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May 21, 2004
The first two weeks… the good, the bad, and the ugly (5-21-04)
Lesson Number 1: When you have 2 children, you have to learn to type entries much, much faster than when you only had 1 child, LOL! There is no such thing as “time management” right now, it is much more like “time roulette.” You can place a random bet on what you hope you’ll be doing at, say, 2 pm on Friday, but you only have a one in a million shot at actually getting to do that thing. This is a change I’m going to have to get used to…
But really, honestly, we are doing great. Life with 2 kids is going much smoother than I ever thought possible. Sometimes it is a little difficult to handle the quirks of a newborn and the willfulness of a 2-year-old at the same time, but luckily I’m blessed with 2 relatively easy-going children. Aden is going through a bit of a difficult stage that involves a lot of testing us and not listening to us, but he knows that we really are serious and he always starts to behave at the last minute. It’s not my favorite behavior but it could be so much worse. At least he does make a good choice in the end, even if it took 10 minutes and all of our sanity before he did it. That way I don’t have to follow through on all of my idle threats, LOL!
Lily is a wonderful baby and everything seems so much simpler this time around. She is starting to lose a little bit of her newborn mellowness, but I would still say she is an easy baby. She sleeps for long stretches at a time and then cluster-feeds, but I will take the 2 hour naps and the 4 hour stretches of sleep at night and not complain about the hours that my butt is glued to our favorite nursing chair. Okay, I might complain at the time, but after some sleep I’m sure to shut up! :) She has long, happy alert periods and is starting to smile more and more. She seems to reserve both her nursing marathons and her cranky, nothing-is-going-to-make-me-happy moods for the evening when Derek is home to help out—good girl! And I should note that since she is a very even-tempered child, those moods tend to last about 15 or 30 minutes at the most. As much as she loves nursing, when she is truly inconsolable she is 100% Daddy’s girl. It is amazing how Derek can pick her up and soothe her at times when my best efforts are only met with cries. It’s so sweet.
At her one-week check-up, Lily was already up to 9 lbs, 5 oz—4 ounces over her birth weight. Not bad, huh? And she’s grown even rounder and chunkier this week. :) She is the queen of the poop explosions and seems to be trying to outdo any records her big brother set in that department. So far she’s had one that drenched the Boppy pillow, dripped down my leg, and puddled on the chux pad I was sitting on, and another that shot out during a diaper change and hit my pants leg and the floor! Let me tell you, these explosions are ugly!
We’ve had one small health scare, and that was a call from her pediatrician’s office today saying we need to repeat the galactosemia part of her newborn screening test. She has not seen a pediatrician yet (we were going to go for the first time when she was 1 month old) so now we will be going on Monday so she can be looked at and they can let us know the new test results. She hasn’t shown any warning signs (jaundice, diarrhea) and galactosemia is a very rare hereditary disorder which neither of us has any family history of, so my instincts tell me not to worry. If I had to guess, I would say that the initial test was thrown off by the fact that she was nursing as it was done and probably had more galactose sugar in her blood than she would have normally. For the repeat test they stressed that it needed to be done before she ate. Anyway, if there’s any important news I’ll post it on Monday.
I feel pretty good, although the interrupted sleep is starting to get to me. Breastfeeding went well from the start and my milk came in after only one and a half days, but I have had very sore nipples again and lots of visits with both my MIL (a lactation consultant) and my good friend the LLL leader. It’s an ongoing problem, just like it was with Aden, but not nearly as severe this time. My bottom was never very sore—I honestly couldn’t even tell that I had torn at all—so it healed very quickly. I have had to deal with hemorrhoids this time around though, and those are really not fun! But they’re getting better. By one and a half weeks my lochia bleeding had almost stopped, but then it picked up again earlier this week when I returned to a more normal level of activity. I would love to be done with that nuisance but I know it will just take time.
So, a brief recap of the last 2+ weeks:
Let’s see, she was born on Tuesday, May 4 at 7:03 am and she and I rested in bed for most of the next 5 days. I got up a little more each day—first only for bathroom trips, then to tidy up a few things on my way too and from the bathroom, then to stand and fold a little laundry or sit at the computer, and so on and so forth. I could definitely tell that I was a little “off’ after my blood loss so that made it easier for me to take it easy. Derek and my mom were very strict with me about following Fran’s orders (bed rest for as much of the first week as possible, not going up and down the stairs, etc.) and normally I would have hated being told what to do but I knew it was really in my best interests. So we ate a lot of picnic meals on the bed, I took naps and read and watched TV, and we kept visitors to a minimum. I didn’t even venture downstairs until Saturday and didn’t leave the house until Sunday.
After 6 days of constant, wonderful help from either my mom, my MIL, or Derek, I was pretty nervous about my first day alone with Aden and Lily on Monday. I knew I could do it, and I was a little eager to prove to myself that I could do it, but on the other hand it was a scary prospect. On Saturday and Sunday I was dealing with a touch of the “baby blues” and just the thought of being alone was enough to have me in tears!
But Monday morning dawned and the reality of being home alone with 2 kids was much better than I had imagined. Aden got up early and went downstairs to play for a while, so I slept for a while longer with Lily and then got up to take my shower before she woke up. She was still sleeping when I got out so I had time to get dressed, get clothes on Aden, and get some breakfast together. I brought her downstairs to nurse her while I ate breakfast, and I have to admit by that point I was really ready to sit down for a while and take a break. After all, that was more than I’d been on my feet for a week! I could tell I was a lot more tired than I normally would have been, and I was really glad that I had invited a friend and her son to come over. They were here from 10 am to noon, and it helped so much that Aden had someone to play with! It made the morning fly by, and then they left and it was time for lunch and naps.
By the time Aden woke up, it was only 30 minutes until Derek came home—what a relief! Unfortunately he had a meeting that night at 5:30 so he had to leave again soon, and didn’t get home until shortly before Aden’s bedtime. To be honest, I was a little mad at him that he chose to go to his meeting—for nearly a week he was incredibly overprotective, insisting I stay in bed and not letting me do anything, and then on my first day back on my feet he pretty much abandoned me for the entire day. Maybe that isn’t quite fair to him, but that’s how I felt. But anyway, I managed to heat up dinner for Aden and I, feed both kids at once (LOL), and keep Aden entertained until Derek came home to help with bathtime and bedtime. I was exhausted by the end of the day, but pretty proud of myself for everything I accomplished!
The rest of the first week that I was home alone went pretty similarly—friends took Aden to the park, my Mom came up for a day, and we camped out at a friend’s house another day. By last Friday I was brave enough to load both of the kids into the car for a trip to Target. It went very smoothly and we even met a friend for lunch afterwards. This week has pretty much been life as normal—running errands, going to playgroups and the park, paying bills, etc. My friends have been bringing meals several times a week so I’ve only had to cook once—what a wonderful gift!
Last Sunday we had a really bad day—our dog Xander started seizing again, despite the phenobarbitol, antibiotics, and valium he was on. I don’t even know how many seizures he had, but it was really a horrible day. After several heart-breaking phone calls to our vet we decided to put him to sleep and end his suffering. It’s never an easy decision but it was the right one for all of us since there were no further treatment options for his epilepsy. It’s been strange adjusting to life without a dog, although in a way I’m glad the stress is gone. That may sound callous but I didn’t realize how hard his epilepsy was on all of us. The hardest part is that Aden doesn’t understand the finality of it, so he keeps saying that he’ll play with Xander when he gets better, or that it’s okay that he dropped food on the floor because Xander will eat it when he gets better… :(
Sorry to end on a down note, but I can’t think of anything else right now and I want to hurry and get this posted rather than putting it off (again). I have a feeling that there are a million more things I wanted to write about, but I can always catch them next time. Take care, everyone!
Tara
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