As parents reading this blog will likely attest, this has been the best (and probably most intense) week of our lives. Birth and caring for such a sweet perfect fragile being have flooded our cognitive pathways with intense emotions and left us sleepless but content. Wilson wrote a beautiful post about the birth so I will focus on the comings and goings of this past week.
As W said, I had a C-section last Tuesday afternoon. Elle and I felt good enough to leave the hospital two days after the surgery on Thursday afternoon even though Wilson and I were torn about the decision. we didn't know whether we should spend one more day in the hospital or go "home" to our airbnb. But we decided that "home" (even our unseen airbnb home) was better then the hospital.
And it was the right decision—W did a great job picking out our airbnb. It’s a little bit of a weird experience to come home from the hospital to someone else’s home but luckily, this home is super comfy and we are already living up to the B.A.B.E. (baby, aspirations, body, exploration) mantra of "exploration"…traveling with the newborn star. That said, my first shower trying to figure out the hot water after giving birth and 2 nights at Vandy’s Medical Center felt more daunting then a normal travel experience of figuring out a shower.
But we figured out the shower (and all the other apartment stuff) with ease – so it was on to figuring out the more important business of feeding and caring for Elle. Thus far, we have a pretty good system where W takes on the bulk of the diaper/clothes changing and household duties. This has been super helpful at night when W helps wake up Elle during a night-feeding with a diaper change or getting the breast pump ready at 3 am to relieve my engorged mammary glands.
That’s right – milk has come in with a fury. I didn’t realize that breastfeeding can entail rocks in your breast (or your breast becoming rock). Yikes! One thing, among others, about motherhood that isn’t that awesome. Some techniques for relieving this are – pumping excess, cold/warm packs, warm showers, and my current fave – cabbage leaves on the mammary glands. Weirdly, cabbage leaves really seem to take the edge off…
Cabbage leaves fit into another topic for this blog post – body. Recovering from a C-section hasn’t been too terrible. There is a lot of TMI that could be included here but I will save that for private conversations. What I can say is that walking early and often has been really helpful for working out the number that they do on your intestines to get the baby out. I am also really enjoying having my own body again. It doesn’t look like my body yet (e.g., I still look 5 months pregnant) but it feels good to not be scared of delivering a baby early or squishing a baby when bending over to tie my shoes. It is great to just walk around and be only one human being again.
And finally – Baby! Elle is already staying awake for a couple hours at a time and that is thrilling even when it is from 2am-5am. She has such a sweet personality where she seems to just want to take in life and loves kisses and cuddles. Her sweetness still comes with a fair amount of sleepiness. Most of the time, it is hard to get feeds in that last longer than 9 minutes. I prefer longer feeds because I am trying to fatten up my long and lean baby as quickly as possible. Also, she can go longer between feeds and that makes mommy happy. That said having an extended break between feeds does exact a price. Her long feeds take a long time. Our record so far is 35 minutes on one breast and 15 minutes on another. This 50 minutes of feeding took a little over 2 hours to complete because getting the reward of long feeds also requires a fair amount of newborn rousing. But she is obviously worth it!
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Here's to cabbage! :-)
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