I’ve actually had this post saved as a draft for a couple of months now – just a few little comments to remind myself what I was thinking about and to act as a prompt to write it up. And then today I saw this week’s Parentonomy prompt.

So, siblings…

In the last few months of pregnancy I become increasingly worried about the effect that the arrival of Baby E would have on Little O. It is also something that I had no experience to draw on, being any only child, and looking at Husband’s family did not help matters as there does seem to be some favouritism by his parents. I kept on going round and round the worst case scenario in my head: Little O feeling that he was being overlooked with the arrival of Baby E. I could imagine the tears, the sadness and then the resignation. It was something that I was determined that he would not feel.

To combat this, I did what I always do in these cases: I read, I researched, I read some more. One great book that I downloaded on Kindle was The Second Baby Survival Guide by Naia Edwards, which covered topics like sibling rivalry, attention-seeking behaviour by toddlers and gave tips on how to juggle life with a toddler and a newborn. And a quick google search reveals many helpful websites, including this page on Gurgle and this one on kellymom. We also bought a few books about babies to read with Little O (two by Rachel Fuller (Waiting For Baby and My New Baby) and There’s a House Inside My Mummy by Giles Andreae), which we read with him in the last weeks before Baby E’s birth.

On the day that we came home from the hospital with Baby E, we found that Little O was almost beside himself with excitement about meeting his little brother. Over the next couple of days, this turned into a little bit of resentment about how much attention this little interloper was receiving. I think part of this was because our initial approach was to have Baby E shut in our room when he slept, which meant Little O only really saw him when Baby E was feeding and that created some bad feeling – to him it must have seemed that Baby E was getting lots of cuddles. I consulted the book again and changed strategy and had Baby E sleeping in his carrycot out in the main part of the apartment. Little O was then very keen to stroke him, but often a little too heavy-handedly. Through trial and error, we found that if we encouraged him in his stroking and removed him from the situation and distracted him with toys when he became too aggressive, we could create some harmony. I say through trial and error – we had a few incidences when Little O realised that if he hit Baby E or poked him hard, he got a reaction, albeit a negative one, from us, and so he would do it over and over. Simply distracting him with a new game or a new way to play with his toys stopped this negative behaviour though.

In one way though, the opposite of what I had feared has happened and sometimes poor Baby E has to take a backseat. If both of them are crying and it is just me with them, then Little O is the one who I attend to first, in most cases, simply because he is the one who would understand and be hurt by me focusing on his little brother over him. From what I read this is the best way to handle this situation and can actually help the newborn be less fussy and grow more independent.

Now, three and a half weeks in, Little O already seems to adore his baby brother, always comes in to our bedroom in the morning to say hello to him, wants to cuddle him and to help with changing his nappy. Of course, there are still, and will continue to be, moments of discord and rivalry, but I feel much happier than I did in late pregnancy. I just hope that their closeness in age will translate into closeness later in life. Excluding, of course, the many battles that we’ll see between them – they are little boys, after all!