Hooray! We kept you alive for a whole week home from the hospital, little buddy!
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| Chillaxin' in my tiger suit |
I always knew that taking care of an infant would be a pretty all-consuming task, especially at first, but the reality of it has definitely hit me this week. The daytime hours fly by and the nighttime hours sometimes seem to crawl; some days I'll look at the clock and seriously have no clue how it is 4:30 already and I've barely gotten dressed. It's not an exaggeration to say that the only "me" time I've had since kiddo made his debut is on the toilet or in the shower, and even then I'm usually racing to finish before he starts squawking to eat again. Not that I mean to complain--I knew that this was exactly what I was signing up for, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It'll definitely get easier, too, as he gets older and we both get better at eating and sleeping again. Still, though, I'm quite looking forward to when he can hold up his had a little better so that I can do more with my hands while he eats. (I'm currently typing one-handed.)
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| Waiting to visit with more of my adoring public |
Speaking of eating...man, hold up. They said breastfeeding was a skill you had to learn, but I really didn't understand how hard it would be. It's turned out to be one of those things where (much like having a baby) you can read all you want and watch videos & look at all kinds of diagrams, but you can still have no sense at all of what it's actually supposed to feel like on your own body. The nurses in the hospital were great at helping me figure out the basics, but he's 10 days old today and
just today do I feel like we've consistently got a pretty good latch. I think problems with his latch didn't really become apparent in the hospital because we were working so hard just to keep him awake long enough to eat (still an issue, ha ha), and spending so much effort fighting with the SNS, and he was so little that he didn't spend enough time at one feeding to really start causing damage--and besides, I was hopped up on enough ibuprofen & on the high of having a baby to kind of ignore it when things hurt a little.
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| Such a sleepy baby! |
I knew that they said breastfeeding should never hurt, and I mostly believed it, but I think I didn't know what to do once we got home and my milk finished coming in and his suck got stronger. By the time I'd decided that there really was a problem I needed to take care of, I had blisters and cracking and even some bleeding. It felt like someone was coming at me with scissors any time he ate. I was doing all of the things the websites and the nurses said as well as I knew how; his mouth looked like all the pictures they show you, and I could hear him swallowing when he ate. But the problem was getting worse, not better.
Finally I did some more digging online and found some incredibly detailed websites that I had passed over before, thinking that they made it seem too complicated. Ha--turns out breastfeeding
is complicated! 5 degrees off on his latch angle, or 3 millimeters too high on the areola, or his lip or tongue or neck or tummy or butt turned the wrong way and all of a sudden I'm swearing up a blue streak in my head at this poor kid every time he's hungry.
So I read and studied and got up the courage to keep practicing, and it's slowly getting better, in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of way. The very best advice I read was to NOT pull him off & put him on again over & over trying to get the perfect latch--the doctor writing on that site said that doing that just makes both of you frustrated and makes it harder to relax into it (so true!). He said to try for the best latch you could on the first shot, and from there try to fix things
while the baby sucks by pushing down on his chin, adjusting the angle of his head, shifting your weight or your hands, etc.
This has completely saved me! Kiddo and I can almost always figure out a good latch now after a couple of minutes if we can't get it on the first try. And it turns out that the feeding position that they say is hardest for newborns & moms to figure out is actually the easiest for Luke and me: laying down in bed, tummy-to-tummy. Trying this was actually the first time I could feel what a good, strong latch felt like--Luke was drawing down big, slow gulps and swallowing after almost every suck (unlike before, where it would take him 6 or 7 sucks to get enough milk for a swallow), and I felt ZERO pain. It was almost like I couldn't feel him there. What had been a twisting, biting, knifelike pain was suddenly just a slow, gentle tug. I started crying because it felt so much better.
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| Totally milk-drunk. Full tummies are the best. |
I read, too, that nursing with a bad latch is like trying to drink though a kinked straw: Not much fluid comes through so you suck harder, but the harder you suck, the more the pressure builds behind the kink (causing more pain & even slower flow in the case of breastfeeding). This was, honestly, my main motivation to go back to square one and fix Luke's latch (not the pain, stupid me)--I suspected he just wasn't getting as much food as he should have been. He was only sleeping for 20 to 45 minutes a stretch at night, and then wanting to nurse for 45 minutes or an hour in between. That alone was slowly turning me into a psycho, sleepless zombie during the day.
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| Mom & baby passed out on the couch after a loooooong night... |
The night that I started bringing him into bed & nursing laying down (Saturday?), he nursed for 25 minutes and then slept for 3 1/2 hours. HALLELUJAH!! And then he woke up (without crying) and did it again! And AGAIN! In the space of one night, he went from waking to feed 11 times between 10pm & 8am to waking just 3 times. My sanity is back. I think a lot of the solution has been fixing that latch, and a lot of it is just that he sleeps better next to someone because he's so little. I'm actually pretty worried that I'm establishing some hard-to-break habits here: Between sleeping in bed with us and being held so much during the day by all the visiting grandparents, uncles, friends, etc., he almost never sleeps without being held. Am I going to regret this? They say you can't spoil a newborn, but I can really see this co-sleeping at least being a huge, um, shall we say, cramp in my style down the road...I love my husband, too. Am I setting us up for some big problems in the next few weeks?
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| Ready for bed! |
I guess for now, now that the rush of visitors has died down, I can work on having him nap in his crib at least. That should be a good place to start. Maybe tomorrow... he's been in-arms for basically the last 24 hours because his Plastibell cap is coming off his circumcision as it heals, and it's been super painful for him. Poor kid screams for 15-20 seconds every time he pees. Not just his "I'm hungry!" squawking, either; he goes from being asleep or completely silent to letting out these blood-curdling screams where you can tell that he really hurts and it scares him because he doesn't know why he's in pain. He's always fine right after--he just looks around as if nothing happened--but he needs some pretty immediate soothing to get back to sleep if he woke himself up from a nap, so holding him while he sleeps has been much easier. The cap finished coming off at his last diaper change (yay!) and he's not half as fussy about it as he has been for the last two days or so, so hopefully things in the screaming pee department are dying down.
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| That angel face is deceptive: This is probably the 4th outfit I've peed through today. |
In related news, the kid is a champion pooper. If he's awake for the event, he holds still and gets this distant, slightly confused, very concentrated look on his face that seems to say, "Wait, what's happening to me?" Sometimes if he's asleep, he'll heave this contented little sigh after he's done. And no matter if he's awake or asleep, he always lets us know he needs a change because he poops
so loudly. It is so nasty. Scott and I just look at each other and laugh every time that such a big, juicy, disgusting noise could come from something so small. I guess that's what you get from a kid who passed not one or two, but
five meconium-filled (filled, I tell you) diapers in his first day of life. Champion pooper.
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| Pondering the mysteries of the universe...or pooping. Hard to say. |
Bonus video time: (1) Hiccups and (2) The lengths we will go to to try to get you to stay asleep in your crib. (Promise they're short.)
