first 10 days with a newborn

my heart melts for this kid

whew. you guys. this is day 11 of being a mom and it's been insane! i seriously can't believe you need a license to drive a car but don't need one to have a baby. they say the learning curve is steep with a newborn and holy shit ain't that the truth!?! it's sort of like when i was in x-ray school and everything you're bombarded in class with is 100% brand new information but you're also expected to go to clinicals and apply what you've 'learned.' but the learning and applying never ends and it's so hard to catch up.

so as i've said in prior posts, i've lived my whole life only having to take care of myself. sure i've had a dog or two but they literally eat, sleep and need walks. otherwise they are sort of just hang out. and nurturing relationships with humans has been a cakewalk because these people are self sufficient. my role with them is to spend time with them and to be thoughtful when i feel like it. not that it's new news but having a baby is on another level y'all!

i want to preface that Cameron has proven to be awesome, just like his mom and pops. he's pretty chill overall and only really cries when he needs something. once he's fed, changed and clothed, he's pretty easy. he sleeps really well and isn't fussy. at night we put him down awake and he generally falls asleep on his own. what a saint, am i right? i want to say he takes after me since i am usually pretty chill. and i say 'usually' because the first few days at home, i was a crazy mess.

if you know me well you know that i'm like 70% logical and 30% emotional. with this newborn popping out of me i'd say that over the first few days at home that number went to 70% emotional and 30% logical. this surge of hormones along with the intense learning curve and lack of sleep has made me feel like a completely different person.

they say that with newborns all you have to do is keep them fed, changed, clothed and otherwise all they do is sleep. you LIARS! there is SO much more you have to keep track of. and it's not all just about the baby, it's about yourself and your partner too. so let's start with all of the worries and concerns that i've come across in addition to keeping this kid fed. i'll get back to the fed thing later. that one is a doozie.

for Cameron

when changing his diapers, not only do we have to keep him clean and not sitting in a pool of his own urine and crap, we have to make sure we get a dab of vaseline on his red, inflamed, circumcised penis so that his skin doesn't adhere to itself and to keep it from chaffing on the diaper, not to mention keeping it from infection. then we have to fold the diaper a little bit before securing it so that it doesn't go over his umbilical cord, which hasn't fallen off yet so as not to increase the chances of infection. if he didn't have a maraschino cherry for a penis and a useless cord still attached to him, changing diapers would be so much more of a cakewalk. the extra time we spend putting vaseline on and folding the diaper leaves more time for him to pee on us and himself and/or shoot his poop directly on to mom and dad, forcing us to start the process all over again.

 Ted made himself an apron from fear of projectile pee/poop

for Me

i had an unplanned c-section, which means that my postpartum care is now more involved than had i had a vaginal delivery. i thought that i was going to go home and only have to hope that my vagina wasn't going to feel like it was assaulted by a little baby and change a pad every so often from normal bleeding. but with a c-section i have to change more things around considering it's a major surgery. i thought i was going to be able to come home and use my abs again but nope. with incisions on my external abdomen and uterus, i have to be cautious when getting up from bed or sitting. i have to be careful about how active i am and not carry more than like 10lbs. wtf? what kind of weak ass person can't carry  more than 10lbs? oh, and when i was pregnant, i wanted nothing more than to be able to sleep on my back. now that i've got this incision that's healing, it's best to sleep on my back to reduce pressure to the area and i can't wait to sleep on my sides again. catch 22, man! you know what else is crazy? after coming home, i realized the area from my bellybutton down to my incision feels numb and nobody told me about that! supposedly the feeling comes back when your nerves form together again but some chicks on google searches say they've never gotten the feeling back. [i've now started to get some feeling back though, thank god!] on top of that, i came home the same weight as when i was pregnant with Cam. you'd think you'd lose at. the. very. LEAST the amount of weight your baby is along with the weight of your placenta but nah, not necessarily. they put so much IV fluid in me and who knows why else, but with c-sections you can swell more a couple of days after. so i was walking around with my legs and belly flopping about, weighing the same as i did at the end of pregnancy. discouraging to say the least. but over the course of three or four days and a lot of super high pressure and volumed pee sessions, the swelling as gone down and i'm 15lbs down. whew! on top of all of this  i've got to take medications to ward off the pain from surgery. but tell you the truth, there isn't that much actual pain. i'm not sure i was ever on the heavy medications that usually come with c-section. to my knowledge, from the second day at the hospital i was only on a cycle of tylenol and motrin for pain and i was able to get up and walk around the same day as the surgery (granted i had the c-section at 1am, which gave me 23 hrs to rid the effects of epidural, anesthesia, and get the feeling back in my legs). but keeping track of taking my own medications on time while scheduling feeding sessions with the kiddo is a lot to keep track of. waking up in the middle of the night to feed and then waking up again to take medications is a pain in the ass.

for Ted

honestly, there isn't thaaaaat much that i've had to be concerned about or adjust for Ted except for the night schedule. he's been kick ass as a father except in the middle of the night the guy just wants to sleep and his patience runs thin sometimes but still, he steps up and does his fair share.

now on to the keeping-the-kid-fed thing...this shit is rough! 

when you come home from the hospital you're left to yourself to just figure it out. but you're flushed with all of these hormones and have no idea what you're doing. as far as feeding goes, they only really push nursing while in the hospital. nobody really comes by and is like...hey, are you going to nurse, bottle feed or formula feed? they pretty much set you up as if you're going to nurse on your boob and let me tell you again, that shit is rough! there is a lot of pressure put on you to nurse your baby on the boob. so i tried. and i tried and i tried. they say you should wake your child every 2-3 hrs to feed until he gets back to his birth weight. but this kid was sleepy as f*ck! he was a boss at latching so i thought all was good. i'd nurse on each boob for like 15 active minutes and hope that he was getting the nutrients he needed. but keeping the guy awake enough to be active was posing to be difficult. he would latch and then just kind of hang out or half ass suck. what was supposed to be 15 minutes on each side turned into an hour or more trying to keep him awake. i felt like i was trying to nurse him for 15 hours of the day. and it's really not fun to be topless for that long (well, for me. some people love being naked. not me). and when we went to our five day checkup at the pediatrician, Cameron had lost 10% of his body weight, which is borderline for taking different measures. during this time my hormones were crazy and i couldn't help but to feel like i was starving my child. was he extra sleepy because he was malnourished? am i not producing enough milk for him or is he not sucking the way he is supposed to? all i could think was that i was failing as a mom. i can't tell you how much i cried in the first few days. i felt like a piece of shit mother. it was intense and i felt bad for Ted. he had to console a crying mom and a crying, unfed baby. but he's a champ and was there for both of us when we needed it. i'm so lucky he's an amazing husband and dad.

for three days in a row we went to a lactation nurse who was very pro-boob. over the sessions she would shove her hands and arms in my face and tell me how to nurse Cameron. she would have Ted massage a boob while i held him in place and she did some other shit. so that's like 4-5 arms in my face and on my child. it was claustrophobic and impossible to take home. how is one or even two people supposed to take over the motions of five hands? she would manually express milk from my boob and tell me that i was producing a good amount of milk. that maybe Cameron had an issue latching. her solutions? try using a nipple shield so that he feels the correct shape far enough in his mouth to enable his natural suction when it touches his hard palate. if that doesn't work, tape a feeding tube to your nipple and have him nurse while Ted pushes the milk through a syringe. this will let him know that milk comes from the nipple and he'll latch better. if that doesn't work, use a syringe to feed him but use your pinky finger to mimic the nipple. but always, always nurse on the boob first. so we go home and try. and like i said, the kid is sleepy. we try all the things she says and i'm not confident he's getting enough food because he's not latching well enough. that's what this lactation expert is telling me, right? so it must be true. wrong! after a few days of trying to nurse Cam on my boobs because for some reason logic has gone out the window and hormones, lack of sleep, and a crazy learning curve put you in a weird headspace where you just nod your head and listen to whatever you're being told. i cried and cried and cried at home. Ted was probably taken aback because this is not me. i was anxious, scared and concerned for my little bundle of happiness.

finally on our last visit to the lactation nurse, after she did all the same things and he still wasn't taking in a lot of milk, i broke down. i cried, said this was fucking rough and that i didn't actually care how the fuck my kid eats so long as he eats! sure, i want him to receive the benefits of breast milk and i know that nursing is the best for bonding and production and blah blah blah. but how am i supposed to know if he's getting any food? dude is dropping weight, so how long can i try nursing before he hates me for not fulfilling my job of feeding him? for some reason i felt such pressure to nurse and at no point did the lactation nurse ever introduce the option of formula to supplement or get his weight headed in the right direction. she assumed i was producing enough milk and i wasn't!

after talking to my mom and a few friends who said that they pump milk and supplement with formula, i felt more at ease. why didn't i think to ask them first? who knows. i feel like i was just in a big daze. the logical side of me has always known that there's nothing wrong with a baby who is being fed formula. my brother and i were formula babies from day 1, have never received the antibodies from a mother's milk and are healthy as can be. i never get sick, so i can't attribute that to nursing on my mom's boob. i was stuck in a such a weird place where i was just listening to the one person i had contact with who is an expert in lactation and it turns out the whole time it wasn't about his latch. this kid latches like a champ. i just wasn't producing enough milk. why she didn't think that was the case or worth mentioning is beyond me.

Ted and i decided to pump whatever milk i can get and bottle feed, supplementing with formula. once we decided to make that decision all my anxieties about keeping this kiddo alive and fed went out the window. because we bottle feed and he takes to the bottle easily, we are able to measure how much food he's actually getting and now i know he's eating. there is also a lot of weight off my shoulders now that Ted is able to help feed and the burden of producing and feeding isn't 100% on me. and just to ease my anxiety, we bought a scale to make sure he was headed in the right direction and gaining weight. i'm happy to report his little cheeks are getting chubbier, he's pooping and peeing all the time and is awake a lot more now that he's actually receiving nutrients!

bottle feeding is what's up at the Lin house. that, and my swollen fingers [insert shifty eyes emoji]

so that's what the first 10 days of life looked like over at the Lin house. now that we aren't concerned about him eating, Cameron has been able to take Wags to the dog park, go to the mall and to a baby shower (granted all of these things happened no more than a mile or two away from home and for no more than two hours at a time. but still, it's something). we're adjusting better now and able to sleep more. his little faces and sounds are so fascinating and when he's awake it's hard not to want to stare at him endlessly, but man, what a friggin whirlwind it is to have a newborn!