Day 9 and my two year old keeps launching herself at my stomach. When is it actually safe to pick her up again?

Full tummy tuck with muscle repair on the 15th so day 9 today. Drains came out on Friday, I'm still walking a bit hunched but improving, pain is more tight than sore now. All fine on paper. The problem is my daughter. She's 2 and a bit and she has NO concept of any of this, she just sees mummy on the sofa and runs full pelt and headbutts me in the lower belly. Twice yesterday. I nearly cried both times, more from fear than pain.

My husband has been doing all the lifting, nursery runs, bath, the lot, but he's back at work on the 1st and my mum can only do mornings. So I need to know realistically: when can I lift her? She's about 13kg. My discharge sheet just says "no heavy lifting for 6 weeks" which is useless when the heavy thing is a person who wants to be picked up 40 times a day. And is the headbutting doing damage?? I keep imagining the stitches inside pinging. Sorry, long, I'm tired and a bit weepy.

Mine was March, my youngest was 3 at the time and 15kg of pure elbows, so I feel this in my scar. The thing that saved me was sitting on the floor. If you're already down at their level they climb into your lap instead of being lifted, and you can cuddle without any actual lifting happening. I basically lived on a beanbag for a month.

For the launching: I taught mine "gentle hands, mummy's tummy is poorly" and it worked maybe 60 percent of the time, which was better than nothing. The other 40 percent I braced a cushion over the scar whenever she came at me.

Cushion shield, yes. Also a proper lie down on the sofa with your knees up makes the belly a lot less of a target than sitting upright. I got hit a few times in the first fortnight and nothing bad came of it, but I did ring my nurse about it and she was very clear that a toddler bump is a different thing from lifting the toddler.

Katie, first, the headbutts. A bump against the abdomen at day 9 hurts and frightens you, but the plication is a row of strong sutures through the muscle sheath, not a thread, and it is not undone by a two year old landing on it. What surgeons worry about is sustained load, the kind of strain you produce by lifting and carrying, not a knock. If a bump left you with new swelling on one side, bleeding, or a pain that kept climbing instead of settling, that would be a call to your team the same day. A wince and a wobble is not that.

Now lifting, which is the real question and the one I most underestimated with my own two. The house rule on this site, matching what the NHS and BAPRAS describe, is no heavy lifting for about 6 to 8 weeks to protect the muscle repair, and a 13kg child counts as heavy lifting in that sense; I wrote up the staged return in exercise after a tummy tuck. What that meant for me in practice was roughly three phases. Weeks 1 to 2, I lifted nothing heavier than a kettle and my children were brought to me. Weeks 3 to 6, I could manage a short lift from a height, so from a bed or a sofa onto my lap, keeping her close to my body and never bending down to the floor to scoop, but I didn't carry. From about 6 weeks, once my surgeon had checked the repair, I started carrying for short distances and built up. Getting a toddler out of a cot and into a car seat is the hardest lift of all, because you are bending forward and reaching, and that was the last thing I got back, well after 6 weeks.

Two things people don't tell you. One, the bent-over stage you're still in is your body protecting the repair, and picking a child up off the floor asks you to straighten under load, which is the exact movement it's guarding against. Two, the tiredness at weeks 2 to 3 is enormous and it catches out mothers who are "managing." I'd plan for your mum's mornings to cover the cot lift and the nursery run, and see whether nursery or a neighbour can help with the afternoons for the first fortnight after your husband goes back. And ask your own surgeon for their number rather than mine, because a tummy tuck with a hernia repair or a very wide diastasis sometimes gets a longer no-lifting window.

Update because I hate threads that just stop. Rang the nurse, she said the same as Rebecca more or less, no carrying until my 6 week check and bumps are not the same as lifting. Floor sitting has completely changed my days, she climbs into my lap and we read and I don't have to lift at all. Nursery agreed to take her three afternoons which I'd never have thought to ask for. Day 22 now, standing nearly straight, and the launching has calmed down since we made the "poorly tummy" thing into a game where she has to tiptoe. Thank you all, I was in a state when I wrote that first post.