Newborn Care

There are some things about having a baby that seem so obvious that you prepare for in advance of the child's arrival. And then there are other things that you might not have been expecting.

I was not at all nervous about nursing when the time came, so Jackson and I were able to immediately establish a good relationship via my engorged chest. Most infants lose about 10% of their birthweight within the couple of days postpartum. Jackson only lost two ounces out of his nearly 10lbs of babyness (about 1%). On his fourth day in the external world, my MIL and I took him to the pediatrician's office where I got my first lecture on childhood obesity. In the two days since leaving the hospital, he had gained back the lost ounces and another three more ounces to boot. This is not typical. I was then told that he didn't need a breast in his mouth every time he cried.

Way to make me feel like some kind of pervert, right? I was proud of myself before that visit because I had realized that I had initially been holding him to a timed feeding schedule rather than letting him indicate when he was full--which was when the hour-long nursing sessions began. Twelve hours out of the day he was hungry and nursing. About midway through each meal he would blast his diaper with a previous meal that had been processed. Over time he got gradually faster at nursing. By 4 months he was down to about 40minutes per nursing, and by 8 months or so, he was down to about 10 minutes a feeding.

After the first visit, I have always tried to schedule Jackson's pediatric visits with the doctor who was there at his birth, since she wasn't quite so excitable about infant weight. Besides, Jackson was a 95th percentile baby. He has stayed consistently in the 90th and 95th percentile range for both weight and height, and he is a healthy, proportionate child. I figure I did the right thing to ignore the other doctor's kneejerk reaction to Jackson's scale measurement, and I feel good for trusting my own judgment on that call.

At any rate, I didn't have much choice about nursing him. All he had to do was cry and I was a milk geyser. Hot showers turned me into a fountain. Intercourse practically necessitated a shirt for the protection of Andrew's eyes--on the rare occasions that we were energized enough and willing to try some physical intimacy. If it had been 2 hours since the start of Jackson's last nursing session, I would get let down so hard that I would practically be begging to let him nurse to ease the pressure. Sometimes this was even strong enough to wake me from my occasional bouts of slumber.

I was getting about 3 or 4 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period for the first 2 months. By 4 months I was up to about 5 hours a night, and that continued and slowly grew to about 6 hours by Jackson's first birthday. I was a walking zombie. I had intended to work from home, but it became clear that I was not able to perform more than 2 hours a week and not at the level of quality my employer had come to expect of me. After a few months of valiant efforts, we agreed to call it quits, and they were nice enough to wait for me to be the one to say it first.

Changing 8 to 12 poopy diapers a day was fairly time consuming in its own right, but not because of any particular issue with smell. Sometimes it was because Jackson liked to spend half an hour talking to the painting I had hung above his changing table. But quite often it was due to an unfortunate consequence of an all-liquid diet--the diaper blowout.

Diapers are designed about as well as they can be to contain the things that babies excrete. The problem is that it's ethically irresponsible to duct tape the dang things to the child at the edges. Jackson was a pro at blasting his breastmilk poop, in that fantastic mustard yellow shade, all the way up to his shoulder blades.

Occasionally we were unlucky enough for this to occur while we were out at a restaurant or in the car.

He seemed especially prone to a blowout if allowed to lounge on my Boppy maternity pillow, presumably because he knew what a joy it was to try and clean it. But the worst part of diaper blowouts is the part no one talks about.

Let me say right now that your own hygiene is NOT something you should allow to slide. Andrew was unfortunate enough to come home for lunch one day just as Jackson massacred a diaper, an outfit, and some pieces of nearby furniture. We removed the material he had offended and cleansed it. We bathed the baby. Apparently somehow we were not careful enough with making sure our hands were sufficiently clean, and soon after we spent a rather unpleasant night missing sleep together. As we took turns vomiting and having diarrhea over a span of 6 hours during the night, Andrew and I recognized the source of the problem and vowed never to allow it to happen again. (n.b. Pros and cons here: one bathroom meant having to try to "hold it" when sick, but at least we weren't alone....)

Still, I much preferred the "dates" we went on during the early days to worshipping the porcelain god. I didn't leave the apartment for 2 months other than to go on a walk with Jackson from time to time, so Andrew and I used to take the trash to the Dumpster together and hold hands on the way back when the rugrat was napping. Romance had taken a backseat to life--as opposed to occurring in the backseat.