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: