I've been deleting some old posts so don't be suprised if anyone sees them dissapear. I was going to stop writing after the first week but I love it so much I could burst and I want to write it so I'm gonna (just a bit more breifly than week one ;)). Again I'll keep updating throughout the week.
So Monday morning we had a lecture about research which was actually really interesting. I can't even remember what we did after that. I'm exhausted.
In the afternoon we were seperated into our hospital trust groups, but we were with nursing students and the whole talk was really aimed at them - so we didn't find out anything much other than the history of the hospital lol.
Tuesday we had the morning lectures on the baby friendly initiative and breastfeeding.
Sat by the river eating our lunch in the sunshine, which was lovely.
The afternoon we found out our placements for the year (which I am IMMENSELY excited about, I am SO happy with my year 1 placements), then we learnt about reflection and had to reflect on situations etc.
Wednesday was a half day. Midwifery lecture about communication and reflection. We got our first assignment - a 2500 reflective essay that I do not understand whatsoever. And I seem to be the only one totally and utterly confused.
Thursday we had our first biology lecture which was FABULOUS I absolutely loved it. The cervix does make me a bit queasy though- that cannot be a good thing?!
In the afternoon we had a session about research and evidence and got our second assignment - that I sort of understand, about searching for relevant up to date evidence.
Spent the evening trying to learn more about the internal female reproductive organs, but I think it's going to take a bit more to get it all to stick in my head.
Friday morning was our introductory practice session. In future Fridays will be practising our clinical skills and learning about the theories that underpin them. Ahhh sticking needles in grapefruits here I come!
In the afternoon we had a session with a physiotherapist learning to lift things correctly etc - however half of us were sent home for not wearing trousers and trainers.. in a heatwave. So we have to redo it another day now. We were told last week, but nearly everyone cannot remember being told - including me.
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Monday, 19 September 2011
My first week at university.
So I think I'll add bits as the week goes on, rather than keep posting.
Monday
8.30am: A group of us from my cohort arranged to meet at the train station early this morning, there were like 20 of us standing by the coffee shop! lol.
9.25am: The 'talk' started. There were around 300 of us in the lecture hall! We were in with adult, child and mental health nursing and the talk was actually quite nursing based and all the usual 'welcome to our uni' stuff. They basically repeated all the info from the open day, selection day, website, prospectus, offer letters etc lol so I was pretty much falling asleep.
11am: The midwives were seperated from the nurses. There were nearly 100 of us midwives! I think we're the biggest cohort in the UK. We got a more midwifery focused talk which was lovely and I think most of us then felt a bit more 'into it'. We were then given out our information packs and because there were so many of us we got allocated slots for enrolling and measured for our uniforms. My slot was the last slot of the day, which had me nearly in tears - just the fact that I had to sit around for 3 hours doing nothing whereas if I had had an earlier slot I could have come home and seen my babies. But you just gotta suck it up I guess.
12am/pm? I never know which one 12 midday is. Had lunch, sat with a few midwives I had already met who are all lovely so that was fine, we sat and chatted and it was a nice break actually.
3pm: Went to enrol. I used a random snapshot of me and cut my head out and put it on a white background on photoshop. The lady who was enrolling me laughed and said it was a great pictures and showed it to her colleages - how embaressing lol! Then we collected our ID cards.
3.30pm: Checked out the library and the building in general as we had not bothered going on the campus tours.
4pm: went into our uniform fitting (we snuck in early as we all wanted to go home early lol). The uniforms were tiny, a couple of people had to go up 4-5 dress sizes! I was lucky I only went up 1-2 sizes haha. Actually as I'm typing this I've just realised that I ordered the wrong uniform. Pants. I wanted 3 tunics and 1 dress. But I think I accidently said more dresses. Argh!
4.45pm: got on the train, and then the bus home. The bus was free as I don't have a travelcard yet and I only had a £10 note and the driver didn't have change, woohoo!
5.30pm: Legged it from the bus stop to my house to see my babies!
Tuesday
11am: We found out our placement hospitals. I was so immensely grateful to have been allocated my first choice hospital. Some people got their FOURTH choice, so as I said, I cannot express how relieved I feel knowing I got where I want to be. After this we had 'ice breakers' answering questions at the front of the room like 'what did you do before this?'. Had a huge talk on the NMC - which means I'm now going to be deleting a lot of old blog posts and probably wont ever post anything very interesting.
2pm: More talks about the course, recieved our handbooks etc. Not much else to report. Missed my kids loads, nearly cried again.
5.45pm: Got home, and managed to jog instead of run from the bus stop today to see them lol.
Wednesday:
8.30am: Getting ready to leave. Weird, emotional day today as my boyfriend had his last day at work yesterday and from today has become a stay at home daddy for our children, so that I can go to uni to persue my dreams!
10am: Collected our folder with our clinical skills information for the year from the admin building then had to walk to the uni campus
11am: Two hours of watching birth videos and discussing what we were watching, which was really interesting. Sure, I've seen a billion birth videos but they never get old, and I nearly always tear up. I found the following discussions more interesting than the videos themselves. I completely respect other peoples opinions, but I have to admit I was actually surprised how different many opinions were... I quite naively thought 'hey, we're all going into the same thing, we probably all have the same opinions'... well that is very much NOT the case and I guess I will have to get used to that.
2.30pm: Arrived home, as wednesday is half day. Managed to walk from the bus today rather than running or jogging. Was weird arriving home to my boyfriend, who had tidied, cleaned, hoovered, and then tonight made me a packed lunch for the morning? Very strange behaviour...
Thursday
9.30am arrived nice and early to have another talk about rules and conduct - social networking, plagerism etc etc.
11am 2 hour talk about health and safety, moving and handling, back care etc.
1.30pm Got the train home, we finished early! Yay. Went to meet my family to spend the afternoon out together in the sunshine, make the most of our free time before my real work load begins.
Monday
8.30am: A group of us from my cohort arranged to meet at the train station early this morning, there were like 20 of us standing by the coffee shop! lol.
9.25am: The 'talk' started. There were around 300 of us in the lecture hall! We were in with adult, child and mental health nursing and the talk was actually quite nursing based and all the usual 'welcome to our uni' stuff. They basically repeated all the info from the open day, selection day, website, prospectus, offer letters etc lol so I was pretty much falling asleep.
11am: The midwives were seperated from the nurses. There were nearly 100 of us midwives! I think we're the biggest cohort in the UK. We got a more midwifery focused talk which was lovely and I think most of us then felt a bit more 'into it'. We were then given out our information packs and because there were so many of us we got allocated slots for enrolling and measured for our uniforms. My slot was the last slot of the day, which had me nearly in tears - just the fact that I had to sit around for 3 hours doing nothing whereas if I had had an earlier slot I could have come home and seen my babies. But you just gotta suck it up I guess.
12am/pm? I never know which one 12 midday is. Had lunch, sat with a few midwives I had already met who are all lovely so that was fine, we sat and chatted and it was a nice break actually.
3pm: Went to enrol. I used a random snapshot of me and cut my head out and put it on a white background on photoshop. The lady who was enrolling me laughed and said it was a great pictures and showed it to her colleages - how embaressing lol! Then we collected our ID cards.
3.30pm: Checked out the library and the building in general as we had not bothered going on the campus tours.
4pm: went into our uniform fitting (we snuck in early as we all wanted to go home early lol). The uniforms were tiny, a couple of people had to go up 4-5 dress sizes! I was lucky I only went up 1-2 sizes haha. Actually as I'm typing this I've just realised that I ordered the wrong uniform. Pants. I wanted 3 tunics and 1 dress. But I think I accidently said more dresses. Argh!
4.45pm: got on the train, and then the bus home. The bus was free as I don't have a travelcard yet and I only had a £10 note and the driver didn't have change, woohoo!
5.30pm: Legged it from the bus stop to my house to see my babies!
Tuesday
11am: We found out our placement hospitals. I was so immensely grateful to have been allocated my first choice hospital. Some people got their FOURTH choice, so as I said, I cannot express how relieved I feel knowing I got where I want to be. After this we had 'ice breakers' answering questions at the front of the room like 'what did you do before this?'. Had a huge talk on the NMC - which means I'm now going to be deleting a lot of old blog posts and probably wont ever post anything very interesting.
2pm: More talks about the course, recieved our handbooks etc. Not much else to report. Missed my kids loads, nearly cried again.
5.45pm: Got home, and managed to jog instead of run from the bus stop today to see them lol.
Wednesday:
8.30am: Getting ready to leave. Weird, emotional day today as my boyfriend had his last day at work yesterday and from today has become a stay at home daddy for our children, so that I can go to uni to persue my dreams!
10am: Collected our folder with our clinical skills information for the year from the admin building then had to walk to the uni campus
11am: Two hours of watching birth videos and discussing what we were watching, which was really interesting. Sure, I've seen a billion birth videos but they never get old, and I nearly always tear up. I found the following discussions more interesting than the videos themselves. I completely respect other peoples opinions, but I have to admit I was actually surprised how different many opinions were... I quite naively thought 'hey, we're all going into the same thing, we probably all have the same opinions'... well that is very much NOT the case and I guess I will have to get used to that.
2.30pm: Arrived home, as wednesday is half day. Managed to walk from the bus today rather than running or jogging. Was weird arriving home to my boyfriend, who had tidied, cleaned, hoovered, and then tonight made me a packed lunch for the morning? Very strange behaviour...
Thursday
9.30am arrived nice and early to have another talk about rules and conduct - social networking, plagerism etc etc.
11am 2 hour talk about health and safety, moving and handling, back care etc.
1.30pm Got the train home, we finished early! Yay. Went to meet my family to spend the afternoon out together in the sunshine, make the most of our free time before my real work load begins.
Sunday, 18 September 2011
My first day
And so it begins.
Maybe this blog will start to get a little more interesting from tomorrow onwards :)
Gah, I seriously can't sleep.
Maybe this blog will start to get a little more interesting from tomorrow onwards :)
Gah, I seriously can't sleep.
Sunday, 11 September 2011
Kangaroo care and babywearing!
Well, what can I say - I am a complete sling convert. Every day I wish that I had discovered the awesomeness of babywearing when my eldest son was born. Oh, don't get me wrong - I could see the benefits of skin to skin, keeping close to baby - but I just had so much to do. So I got thinking, 'I'm sure I've seen people wearing slings? I'll pop into mothercare and see if I can get one for myself.' I guess there was my first mistake. My first sling became the Tomy Freestyle, and I'm sad to say it put me off slings for nearly two years!
Why I hated the baby bjorn style sling:
1. There was thick padded material between me and the baby - I wanted to be close to him, not keep him seperate from my body! Duh!
2. It hung somewhere around my stomach. It pulled on my back and neck muscles. It was like wearing a 10lb necklace.
3. All the pictures showed cute babies and happy families with the baby facing outwards, so that's what I did. I thought it looked really strange though, and made me a bit self concious.
4. His legs were just dangling, flapping around in the wind. How on earth is could that have been good for his hips?
So I ebayed the sling, and fully embraced my travel system.
When my son turned one I was pregnant with my second son. I actually started to panic. I had done everything wrong the first time round. I started researching and decided to start off with a moby wrap when my son was born.
Best choice I ever made.
I guess my sling addiction started from there, my son is only 7 months (tomorrow) and I've lost count of slings I have - my stretchy, my woven wraps, my mei tais, my wrap conversion (all time favourite at the mo), my toddler SSCs! Such an expensive habit though! Lol.
So anyway - why did I feel the need to write this today? All I've done is rambled so far!
When I carry my baby, within minutes I feel his body relax, his breathing steadies, he starts softly cooing, sometimes he rests his head against my chest and puts his tiny chubby hand over my heart and I swear he's feeling, listening to the rhythm of my heart beating.
I notice a difference, on days when I'm feeling down, grumpy, tired and I don't wear him. He cries a lot more. He sleeps a lot less. I always find myself suddenly sympathising with mothers who say things like 'he doesn't stop crying!' or 'he never sleeps, I can't get a thing done!'
I've also noticed a change in my toddler. He was coming up to 2 when my baby was born, and I decided to start wearing him too. I actually found it easier in the begining to wrap with him as he was a heavyweight whereas the baby would just be floppy lol. Anyway when he gets upset or worried now, he goes 'mummy, ack! ack!' (that's back to me and you) and it means - get me on your back for cuddles, now! lol. Again, once he's on my back I feel him relax, he lays against me with his arms around me, sometimes reaches round and kisses me, strokes my hair. What can I say? I LOVE it :)
So anyway thinking about my own personal benefits of babywearing made me start thinking about newbowns, premature babies, ill babies etc - and how it must be beneficial to them. So I got googling and started reading about kangaroo care.
The more googling I did I found mothers on discussions forums talking about babies being in incubators, but not being allowed skin to skin. Or only for a couple of minutes. One person (I can't remember where I read this now) said that whenever she had him down her top cuddled up he slept and his temperature and breathing regulated and whenever she put him back in the incubator the respiration monitors started bleeping like crazy, but the staff said even so it was better he was in the incubator.
I guess the whole thing confuses me, and I need to do a lot more reading.
But then again I'm meant to be filling out forms and getting on with my workbooks for uni!
Why I hated the baby bjorn style sling:
1. There was thick padded material between me and the baby - I wanted to be close to him, not keep him seperate from my body! Duh!
2. It hung somewhere around my stomach. It pulled on my back and neck muscles. It was like wearing a 10lb necklace.
3. All the pictures showed cute babies and happy families with the baby facing outwards, so that's what I did. I thought it looked really strange though, and made me a bit self concious.
4. His legs were just dangling, flapping around in the wind. How on earth is could that have been good for his hips?
So I ebayed the sling, and fully embraced my travel system.
When my son turned one I was pregnant with my second son. I actually started to panic. I had done everything wrong the first time round. I started researching and decided to start off with a moby wrap when my son was born.
Best choice I ever made.
I guess my sling addiction started from there, my son is only 7 months (tomorrow) and I've lost count of slings I have - my stretchy, my woven wraps, my mei tais, my wrap conversion (all time favourite at the mo), my toddler SSCs! Such an expensive habit though! Lol.
So anyway - why did I feel the need to write this today? All I've done is rambled so far!
When I carry my baby, within minutes I feel his body relax, his breathing steadies, he starts softly cooing, sometimes he rests his head against my chest and puts his tiny chubby hand over my heart and I swear he's feeling, listening to the rhythm of my heart beating.
I notice a difference, on days when I'm feeling down, grumpy, tired and I don't wear him. He cries a lot more. He sleeps a lot less. I always find myself suddenly sympathising with mothers who say things like 'he doesn't stop crying!' or 'he never sleeps, I can't get a thing done!'
I've also noticed a change in my toddler. He was coming up to 2 when my baby was born, and I decided to start wearing him too. I actually found it easier in the begining to wrap with him as he was a heavyweight whereas the baby would just be floppy lol. Anyway when he gets upset or worried now, he goes 'mummy, ack! ack!' (that's back to me and you) and it means - get me on your back for cuddles, now! lol. Again, once he's on my back I feel him relax, he lays against me with his arms around me, sometimes reaches round and kisses me, strokes my hair. What can I say? I LOVE it :)
So anyway thinking about my own personal benefits of babywearing made me start thinking about newbowns, premature babies, ill babies etc - and how it must be beneficial to them. So I got googling and started reading about kangaroo care.
The more googling I did I found mothers on discussions forums talking about babies being in incubators, but not being allowed skin to skin. Or only for a couple of minutes. One person (I can't remember where I read this now) said that whenever she had him down her top cuddled up he slept and his temperature and breathing regulated and whenever she put him back in the incubator the respiration monitors started bleeping like crazy, but the staff said even so it was better he was in the incubator.
I guess the whole thing confuses me, and I need to do a lot more reading.
But then again I'm meant to be filling out forms and getting on with my workbooks for uni!
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