Our first month as parents (part 2)

Sheesh, this boring stuff is taking me forever to write down!  Quinn is going to be 8 weeks on Sunday, and I'm still working on his one month notes!

C section recovery - Needless to say, having a C section was nowhere in our birth plan.  I had no idea what to expect, and I wasn't prepared at all.  In hindsight, I should have at least read a little bit about them while I was pregnant.  The pain the first couple of days was excruciating.  They had a hard time keeping the pain under control, and my nurses at hospital #2 kept forgetting to give me my meds (which I've since heard is a common problem there).  Not only had I had abdominal surgery, but I also had a tiny, fragile baby to take care of.  It was probably 2 weeks before I could sit up in bed without large amounts of pain.  Of course this was a huge hassle, since I needed to sit up all the time to feed the baby.  I'm grateful that Bryan helped out a TON during this time and really didn't ask me to do anything but feed the baby.  He definitely kept our house running.  Now, at 8 weeks post-partum, I don't hurt at all.  I'd say I was mostly better by 6 weeks.

Feeding - in general, feeding was probably the #1 thing I cried about the most.  Since Quinn was so early, he didn't have a suck or rooting reflex.  We were separated for the first 24 hours, so he had to get formula and I was trying to pump while I waited for my milk to come in.  It took about 48 hours, and when it came in, IT CAME IN.  Even the nurses were impressed.  Even after feeding Quinn, this is how much extra milk I pumped and brought home in just over 2 days.

In order to bring him home, the doctor told us we had to get him up to a certain amount per feeding.  He wasn't really breastfeeding well at all, so initially I pumped colostrum and Bryan fed it to him with a 1mL syringe. (I love the look on Bryan's face here...."am I doing this right???"  This feels so long ago now).

It seemed like the doctors and nurses were setting us up for failure.  They would tell us that the goal for that day was 15mL per feeding. First off, I wasn't allowed to count breastfeeding.  I'm still not sure why.  This lead to an exhausting pattern of attempting to breastfeed, then bottle feeding (usually Bryan), then pumping.  Secondly, we couldn't get him to eat 15mL without spitting half of it back up.  We'd work our butts off all day to get him up to 15mL, only to be asked "why are you doing only 15mL?  The goal is 25mL."  Um, what?  You never told us you had increased it.  We asked for help.  Even the nursery nurse couldn't get the amount in they wanted.  It was SO stressful, and they "threatened" that we couldn't take him home and they would put in an ng tube if we couldn't get him to eat the amount they had deemed as the goal.

Thankfully we just skated by on the last day (I begged for an extra day in the hospital so we could work with him together and all go home as a family).  They made us go back for weight checks two days later and one week later.  At that point we were able to satisfy them that he was doing well, and the intense monitoring stopped.  I'm happy to report now that he's breastfeeding like a champ (although still about every 2 hours, sometimes more often).  I haven't had any of the cracking/bleeding/pain issues that so many women complain about.  I still pump, but only 1-2 times a day in order to have bottles for Bryan when he gives me a break or for grandma when she babysits.  He's going to get bottles in daycare, so we want to be sure he continues to be able to go from breast to bottle as easily as he always has.

Work shower - My work baby shower was supposed to be the Tuesday after he was born.  Needless to say, it was cancelled.  My boss was kind enough to deliver the big gift, his carseat, to the hospital since we needed it to take him home!  My coworkers were so excited about him that they still wanted to have a shower.  They knew we have a Dr. Seuss themed nursery, so they threw a Dr. Seuss themed baby shower.
Green Eggs and Ham

Diaper cake:

The whole gang

It was lovely, and several of the decorations now hang in his nursery.  I am SO lucky to work with such great people!

Getting out of the house - After the initial "wow we have a baby" shock wore off, we quickly realized how important it was/is to get out of those house every day for both our sanity, and Quinn's.  Some days that can be a struggle, but I always try.  He LOVES being outside.  Even if it is just in the hammock with dad.
Because he was so little he didn't fit in a carrier.  The slings worked, but they hurt my back.  Bryan and I both agreed the Moby wrap was too complicated.  One day, when Q was about a month old, I finally decided to try the Beco, even if he was technically a little under the weight limit.  He LOVED it.  So did I.  You can see how he felt after his first walk in it.

We have since worn it all over, even in the house.  He loves being close and warm, and he often falls asleep within a couple of minutes.  We went to a beautiful park near our house a couple of weeks ago, and he slept the entire time in the Beco.


More to come....

Our first month as parents (part 1)

Note: This probably isn't very interesting to many people, but I wanted to record some of this "new to parenting" stuff before I forgot it. It's in no particular order.  It has taken me over a week to complete this part, so some of the days might not make sense now.  I'm too tired to go back and fix things!

Diapers - Our plan all along was to cloth diaper.  However, most of the ones we have are for "normal" sized newborns, not preemies.  We ran out and bought some preemie disposables (which are surprisingly hard to find).  We used them for about 2.5 weeks, but they were SO expensive (we spent more on disposable diapers in those 2.5 weeks than on our entire cloth diaper stash).  We also found that the Huggies leaked terribly, so that was our incentive to go up to the fancy cloth diaper store and buy a few covers for tiny babies.  We had a couple of days of figuring out how to use them, but we're now totally on board and love cloth diapering.  A friend also loaned me some great snapping prefolds, which have made things REALLY easy.  Seriously, they are no more work than disposables.  Also, our city recently added composting and switched to only every other week garbage pick-up, so the amount of trash associated with the disposables wouldn't even fit in our trash bin.



Solo parenting - The original plan was for Bryan to take off two weeks plus any fraction of a week after I delivered.  He figured out pretty quickly that 2 weeks wasn't going to be enough considering I'd had major surgery, plus he wasn't ready to leave Quinn that soon.  He ended up taking 4 weeks off and went back to work this Monday.  Monday everything went smoothly for me and I thought I was a pro at this parenting thing. HAHAHAHA.  Tuesday was awful.  The night before Quinn was a wreck, so I barely got any sleep, and our day went downhill from there.  Wednesday was slightly better, and Thursday so far has been fairly hard.  When the baby doesn't sleep during the night, it's really hard to function.  I know Bryan needs to sleep since he has to go to work, so I'm on my own if Quinn is screaming because of gas pains.  When he's gassy he doesn't nurse well (or spits a lot of it up) so I end up bottle feeding pumped milk, which just makes more work for me since I have to pump again.  All of this is a long way of saying I'M TIRED! Update: it has been a week since I wrote that.  Yesterday I read Happiest Baby on the Block and started implementing the techniques.  Although it hasn't even been a full day, it has made a huge difference so far!

Carriers - We planned on baby wearing, but Quinn was too small for a lot of our carriers.  He fit in a sling that had been given to us, but it hurt my back.  The moby wrap worked, but we both found the wrapping to be difficult and impossible to do without help.  I finally decided 2 days ago that he seemed big enough for our Beco Butterfly now (my guess is he's hovering close to 7lbs), so I decided to try it.  He and I both loved it!  He's snuggly in it and loves to be out walking around with me, and I love that it doesn't hurt my back.  Win all around.  Bryan tried it tonight for the first time at the store and liked it as well.



Gifts - Everyone has been so generous with our little guy.  It became the joke between Bryan and I that we couldn't help but check the porch for packages several times a day because for the first month or so there was a package almost every day.  Okay, sometimes it was baby stuff that we ordered from Amazon, but it was still all stuff for Quinn.  It was a lot of fun to see all of the people all over the world that were sending

Preemie clothes - We had not one piece of clothing that actually fit Quinn when he was born.  We were expecting an 8lb baby, not a 5lb one.  All of his clothes swallowed him up.  Preemie clothes were a little hard to find, but Babies R Us and a co-worker came to our rescue.  He's now just starting to fit in newborn clothes, and we have a ton of those.

And some random pictures:

1 month

Today is Sir Quinn's 1 month birthday....although technically he has 3 more days to go until he's "born."  What a month is has been.  I've been too tired and busy (doing what I can't quite figure out, but newborns take a lot of energy, and I feel like a preemie ups the ante considerably) to blog, but I really hope to record more about this parenting gig for posterity.  Goodness knows I'm not going to be able to rely on my mushy brain to remember much of this time!