How am I ever going to keep track...

By the second day, I was a little overwhelmed. I was in more pain than ever. I guess once the energy of the whole situation dies down, your body is free to feel the bruises and tears that result from childbirth. My husband was there to help me but it is hard because he had no concept of what I was going through. And I am so fiercely independent that I wanted to do everything on my own. If I needed something washed, I trekked to the basement and did laundry. Even with the baby, I wanted to do everything.

That is when I started to feel the pressure of the timing of everything. How was I ever going to keep track of his feedings? I was supposed to feed him every 2 hours or so. He had lost a bit of weight when we left the hospital. That is normal but they wanted me to keep him on a feeding schedule so he didn't lose any more weight. I was trying to keep track by just watching the clock but during that first night of exhaustion, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to calculate anything in my head. And I was afraid to rely on the baby to tell me when he needed to eat. I felt that if I didn't wake him, he would sleep through the feeding and it would be hard to make it up during the day.

Then on the morning of the second day, I had a brilliant idea. I have a food timer magnet on my fridge. You set the time and a little alarm goes off when the time is up. It was perfect. So I started setting my little timer every 2 hours. Then I would feed my little munchkin. I soon found out that he was not a very good eater. But I wanted to get as much food as possible into his little belly so he would gain some weight back.

We had visitors that day. My mother came by for a while. And of course everyone offered to watch the baby if I needed a nap but I refused. I wasn't going to let anyone help me. I think back now and I was absolutely crazy. But I feel like I wouldn't change the way I handled things if I had to do it all over again. I wanted to do things on my own. My husband only had a couple days off from work and I would be on my own after that. I would be the one getting up with the baby because he had to get up early in the morning. My mother couldn't take much time off from work either. So I just wanted to jump right in and start from day one.

I also realized that interrupted sleep is worse than no sleep. There is something about the REM stage of sleep that makes you feel like doo doo if you don't get enough. So waking every 2 hours really takes a toll on you. And this was just the second day home. How were we, how was I, going to get through this?