Our First Month With Miss A

Our little miss will be 4 weeks old on Saturday. Time has never flown so fast!

I wanted to write about our hospital stay and going home, but I haven't had a chance to do that yet. It's late, and I'm not thinking too clearly right now, so I'll keep this short. But I just want to do a quick post to say that we're doing great and everything is going very well.

Overall, she's a very easy, mellow baby. Today was not an easy, mellow day, but that's okay - I think she's going through a growth spurt. She's been wanting to eat every 90 minutes to 2 hours instead of 2 1/2 to 3 hours.

Before having her, I didn't realize that with breastfeeding, you feed much more frequently than bottle feeding. She likes to spend 40-50 minutes nursing, and even then she still acts hungry afterward, so between feeding, burping (another 10-15 minutes), diaper changes, and taking her clothes off (so she'll stay awake while feeding)/putting them back on (so she won't cry about being mostly naked), there's barely time to go to the bathroom.

For someone who always has to be doing something, it's been an adjustment to spend that much time sitting when I know there is laundry to be done, baby stuff to be put away, thank you notes to be written, leave/insurance paperwork to deal with, etc. But I just focus on her and enjoy spending the time so close to her, because I know this stage won't last forever, and I want to enjoy it while I can.

R went back to work on Monday, and I've been doing better than I expected being alone with her. I wasn't very nervous about it at all. I'm sad that he doesn't get to spend as much time with her now, though. I knew he would be a great dad, but he's actually been so far beyond great that phenomenal is the word that keeps coming to mind when I see him with her.

He worked so hard at keeping himself emotionally detatched from the pregnancy that I figured it would take him a while to let himself become attached to her once she was here, but that didn't turn out to be the case at all. He said the first moment he saw her, he was instantly attached. It was hard for me to care for her in the hospital because of a mix up in the pain medication instructions, so he wound up taking care of both of us. The nurses taught him how to care for her, and then he taught me. He knows her cues better than I do!

It still seems surreal that she's ours. That she's here. That we have a baby. But it's amazing and wonderful, and I'm thankful for every moment, even the ones where she's crying and I can't figure out why because I haven't decoded her cries yet.