Play by Play

Below is the first and only post I actually wrote during those early days:

Speck is 4 weeks old now, which hardly seems possible. Our first week flying solo is now drawing to a close. DH was home the first couple weeks, then my mom came to help out last week. Frankly it's been a bit rockier than I expected. Everyone tells you it's hard, you get no sleep, blah blah blah. I don't know whether my problem is more naivete or arrogance, but I guess I just thought that somehow things would be different for me and I would be able to take it all in stride. Plus when you listen to other people you can't help but think they must be exaggerating.

As it turns out, they aren't.


And now for more email chatter:
Me: do you have any idea what I did with the bags I bought to sterilize the pump parts in the microwave? We're doing fine, Speck played a little while and then went back down for a nap, so I was able to wash my hair and eat breakfast. If he doesn't wake soon on his own I am about to go get him up to eat again.

Me2: Speck must have been tired too. After last feeding we were playing on the floor on his aquarium mat. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back he was asleep. After some internal debate I put a blanket on him and laid down on the couch myself. I did manage a catnap of 20 minutesor so until the phone rang (mom). Now I am again having the internal debate, this time about whether to wake him or let him sleep a bit longer. He's been drowsy at every feeding so I'd like him to be nice and awake the next time so he will eat well. But it's been 2.5 hourssince he ate and he's been asleep close to 2 hours and I always worryabout him getting too hungry or napping too much so he stays awake at night. Oh well, maybe I'll flip a coin and think of it as an experiment. Sorry, you probably don't want the play-by-play. Mainly I just wanted to tell you I made his next appointment for July 5th at 10:30. He'll get his first shots that day so I think it would be good if you could come to that.


DH: Let him sleep as long as he doesn't sleep more than 3 hours. That might keep him from being so cranky this afternoon. He should be sleeping ~ 15hours out of 24. The last two days you were freaking out because he wasn't sleeping enough. Don't worry about the feeding unless he's gone longer than 4 hours.You've been feeding him plenty. He's letting us know now when he is hungry.I like the play-by-play. Why do you want me there for his shots...so he learns to associate me with pain?


Me: he did wake up on his own, and it was very close to 3 hours of nap and 4 hours since last feeding. but he didn't eat that much, and now he is asleep again. maybe now that his weight is good he is just having a day where he is relaxing. i think i try too hard to find patterns.

Learning to Parent

DH: Hi!He slept a lot last night. I think we can safely let him nap during the5:00-7:00 hours... eh? Remember:- No drawing blood- No peeing on the floor- Nothing other than Mother's milk to drink. Keep me informed on what your schedule is looking like with the Dr. Appt.

Me: Yes, he slept GREAT. I had to wake him at 7 to eat again because he was still snoozing pretty soundly. I wish I knew what the secret is. Maybe it's just a gradual process and we are reaping the benefits of being consistent about day vs night routines. I'm curious to see how he does tonight. Yesterday he stayed awake after his first feeding, but right now he is asleep again. If he stays sleepy all day I may start to get worried again and try to go back to the 2 hour poke-the-baby routine... I could only get him to nurse for about 15 minutes this morning so I pumped afterward; you'll have just a little less than 3 oz in the fridge unless I am able to pump again. I am hoping he has nice long sessions the rest of the day so I may not have the opportunity.
Mom will be here while I go to dr (appt at 3:30). I will arrange things so I feed him right before leaving, so I think I should be back well before he needs to eat again. Do you want me to show her the syringe technique just in case? I am a little reluctant to ask her to do it, because I think it will be a bit outside her comfort zone, and I feel pretty confident I won't be gone too long. But if you want me to show her I will.

DH: Don't show her. I'll leave here a little early. I think we are starting to see his days/nights inverted. All theliterature says it takes a few weeks, and we've had him home for 2.5weeks now. See if he gets a little more lively throughout the day. I found this link on infant sleep. It contains a chart broken showing sleep requirements broken down by how many months old the child is. http://www.lpch.org/DiseaseHealthInfo/HealthLibrary/growth/infhab.html If he is needs to sleep 16 hours a day, that leaves 8 hours awake. Ifyou are feeding him 8-10 times at 30-40 minutes a go, that is 4-6.5hours. Tack on a wakeful period in the morning and one in the afternoon,and the little guy should be tuckered out. I've read several resources now that recommend not letting the baby fall asleep in your arms. Instead, rock or cuddle them to the point of drowsiness and then put them down and let them fall asleep on their own. Otherwise we may condition him to only fall asleep if he is being held...and may increase sleep problems around 6 months when he starts to experience separation anxiety. Don't forget I have a lesson @ 6:00 tonight.

Me: I have read the same thing about putting them down drowsy rather than fully asleep, but I thought it applied to older babies, starting about 3 mos. old. We can try it this weekend if you want...I don't want to get adventurous when you have to go to work the next day. Plus he falls asleep so frequently while nursing, I don't know if that means I should try to keep him from doing so? That seems extreme to me.
He is awake right now, on his blankie looking out the front door.

DH Back at Work

Me: We are doing fine. Speck slept till about 6:45 so I was able to catnap a little after you left. Mom got here not long after that, so I was able to eat breakfast and take a shower. He's awake right now, chillin and looking out the front door. I will try to nap when he goes to sleep...hopefully after he eats next time. Hope work is not too crazy. love ya

Me2: He's been a little fussy; I think he has gas. I had gas last night too...maybe it was the piz-ghetti.

DH: Still catching up on messages-n-stuff. I'm going to end up needing to interview everyone to see where we are at with everything. Shouldn't be too bad. I feel pretty good this morning. Glad to hear that you got some more sleep. I'm wondering if seeing if he would sleep a little longer when he started to stir last night was a mistake. It just prolonged your wakefullness, and made it so that he was really hungry, cranky, and awake by the time that you got to him. Dunno. We can play with it.

Me: I think his problem last night was digestive. It was never more than just a very few minutes between when I first heard him and when I got up, because he never stayed quiet for long.

Mommy Daze 5/6/07-5/20/07

There are no emails or other records I can use to help me remember the dark and crazy days right after Speck's birth. DH was at home for 2 weeks (thank God) so we didn't have to correspond.

Frankly I'm glad those days are behind us now. I wish I could talk about how lovely it was and how totally in love we were with our new baby, but I think DH would agree with me that we both felt overwhelmed and exhausted, as well as filled with anxiety that we would never be relaxed or rested or maybe even happy ever again.

The main problem was that Speck had trouble learning to breastfeed. To the uninitiated this seems incredible, but I assure you it happens. Based on some research and googling, we believe that the vacuum delivery and associated trauma to his head interfered with his suck reflex and caused him to be very sleepy. Babies reportedly self-sedate in order to deal with pain (e.g., baby boys often sleep a lot after circumcision) so we figured the sleepiness was his way of dealing with the massive headache we assumed he had. Seriously, he was a total Remulak. It wasn't too noticeable to the casual glance because he had so much hair, but his conehead was no joke. But I digress.

The first couple weeks of Speck's life were pretty frickin miserable for his mommy and daddy. He wouldn't latch on, so at every feeding, I spent a while desperately trying to get him to nurse, and then DH would use a syringe to feed him milk I had pumped. I hooked up the torturous pump while DH was wielding the syringe. This whole process took about 45 minutes and was repeated roughly every 2 hours round the clock so it really felt our whole lives were being spent this way.

The other cruel irony was that Speck seemed to sleep all the time, except of course when DH and I were sleeping.

After much heartache and lactation consultation, we did finally get feeding worked out. Once he got the idea, Speck was soon nursing like a champ and gaining weight like crazy.

B-Day!!

No email between DH and me to help jog my memory for this day, because as it turns out, our Speck arrived. We went to the OB appoinment that morning and though I won't record all the gory details and measurements here, suffice it to say that labor was looking imminent. Doc offered to go ahead and induce but I decided to wait. DH came home with me rather than going back to work. I was having some contractions, but they weren't regular or very close together until about 11 am. Doc had told us that I showed signs of being "one of those girls who goes quick" and had counseled me not to wait for the contractions to get regular. The usual advice is something like 5 minutes apart for at least an hour. Doc said instead to go to hospital if they got 5 minutes apart and not worry about waiting an hour to see if they became more regular.

Well...DH and I had gone to grab some lunch at Arby's (poetic somehow as that is where we met lo these many years ago). While I was preggers The Big Hat was selling this orange cream milkshake that I l-o-v-e-d.

I had a little notebook where I was writing down contractions and times and DH pointed out that they were about 5 minutes apart. But they weren't really painful, and honestly I wasn't even sure they were *real* contractions. The most I could say for certain was that I felt strange and was heartily tired of being pregnant.

So we continued to mosey around town for a while. We stopped at several places I don't recall, though I do remember making a stop at the music store. DH went in to get picks or strings or check on his amp or who the heck knows.

By 2 pm my contraction notes were onto the 2nd page of the notebook and they were 3-5 minutes apart, trending more toward 3 minutes. So we went to the hospital. We had the bags in the car so everything was ready. We got checked in and when the dr on call did the exam, I had, ahem, progressed to a point where they said I was definitely in labor. I believe the doc said we'd have a baby by suppertime.

We were nervous and excited, natch. We got set up in our little labor room and made ourselves comfortable: got the iPod and speakers going for a little mood music, plus DH playing guitar, plus some fat juicy novels I had been saving just for this purpose. We spent several hours like this, more or less feeling bored. I was not in any pain whatsoever and in fact felt a tad guilty because of it. The most painful and exciting thing that happened by this time was one of the nurses screwing up the IV and getting my blood all over both of us. She wasn't a brand new nurse (supposedly) but she was new to our hospital and was apparently unfamiliar with their IV kits. That was the story anyway.

I don't know why, but my labor kinda stalled out. I had progressed beyond the point where they let you leave, but then I stopped. If I got up and walked around the contractions started again, but I couldn't do that constantly cuz the nurses like to monitor you. So fast forward to 6:30 or so and the doc who had promised us a baby by suppertime suggested breaking my water. "It'll go quick if we do that." So we talked a bit and decided to go ahead. I was planning to go natural so I was trying to mentally prepare for the contractions to really hit me once they did the amniotomy.

And...nothing happened.

No increase in either intensity or frequency of contractions. No change at all really, except that now they wouldn't let me get up and walk.

So, more time passed and we waited for labor to really kick in, but when nothing stubbornly continued to happen the nurses started talking about pitocin. I had heard horror stories about this but DH and I decided to go ahead. They started me on the drip and FINALLY something happened. Contractions really started coming faster and harder. But the nurses kept fiddling with the monitor-thingy (they called it a "toko"), saying they weren't picking them up. They kept adjusting the pitocin to try and get my contraction pattern to become regular.

My memory starts to get a bit fuzzy here and some things I only know from DH's report. According to him, after several minutes the nurses realized the toko was not working. By this time I was definitely in pain and trying to focus on the hee-hee-hee since I did not have an epidural. I don't know whether they gave me too much pitocin as a result of the malfunctioning toko, or if my body just reacted badly to the drug. I suspect both. Anyway, my contractions began getting really long. A normal contraction lasts 60-90 seconds, and mine were now stretching into 3 minutes, then 5, then I had an 8-minute contraction?!?!!! Breathing exercises had not prepared me for this.

The nurses were nervous and started getting out a medicine that stops contractions. Fortunately my poor uterus finally relaxed and began to settle down a bit. Speck had shown no signs of distress during all this and was doing just fine. I on the other hand was completely exhausted and mentally wrung out. I gave up on trying to preserve any semblance of natural childbirth and told DH to GET ME SOME DRUGS. Again, my memory is vague here, but I think it was too late for them to do an epidural, so they gave me nubain. This is a drug used for pain relief during labor. The medical definition of "pain relief" must be different from mine, because it did not relieve my pain in the least. It did however make me go to sleep.

The nurses woke me up to check my cervix and decided I could start pushing. We tried for a while and weren't making much progress, so they suggested resting in a position that would hopefully help the baby move down a bit further. They used pillows to prop me on my side with my knees up and let me sleep. Then once we started pushing again, DH would wake me at each contraction so I could get on with the pushing. As soon as the contraction ended I would go right back to sleep.

I was pretty wacked out from the medicine so the last few hours of labor are mostly a blur, and this post is turning into a novel, so let me just say that after quite a bit more pain and pushing, Speck finally arrived around 11 pm. We were on our 2nd dr by that point (neither my main OB) and he had to use the vacuum. (As a result, Speck had a pretty severe conehead that lasted into his 2nd month.)

I'll wrap up this post now except to add a warning to any 1st-time prego women who might ever read this: soon after your labor is done and you think you have really and truly survived the fear and pain and exhaustion and all you want is to sleep and hold your baby, some EVIL nurse will come in and start pressing in your poor abused tummy. Ye gods, it hurts!! It was worse in some ways than labor itself, because you are caught by surprise and don't feel you're getting anything out of it. Supposedly this is necessary to make sure your uterus expels everything it should and returns to normal size. But after everything else you go through it seems like abuse. I don't know why no one ever mentions it beforehand. Be warned!

My TTD from DH

Email exchange between DH and me:

DH: Meeting at 0900. Text my cell if anything happens.
TTD Brainstorming.
- Sweep kitchen (This can be a daily thing. Since we primarily go inand out of the house through the kitchen and laundry room, this will cutdown on the amount of crap tracked into the rest of the house.)
- Nail holes.
- Wrap matress in garbage bags for storage.
- break down boxes in garage for disposal.
- Be happy.
Gtg.

Me: k babe. got the phones set up, they are pretty cool. you may want to play around with some of the features.

Hi!

My 2nd day at home, sans job. Ran some errands to Home Depot and Costco. Bought a neato phone at Costco. One base unit and 4 cordless handsets. Only requires 1 phone jack.

Other than shopping I spent most of the day lolling on the couch like a beached whale, and occasionally trying to fill in some nail holes with spackle as we had just redone the walls in the kitchen and the trim was unfinished and unpainted.

We were waiting on a new dishwasher and refrigerator to be delivered.

Checking in

4-30-07 was my first day "at home" after I quit work. My due date was 5-16-07 so I was hoping to have a couple weeks to rest and get the house ready for our baby.

Also, as a side note I must add that

this picture of me is awful

and I cringe to see it. I am always pretty low maintenance, but I usually at least make a token attempt to put on lip balm and coax my hair into some sort of style. On this particular day I apparently just rolled out of bed (emphasis on rolled) and threw on some clothes. But it is unfortunately the only pic I can find that shows me looking obviously pregnant, and as homely as I look here, I do want to remember that big belly!

This was the day my mom kindly came over to help me clean up the house. This was no joke, because we had been doing some minor redecorating in the kitchen and everything in there was covered with about an inch of drywall dust. I was afraid to climb on the stepladder so Mom had to clean away with minimal help from me. She got the cabinets all cleaned so i felt lots better about that. I was getting used to checking email throughout the day. it felt a bit strange not to be at work. no one from work called or anything so that was a good sign.