at Laura’s Blog
• Life, Death and Nourishment at Stepping off the Spaceship
• Sticking with it: Our Breastfeeding Story by So Fawned.
• How Breastfeeding Changed my Life at the MotherNews Blog
• Flying Breastmilk at All That Sazz
• Ben’s Story at Massachusetts Friends of Midwives
• The “I Told You So” at Breastfeeding 1-2-3
• “They said his latch was fine” at the Motherwear blog
• Breastfeeding is not easy, but it’s certainly best for baby at Chronicles of a Nursing Mom
• Can Early Public Breastfeeding Sightings Shape One’s Future Breastfeeding Practices? at Nursing Moms Unite
• Celebrating My Chest, in Honor of Breastfeeding at Zen Mommy
• Breastfeeding After Reduction Surgery at The Towells
• Breastfeeding in Public at Blacktating
• Breastfeeding Made my the Mother I am at Breastfeeding Mums

Leaving Hospital with a Premmie (or two).

When you are pregnant, you normally anticipate things will go a certain way; maybe the way previous pregnancies have gone, or maybe better! Some people expect particular hiccups because of their medical history and so on.

For me, I expected two things. Literally, I expected two babies, because I was pregnant with twins, and secondly, I expected to need to fight hospital policy. I think every IRONY light in heaven and earth was flashing, when at 34 weeks, I sent my husband and son to Adelaide for some follow up medical visits, and my daughter went to visit a girlfriend for the morning. Ah, peace… I remember I was going to rest that day; I was going to read, and I was going to spend some time at peace. Just as soon as my midwives visited and left. Except things didn’t quite work out that way. My midwives walked in, said “ooh, you don’t look very good” (which is what every 34-week-pregnant-with-twins woman wants to hear) and “go pee on this!” Having experience peeing on sticks, I did as I was told. It was more fun finding out I was pregnant than it was finding out I had protein out of the stratosphere. Blah. Add the revolting oedema that made my ankles practically slosh, and the blood pressure paralleled only by a job interview for a position you really want, and there I was, at home, my family elsewhere, being told to pack and bag and go to the hospital.

So, all the fight out of my sails, that’s how I was going to end this pregnancy. A premature Caesar at 34 weeks. Perhaps you’re pregnant as you read this. Listen, when you’re done, spend a few minutes looking into what you want to do if your baby is born early and needs to go to special care. I had done a little bit of reading, but there was so much I didn’t know until well after we all came home. I’ll say from the outset – we all make it home safely.

The birth story is pretty good, and the way my friends helped look after my two big kids was just fantastic, but this blog post is really about getting out of the special care nursery (hereafter, SCN). You may have read my earlier post about baby wearing in the nursery… if not, check out LINK. Being in the SCN was awful – fine for a day or so, but after that, really tedious. Every nurse had a different opinion on everything, from sibling visits to bathing to feeding to formula. If you are ever in the same situation, it would help to know what you think about all these things. For us, we just flew by the seat of our pants as we worked on getting the babies from 1700g and 2200g to the acceptable-but-arbitrary-weight-required-to-go-home.

Finally, our featherweight baby girl hit 2200g. We’d been in the nursery for a life time, but on day 20, we were finally able to fly the coop! We had the two car capsules installed, and like all parents of newborns, we did the strange journey from the maternity area to the car park.

However, we did it a little differently to most parents. I slipped my ring sling – just the one – over my shoulder, and settled their tiny 2700g and 2200g bodies on my chest. I settled them in tummy-to-tummy (theirs to mine) and side by side (one another) as I had so many times for cuddles, and we waited for an ice age for the doctors to officially say “go on, get out!” and then we stood up, and walked out the door.

We knew a bit about how we wanted to parent; we have two older children and had been working on refining our beliefs and practises for a while. While the babies really were small, they were also healthy and strong. We saw no reason not to use carriers, and saw a lot of good reasons why we should.

• Kangaroo care has been shown to benefit premature babies
• Keeping the newborns close allowed us to continue being involved with our older kids activities- and our own
• Wearing the newborns meant we could respond to their needs more quickly
• Wearing the newborns meant my precious, residual, often depleted energy was conserved by not having to get up and down to them constantly

If you have a premature – or even small-for-dates baby – unless you are given a solid medical reason not to, baby wearing is going to help you. Unless there’s a medical reason not to, baby wearing is going to be beneficial to your baby/babies. Whether your premmie (or preemie – both are used) is your first child or your tenth, you are going to want them to feel settled, calm, peaceful and secure. Keeping them close to your heart is going to do this. You might choose not to socialise – especially out of the home – for longer because of immunity concerns; you may be recovering from major surgery and not as mobile as you normally were; you may have had weeks in special care where you had every last drop of self-assurance and strength removed from your body, but there comes a point where you are free to make the parenting choices you believe to be right. Go for it!

A premature baby can be worn in a soft sling or a soft wrap. My own experience has been that a mei tai is too large and a soft structured carrier is too inflexible, but you may have a different experience. Do join the Baby Carriers Downunder forum if you haven’t already – people are always willing to share their experiences and help you find your way on this parenting path.

I don’t think these photos are particularly flattering to me - but here you go: Ruby leaving the hospital with the twins at 20 days.

Have you left hospital with a special care baby? A premmie (or two)? Another baby who had a special care start to the world? How did you find it? Did you wear your special care baby? Leave a comment and let us know!

As parents, it is so difficult to see our little ones sick. We try to ease the suffering as best we can, but sometimes it seems there isn’t much we can do.

Last week, my little Miss E., who is seven months old, was unwell. Nothing alarming, just a run-of-the-mill virus – high fevers, a bit of vomiting, loss of appetite and just general malaise. Being that she is my third child, I didn’t rush to the doctor right away (anyone seen that circulating email about birth order and how third children end up eating off the floor? It’s pretty much true in our house), but I did end up taking her eventually, when the fevers had been going on long enough to concern me a little. “Oh, goodness,” the doctor exclaimed when he looked at Miss E.’s throat, “that’s quite inflamed. She must have been suffering!”

“Suffering?” I thought. Well, not really, not that I noticed. We have been having lots of snuggles, but she hasn’t been too upset as long as she’s being carried.

And then I realised how much I love babywearing when my babies are sick. They need cuddles; I need to take care of my other children, do a smidgen of housework (I’m not Super Mum, but we do need clean underwear), and possibly even drink a cup of coffee.

When they are older, wearing them when they’re feeling poorly almost becomes a guilty pleasure. Guilty because of course I don’t want my children to be ill! But it is lovely to get those cuddles from a toddler who is usually tearing around at 100 miles an hour.

While in general I prefer two-shouldered carriers, I really find a hip carry is perfect for a sick baby or toddler wanting snuggles. Here is Miss E. in our pouch, suffering less than she may otherwise have:

Just one tip: put the silk carriers away until sick baby stops vomiting. I won’t tell you whether or not I learned this the hard way.

Do you wear your baby more than usual when he/she is sick? Share your favourite carries or tips.