I know. I know. Not even halfway through the month and I’ve already started to skip alternate days. Well it’s just one day so far and yesterday was blah so…yeah.
Today though, I met up with the fellow expat here who’s the wife of hub’s colleague. Her baby is lovely and slept right through the entire meet up which is amazing to me. So teeny tiny at 3 months. She reminded me of how tiny Baby E was at her age.
We got to talking about her birth experience here in Germany and contrary to what I’ve read in expat mummy groups on Facebook, she had a wonderful experience! An attentive gynecologist, a friendly surgeon when it was time for her C-section who just happened to speak French (she’s from France and so she was of course very happy about that), and as frequent health visitor visits after the birth as she liked! She also had help and guidance on how to breastfeed after the birth.
This all sounds incredible to me as I never met a doctor throughout my whole pregnancy in the UK, spoke about two words to my surgeon right before my C-section, about three visits from a health visitor after birth (one of which I requested), and no breastfeeding help whatsoever.
She also mentioned how she noticed some sort of an attempt to coerce moms to breastfeed…like it’s the only way to feed your baby sort of thing. Like if you had decided you didn’t want to breastfeed, you better think again! Interesting. She mentioned that it’s generally not quite an issue in France but they are likely to encourage you, in France, to go with formula. I don’t know about the UK, as I’ve quickly realized there’s quite a wide variety of stories that I’ve heard but I’d wager that it’s a 50/50 thing in the UK. No real occupation with breastfeeding. Not that I’ve done a survey or anything.
I thought her great experience might have had something to do with the fact that she was on private healthcare which she confirmed but also said that the good aftercare is the same without private healthcare so…good for Germany.
Funny how many maternity healthcare differences exist within the EU alone.
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