Our child would be carried on tour with us from the start as the third member of our street theatre company, joining in wherever we went and being part of everything we do. This was put on hold by a certain global pandemic but as pedestrians living in a tiny cottage down a bumpy mud track a mile out of town, I still didn’t hold out much hope for the pram. The first few months of our little one’s life happened to be deep winter, not to mention that all the best walks begin with a stile - a design fault in even the bounciest of prams.
There’s no accounting for the personal preferences of an embryonic stranger and I had very real fears that we would bear one of the few babies that didn’t love being carried, then really would be up the creek. However, these doubts were quickly assuaged once I met our boy. The term ‘velcro baby’ fits him well. In this situation, a wrap is a blessing, though I can’t help wondering if I may have encouraged it…
Attachment Parenting
Robin’s feeding trouble caused me great anxiety. I’ve attempted to become a nut, soy and coconut avoiding vegan to soothe his sensitive tummy; a feat which will most likely end with me just being a nut - but anything is better than witnessing your child in pain. Every day that he gets less tender I feel relieved, but also intensely sad knowing one day soon I will lose my sticky limpet. My baby insists upon sleeping nestled safely (sweatily) under my arm rather than in the oh-so-far-away bedside crib we’d lovingly prepared and though it leaves me cricked and squashed against the aforementioned apparatus - now a glorified shelf of baby things - I have no intention of putting him back there anytime soon, nor the downstairs cot at 6 months. This I never expected and I’ve not yet figured out how to square it with my long suffering partner.
Something else I didn’t foresee was the 2 week oxytocin high I experienced after birth, during which I barely felt the need to sleep or eat. This was just as well as Robin was slow to learn to breastfeed and with pumping all hours, I didn’t actually get much chance to do either. In those early days I would cry because I wasn’t in the same room as my baby and only conceded to unwrapping and taking him off my person when I nearly spilled hot spaghetti on his head. I went from from desperately trying to get him to latch to discovering the phenomenon of cluster feeding where he fed for hours on end, nature’s way of increasing my milk supply, and desperately trying to get him to stop. With a frustrated baby and enough reflux to get through all our clothes, wrapping skin to skin was the only way I could manage to ease the endless feeding. I smiled at the long stripy socks we used to keep his exposed calves warm.
Babyweraing Produces Oxytocin
This wrapping trick also sends oxytocin levels wild, another signal to produce more milk, so it is definitely a winner! In our first days of wrapping, the oxytocin release it generated would literally cause my womb to contract back, somewhat uncomfortably, as I carried him. The ‘love hormone’ that facilitates birth is so very powerful that the whole process has left me with a new respect for women, and for nature. Human babies have the high glucose milk and regular feeding pattern of precocial mammals, whose young cling to their mothers or follow them around. However, our young are born helpless, unable to cling or walk, so we often leave them in makeshift nests as is the way of altricial mammals. So from a natural perspective, it makes sense to wear them in a sling during the fourth trimester. And that’s exactly how it feels. Natural. Like breastfeeding, it has become a key tool in my mama kit! In fact, the idea of feeding in the sling was an important factor when choosing what type of carrier we wanted, but it took a long time to have any success in that area. I didn’t really find much need to do it in those initial months, I liked to let him stretch out. Now, a few months further on, it is a lifesaver.
Keeping Baby Close
One of the first twists in our journey was developing a back problem in pregnancy, hence losing my ability to walk, use my arms or sit on a chair without pain. Three months during which I had serious concerns about how I was going to hold my child when he finally arrived. As summer wore on I became frustrated, missing the day-trips with my partner tracing where we’d take our boy. I spent hours on internet parenting groups reading anecdotes about potty training, discussing the sleep patterns of strange babies and the clothes wash routines of their exasperated mothers, getting an idea of the trials to come. This is where I first came across Baby Wearing. The information and support available through these networks has become a staple for me. According to attachment theory, baby wearing is one of the best things we can do for our children by enabling physical proximity and is ubiquitous in gentle parenting land.
Types of Carriers
The world of carriers, like that of cloth nappies, is truly a minefield with a language entirely of its own. There are framed carriers. There are Mei Dais, Buckles, Half Buckles and Onbuhimos (all of which are SSCs - soft structured carriers). There are Stretchy Wraps, Ring Slings and Wovens. There are blends of cotton, wool, silk, linen, viscose, hemp, tencel and seaweed all in different sizes and weights with different WQs (wrapping qualities). They are plain, patterned and even book themed. There are squishes, unicorns, ISOs, FTOs and probably UFOs… you get my drift. With libraries and communities, it’s like Disneyland for the aspiring sensible mum with hippy-ish tendencies, hiding a capitalist upbringing, a penchant for beauty and a tendency to manifest rather more hopes than is wise in a functional object with a story (like me). In the end I chose a preloved buckled carrier for my partner because I thought it was the simplest solution for a man who gets tangled in his own dungarees. I wanted a woven wrap for myself because of its unique ability to distribute the weight over the chest - rather than just the shoulders - in different ways depending on how you choose to tie it. This, I thought, was the greatest chance i’d have to be able to carry if my back continued to be play up. I felt confident both items would have a good re-sell value if they didn’t work out, or could simply be traded for something different.
Sling Libraries
If the sling libraries had been open physically, rather than as virtual hubs, my local one would definitely have been my first port of call for selecting a wrap and learning how to use it. They are still running and do need support but as I had already done copious research, I chose to buy something special to keep from newborn moments onwards, knowing I could hire at a later date if we got curious about other carriers or sizes and fabric blends.
Woven Wraps
The right woven wrap will be an absolute joy to use, versatile, and last from birth to toddlerhood if you take the time to learn the different carries you can do. I’m finding great satisfaction in developing my proficiency at these skills and wrapping every friend or family member within reach to show them the brilliance of being strapped to a tiny baby. (They all seem obsessed by whether he is still breathing). If you don’t have the time to learn lots of different carries but want to wrap, having a forgiving weave and blend goes a long way towards creating a quick comfortable cuddle. The more enjoyable it is, the more situations you will discover you can use it in.
Eager to try it out when it arrived although my babe was still in utero, I made quite a successful shopping pouch from my wrap. Though I did get some funny looks, it allowed me to forgo taking a rucksack to the market as my back was still a bit dodgy. I couldn’t help but yearn for the moments when the real magic was to come. 2 weeks before my due date, i thought it might be helpful to ‘wrap my bump’ to ease the pressure. As i tightened the knot, my waters broke and Robin was born later that day. I wore him out of the hospital.
Practising Carries
I had practiced tying basic Front Wrap Cross Carry (FWCC) with a with a rice bag filled puppet well in advance and I’m very glad I did. I think this is necessary as there’s so much other new stuff to take on when your ‘squish’ arrives that it makes wrapping from the start possible. I don’t know when i would have found time to learn otherwise. Having said that, both the nurse and the midwife who organised my ‘release’ from hospital wrapped their babies. My nurse was delighted to help me tie Robin in for the first time. She told me she’d keep her woven wrap forever, such was the fondness of her memories. I asked her to spot me incase I dropped him and I actually needed very little help - it was so easy that I was delighted. I felt relieved that he was finally coming home and once we arrived, our entire home seemed to make more sense. We had, after all, chosen it with family in mind.
As I rested in his first week, Robin was worn up on the moors for walks with his Dad, visiting monuments where revolutions were started and even Britain’s highest ‘beach’. Dad, however, found the sling tricky as he couldn’t re-tie it if he needed to take it off and came to much prefer the carrier.
Wrapping to Sleep
I love the wrap. Wrapping has become the sugar that coats the pill of having to do anything that’s not lavishing my little human with love. I’d heard speak of the magic ‘sleepydust’ wraps are said to contain. When I put my baby in the sling, he will occasionally faff, but almost immediately he succumbs and falls deeply asleep. Sometimes I feel as though I am turning him off. This happens in the carrier too, but not when my partner carries him (I envy the babbly companionship he sometimes gets). The intensely soporific quality does come in handy when Robin is uncomfortable and grizzly, but when he is alert and communicative he likes to kick his legs and arms around and i find myself reluctant to pass up that learning time by closing him down. Before Christmas we went to the market with Robin under my poncho (1 month old) and I completely forgot he was there. On more than one instance, I have been surprised when people have asked ‘is that a tiny baby you’ve got hidden’, having momentarily forgotten that small part of my life… thankfully it’s not possible to leave him behind.
Wearing a baby in a sling elicits such beaming smiles that I walk down the canal path perpetually and expectantly grinning, a very proud mama, most incensed if the recipient strangers don’t swoon back. It even makes me feel stylish, despite muddy legs and never having washed my hair.
Every time we went out it seemed I’d meet someone who’d reminisce about how they had once enjoyed wrapping their awkwardly smiling preteen. ‘Twelve miles at six weeks old… Really…? Oh, regularly?!’ I can barely manage two! Since the miracle of childbirth, my hips aren’t what they used to be…
I do enjoy these chats.
I had worried it would be a faff tying the wrap, but soon found I could niftily tie and untie him to be examined at the doctors or feed discreetly on the bus (at least until the nipple cups went rolling down the aisle). So slick was I that people were surprised I was a first time mum! Getting the tails muddy tying outside felt like a rite of passage.
Little babies don’t need much, I’d thought. Just love. Ours was going play with sticks outside needing only his imagination. Yet somehow, we’d been given everything our bub was going to need in abundance. Soon the baby grow count reached its hundreds, the blankets hit two dozen and we had just shy of 30 hats. We had decided that we wanted wherever possible to buy preloved, or support local small businesses to avoid exposing him to the excessive materialism of our society. So much stuff didn’t feature in our plan. Fortunately Robin has become baby number 3 in a chain of babies through which things are passed and I have a few friends to pass them on to as well.
The few items I did choose for Robin were a way to express and manifest my hopes for our future, and took on extra significance. There’s something incredibly romantic about the piece of cloth that connects you to your special unborn person. A wrap is an object designed to create memories and closeness, sparking the imagination and helping bring those visions into being, the seat from which you show your child the world. It’s also a physical experience, a community and a learning curve.
Buying Preloved
There is a thriving second-hand marketplace of worn-in slings of all kinds that are soft from travelling the world hugging babies. This makes preloved one of the best options for buying a sling, whilst connecting with another baby wearing parent along the way.
The wrap I chose was a ‘gossamer’ design. It reminded me of the sun shining through morning cobwebs on the hazy dawn walks I could no longer do, and to appreciate the little wonders in life. It is 100% cotton in a neutral colour that goes with all of my clothes and every time we use it i feel happy I chose well. I can’t think of a situation it wouldn’t suit. It was made by Lancashire based Firespiral Slings who are zero waste and actually use the extra thread from large manufacturing runs to make their cloth. (Turns out this how to make the softest goods around!) They also have a great half price incentive for first time wrappers (available by having a consultation with a sling library). Firespiral’s designs echo perfectly the landscape in which I live. There’s something very satisfying about the idea of walking through a gnarly snowy oak wood with your baby embraced in white twisted oak branches; throwing pebbles in the babbling brook and watching the resulting splash, as echoed on your wrap, gazing at the stars together, their map charted around your shoulders. You can feel the passion and personal experience the Firespiral creators have and I enjoy how their company continues their local tradition of weaving. Jen’s family goes back as far as they can trace working in the cotton industry. We ourselves live in a weaver’s cottage in an area of weaving heritage so I hope in the future to be able to use our wrap teach about the mills and the looms, the warp and the weft and the purpose of the mullioned windows in our house.
Wearing Robin has allowed me to escape being trapped under a clingy newborn baby and given us freedom to involve him in our pre-baby pursuits. I’m excited about how this bonding time is going to evolve as he becomes more communicative and curious about his surroundings and I get more bold, especially when lockdown eases. I long to dance together at a gig not just in the living room! A small initial effort to learn the basics of wrapping has become an incredibly rewarding skill.
On a final note, my reluctance to do the housework with Robin abreast was more than just a good excuse to avoid chores. I don’t trust myself bending down whilst his head is still so wobbly. After braving slippy stairs and splashy taps i concluded that i’m just too clumsy and my house is too messy. At 11 weeks, we tried a back rucksack carry and it’s been a game changer! Unlike with a carrier, wrap back carries in can be done carefully from birth though it’s not recommended unless you are a confident wrapper. My first attempt took 20 minutes to get right during which Robin was awake but didn’t complain. That week we packed up and moved studio together, became a tidying tornado and found time to experiment with some fancy finishes!
