Here is an hydrotherapy exercise program that you can use while pregnant or as a new Mummy.

If you are heavily pregnant during Summer you feel the heat a lot more. Getting in a cold pool has multiple benefits. It gives you the incredible feeling of weightlessness which is lovely on your loosened pelvic joints and helps reduce those swollen ankles/ wrists. It also provides a great medium to do exercise. Take care in the first trimester of pregnancy with the heat of hot hydrotherapy pools but apart from that they are perfectly safe. Caution needs to be taken when moving your arms or legs fast in the water with hydrotherapy exercises as the water adds resistance. The faster you move, the higher the resistance. This is a great tool for strengthening but be careful to listen to your body, as with your unstable joints due to the relaxin hormone loosening your ligaments for childbirth, you are more vulnerable to joint injury and pain. It may also feel fine when you are in the cool or warm buoyant water but when you get out of the pool the pain can come on latently. Regardless of how careful you are, you always feel like a tonne of bricks when the reality of gravity hits you again outside of the pool! But the time you are in the pool is divine.

As well as being the best Mummy, keep equal focus on the relationship with your partner in 2018.

Now that we have little ones in our lives, we get to relive that irreplaceable feeling of magic, wonder and joy that is Christmas. Misaki, our daughter, had no awareness of her first Christmas at 9 months, other than the lovely time and attention she got from her loving family.

This year, she has no concept of Father Christmas or the birth of Jesus (which ever you choose to believe) but loves the Christmas trees, naming “tree, lights, star and balls”- so proud. I look forward to her full understanding of Christmas so I can feel her palpable excitement of Santa coming if she is good (and the bargaining power that will bring).

The other event for us this time of year is our Wedding anniversary. It is 3 years today and we are going to celebrate by going out to dinner with a few drinks either side, followed by a sleep in with Misaki having a sleep over at Grandy’s! I am so excited as it is over 6 months since our last date night! How did we let that happen?!

Read to check your baby does not have the symptoms of developmental hip dysplasia which is quite common and easily treated.

I wanted to write this blog on hip dyplasia to highlight that it is one of the most common musculoskeletal issues in a new born, 1 in 600 in girls but only 1 in 3000 boys (https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/developmental-dysplasia-of-the-hip-ddh). The paediatrician checks a baby’s hips when they are first born to see that they don’t dislocate and have enough range of motion (restriction can be a sign of DDH). Misaki’s was noted on her discharge check, on day 5. As a physiotherapist I was aware of how common it is and what they do to treat it but it was still a bit of a shock. My perfect baby has dislocating hips

What is metatarsus adductus and in-toeing, how can you detect it and how can it be fixed?

I feel so blessed that Misaki is generally a very healthy baby. She had a few musculoskeletal issues in the early days which kept us busy. I think she may have inherited my long legs as being couped up in my womb she also inherited my metatarsus adductus and her paternal aunties hip dysplasia. See blog on Hip Dysplasia.

Read this if you want to gloat with your perfect eating baby or gain solidarity in numbers if you share my pain of a fussy eater. Gain an incidental exercise routine and ways to avoid hurting your back whilst feeding along the way.

Oh geez, bother and much more explicate words. We are trying to master solids. When you read this maybe the recommendations would have changed but today it is try to start solids from 4 months. As you may have read in other blogs we did a lot of travelling early in her life so for a myriad of reasons getting a routine for solids was hard. But aside from this excuse I think along with my husband’s good looks has acquired his trait of fussy eating. Unlike me who lives for food, good wine and her family and friends. It has been a traumatic experience of hysterical cries, choking and all round terrifying experience for all.

This blog talks about the different types of incontinence, one common after childbirth, one a possible hindrance to childbirth, how to strengthen your pelvic floor and how Women's Health Physiotherapists can help treat the complex issues.

We are comfortable talking about gay marriage and sex toys but Incontinence is still taboo. It is actually very common but shouldn’t be. Understandably it is prevalent after vaginal birth due to the stretching of the pelvic floor more than one cares to imagine. It is also more prevalent during pregnancy too due to the pressure your growing baby is placing on your bladder and pelvic floor. At 36 weeks the frequency to go to the toilet is increased in 81% of pregnant women, urge incontinence is present in 68% of pregnant women, stress urinary incontinence is present in 42% and bladder prolapse is seen in 14% of pregnant women (Van Brummen et al, 2006). Six months after birth, 26% of postpartum women have sexual problems, 25% have haemorrhoids, and 10% have urinary incontinence (Brown and Lumley, 1998). So what is the pelvic floor exactly and what can we do to strengthen or stretch it?

Bad sitting posture is epidemic in our modern world. We sit for so much in our sedentary lives and this puts an enormous amount of strain on our back, especially if our posture is bad. Back and neck pain is what I see most in my professional work and it is largely due to poor posture. Posture is a habit. If we can instil good postural habits in our babies when their brains are sponges, then they will have far less trouble with back and neck pain in the future.

Good posture also instils a confident, self-assured mind and body. Physical Therapist Peter Walker has written a book “Baby Massage” (2011 and 2015) which has some great ideas for helping your baby to sit and encouraging good sitting posture for babies. All of the ideas below are from his book, reference below.

This brief blog talks about the vast benefits and importance of Vestibular Exercise. Learn exercises you can do with your baby to encourage her Vestibular System development.

Misaki smiles and laughs with delight when I am holding her and we squat down and up, the faster the better and turn around in circles dancing. I hadn’t thought much about it but my gorgeous OT friend reminded me that this is vestibular training. A baby finds these fast movements stimulating and a baby needs more stimulation than an adult to get the same fulfilment. Vestibular exercises are really important because they help inhibit the primitive reflexes as well as develop balance. Vestibular exercises are also important to develop posture, movement and a sense of position in space. Lastly, vestibular stimulation is helpful for the development of speech and language as the vestibular system (inner ear) works closely with the hearing (inner ear) system.

Read here for a summary of the Primitive Reflexes your Baby should display and when they should Disappear. It is important they disappear as this can have a massive impact on their Neurological Development and much more. Read how you can Encourage their Development.

Again another article that I have had to dig up the old Paediatric textbooks (with cross checks with recent evidence). Nothing has changed but my practical knowledge has. There are a few primitive reflexes which are tested to be present in your baby when they are born. These reflexes develop in the immature foetal brain which serve to protect the immature child when they are born for the first few months and their brain is still developing. These reflexes are then diminished as new permanent mature reflexes take over with the maturing brain. These reflexes are called Postural reflexes. All the reflexes are automatic unconscious actions and developed in the brain stem part of the brain. It is really important to do certain exercises to help the development of these reflexes because the nerve pathways have to pass through the brain stem to reach the parts of the brain where conscious actions like thinking, movement etc take place (the cerebral hemispheres). If there is immaturity/ poor development of the reflexes this can have an effect on not only balance and posture for all motor activities, but also sleep, immunity, energy levels, impulse control, concentration and social, emotional and intellectual learning. https://suehyland.co.uk/ond/primitive-reflexes/  The science is quite complex and I am not going to go in to detail but if you are interested look at the attached reference. However please read more on how to assist your child with their reflex development by reading the GymbaROO and Vestibular Exercise blogs.

What is Plagiocephaly and how can You Prevent or Treat it with Exercises and Positions at Home?

I felt self conscious that my being a physiotherapist who should know how to prevent plagiocephaly had a baby daughter with it. I was doing all the right positioning yet she still had it. The physiotherapist and paediatrician we were seeing for her hips and feet made note of her flattened head and made the physiotherapy recommendations to help fix it. These exercises I will detail below I was already doing. I then worked out that I was not in the wrong and that she had developed the plagiocephaly in utero with her head most likely up against the wall of my uterus because the flattened part was too high on her skull to be due to lying on it. If developed in utero it can also be due to low amniotic fluid, multiple babies or increased uterine or abdominal tone. Mine was probably the latter. ;)

This informative blog details the different physical developmental milestones your baby should achieve in their first year. I detail easy ways to encourage their development from a physiotherapist's point of view.

Watching Misaki reach the different milestones has been an absolute wonder. Seeing the textbook knowledge play out in my very own baby is a joy to witness. It is just amazing how she has basically reached these milestones herself but when she was struggling to roll I assisted her with some physio guidance. I am doing the same now for her commando crawling. I am not a paediatric specialist physiotherapist but have worked in the area enough in my career to have retained some of the important knowledge. I am a musculoskeletal physiotherapist so most of my paediatric treatment has been on torticollis (which I treated on Misaki successfully- see my separate blog on My boobs are lop sided). Hopefully the business grows so that we will be able to employ a paediatric physiotherapist who will give greater insight to child development in later blogs. So I preface this blog on baby development by saying I am not a paediatric physiotherapist so my knowledge is only at undergraduate level.

Mastitis commonly occurs with breastfeeding. This blog talks about contributing factors and how best to treat it.

You may have read my blog on Breast Feeding and heard that I suffered from mastitis, a couple of times. The infection was caused by cracked nipples when we were having trouble breast feeding. Not a fun time. It makes me cringe thinking about the pain when she latched on to feed!

Mastitis is an inflammation of breast tissue that can lead to infection. Initially there will be redness over the breast but can lead to flu like symptoms such as a raised temperature, aches, tiredness. Mastitis can be caused as in my situation, if your baby is not latching on correctly and either not draining your breast milk ducts or creating open breast tissue from cracking the nipples with poor latching. Other causes of mastitis are from not feeding frequently enough, stopping breast feeding too suddenly, a tight bra, or a baby with tongue tie who can not latch on properly.

My baby is making my boobs lopsided" said one of my Mother's group Mummies. Could Torticollis (a twisted stiff neck) be the reason why?

Our boobs change a lot during pregnancy and when breastfeeding. Now I actually have some and stretch marks to match the overnight enormity of them. Like we often have one foot slightly bigger than the other or one leg longer than the other (very common) we often have one breast bigger than the other. But this is not what she was talking about. Her baby had a breast she preferred to drink from and through increased demand to that side, that breast became bigger and the other less popular breast became smaller.

Well I feel like I am! I feel my life is one big musical. My husband thinks I have the worst voice ever. It is not great but I love to sing. Thankfully for me, my daughter LOVES IT. I think it is a thing. I am not alone in that all babies love to hear their Mum’s sing. It is great for my self esteem when I look and feel like *!@# and she looks at me adoringly. I sing all the old classics and then incorporate appropriately worded songs to match the activities I am doing/ toys we are playing with. If anyone is old enough to remember the 1980s Romper Room classic, “Bend and Stretch, reach for the stars, there goes Jupiter, there goes Mars” is regularly sung when I am stretching in the morning! I am often making up the lyrics mostly because I can not remember them all, or they don't quite fit the activity or I get bored of the same lyrics. When I am not singing I am doing a running monologue describing my actions too. I feel that she is absorbing all these words in a practical way to one day speak them herself. I stop talking and singing though when she interjects to show her that I will be quiet and listen when she is talking. It seems sensible and natural to me so I do it. Many people don’t choose to do this as they feel what is the point as babies don’t understand what we are saying. They feel stupid.

Read to see how many benefits can be gained for your baby at GymbaROO or Kindergym.

Mum apparently used to take me to GymbarROO or something similar when I was a child. Mum said it was recommended that I was taken by the Kindergym teachers because in this unstructured environment I would just play with the babies rather than on the play equipment. It also looked like I had some ‘issues’. I was unco. Before political correctness I was chucked out of classical ballet classes because I was pigeon toed, I hated going to Basketball training because I was shouted at for my failings at jumping to get the ball. I was put in the A grade because of my height, definitely not for my skill. It was traumatic. I had these knees that would dislocate on school ski trips, not doing some heroic black run but going up the t-bar ski lift. They ended up putting me in a row boat and out of sheer sweat and determination I became quite good at it because I just had to sit and work bloody hard. Some people are unco and some people are Olympic athletes. There is no amount of GymbaROO or Kindergym that is going to help make you a professional athlete if you are like me but it will help you be a lot less unco and develop many great skills that will help you not only in the playground but in the classroom and beyond too.

Techniques on how to prevent and treat colic in your baby.

Oh how Misaki cried from gas/ colic! It was awful. Hysterical screams for hours sometimes. This was in the first couple of months when you don’t know whether it is this or that, that is causing her pain. Not even the medics can tell you. I reluctantly tried medication after hours of burping didn’t work but this didn’t help either. I tried abdominal massage but it is impossible to do it when your baby is screaming in pain.

Baby massage has so many physical and emotional benefits for mother and child. An article telling you why and how to administer baby massage.

Being a physiotherapist I am a touchy feely person. I can’t stop cuddling, kissing and touching my baby. How could you not want to touch those pudgy edible thighs and that skin that is saturated with so much collagen you could cry with jealousy? The bond between Mum and baby and Dad and baby is extremely strong and made stronger through touch. This is why they encourage skin to skin contact just after your baby is born and from then after breastfeeding and massaging. As a physiotherapist I know there are several benefits of massage but when researching for this blog I learnt that the benefits for babies are SO MUCH more. It makes me cry thinking of babies missing out on massage. Please read this and apply today.

Here is an alternative way to breast feed your baby that could save you from neck pain and keep you warm in the middle of the night.

Why does no one tell you how hard breast feeding can be? Is it that you are so sleep deprived it all becomes a blur? Well I found it really hard! Within the first week my nipples had been ripped to shreds and the open wounds caused mastitis, a couple of times. I had the most amazing help from the midwives during and after my hospital stay. Burnside Hospital, Adelaide was amazing. They advised me to express the milk to give my nipples a rest from Misaki’s tiny mouth trying to work out how to feed. Part of the problem was my low supply so she was working really hard and tirelessly to get some milk out. Poor poor darling was losing weight so along with nipple shields to protect my nipples (a god send) I was put on Motilium (Domperidone, another god send) to increase my milk supply and recommended to start supplementing with formula which regrettably I started doing. This was all within the first 6 weeks of her life. That little intro was just to let you know that you are not alone if you are suffering from any of these issues and midwives or lactation consultants are there to help.

Here is a exercise routine you can do to increase your strength and simultaneously bond with your baby!

In the first two years of your baby’s life, the most important thing you can give to them to help them turn in to happy successful adults is LOVE (Biddulph, 2011). Massage, cuddles, talking and dancing, story time, play time shared with your baby are all opportunities for baby bonding. Looking directly into their eyes as you talk lovingly and sing to your baby is invaluable. They know if you are being distracted with watching the TV and not giving them 100% of your time. I went to this talk on raising girls by Psychologist Steve Biddulph from the book Raising Girls (2011), and he said if the father can give undivided attention to the girl, the girl will grow to know that if her Dad dedicated that time to her that she must be worthwhile and set higher standards for the people she ends up dating, not settling for people that don’t treat her right. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/119122.Steve_Biddulph