I do understand that there’s some science behind it. I mean if, if the, the earlier, certainly the earlier stages and the nutrition that they gain from it, from that early days again that, that’s, that for me is obviously an important thing.

One of the things I enjoyed the first-time round was that we could it put less pressure on just one partner to feed the child and for me as the male of a child I thought it was important for me to find at least some way to try and bond with the child when they were younger, so giving the opportunity to bottle feed early doors was quite, was quite helpful. Obviously when it came round to the second one knowing that as my thought process the first time probably took me a little while to be fully convinced I was very much lead by my partner actually saying that it was something that, that she really wanted to try and it didn’t take a huge amount of convincing for me but, you know, it’s one of those things, normally the decision is hers, you know, we make most decisions combined, that sort of decision is hers and if she wants to, she wants to go down that route then I can only fully support it.

And I think, I think what it was, again the impressions that I’ve got from my partner is that we, that she really wants the, again also the nutritional side of it but for her I think it’s the bonding side of it that’s really important this time and I don’t feel that that was lacking the first time round possibly but maybe it will help even more so this time.

I feel that if it wasn’t for her knowledge of it I think it would be a very different story, I think if perhaps we both went in as blind as I may have been or as uninformed as, as we were having not been presented with the information, I don’t, I don’t feel like the conversation would have gone the same way, I feel like the appointments with consultants and stuff are so few and far between that it doesn’t, I almost feel like you’re too far down the road before that conversation’s even started to happen and you could already made a decision or if you have made a decision and then you start to learn about it, it makes that decision even harder when I don’t think it should, I think the information should be made a, perhaps a bit clearer at the start.

A lot of the information was from my partner and since we’ve done the initial bits and pieces we’ve had consultations with the doctor, we had an appointment just last week where this, this whole thing was discussed, that was with our consultant and midwife, and the information that they had, the guidelines were, were again handed to us then but I had already seen those guidelines albeit I can’t sit here and say that I remember everything in there because I think there were quite a few pages to it but we, you know I took them away again and I have read them and will probably continue to read it until the day the baby comes so, yeah [laughs].

I was shocked at the difference in the information that was being provided and it just, it for me flipped it, it flipped everything on its head because the decision was so quick last time, you know you almost thought well it worked last time can we just, you know, stick with the same process and now we had to make a, a decision, you know, completely against what we did the first time round. So I like a winning formula and the first time was good and we think, you know, why change it. But it’s, yeah, I think once I got like to grips with the information that was being provided and started to look into it and knew, you know, the risks that are still involved, however, you know, the ways of preventing them were, they were clearer and yeah I think it’s very different this time round.

I would say it was something that probably never really crossed my mind until I met my partner and it was, the information was, was given to me quite well and structured by my partner, I think it, it was in one breath quite a shock and the wealth of information that was obviously provided to me because again it was just something I had absolutely no idea, almost to the point, you don’t think it exists, you know, it’s not something you hear about every day and yeah I, very, very quickly learned what was what and I think naturally being quite an inquisitive person I think I sort of took it upon myself to kind of learn as much as possible even outside of the information I was given.