I love poop

Posted by kara

I don’t have enough time to write. Paul is whistling Toshi to sleep right now and I’ll be up for another feeding in half an hour or sooner (depending on her mood). Anyway, here is the Clif Note/scatterbrained version of our past few days.

**begin birth**

Wednesday: I started feeling contractions at 2am. They weren’t regular, so I told Paul to go to work. Paul said that he thought he should stay home and I was a little relieved he wanted to. Some of the contractions were bad and some weren’t. They still weren’t regular, but they kind of hurt and there were a couple that felt like they were on top of each other. So Paul convinced me to call my doctor and she asked if I wanted to come in and get it checked out. I almost said no since I had an appointment the next day, but she was kind of insistent, so we headed for the doctors office. 40 minutes of rush hour traffic later, we waited to see the doctor. When we did, she told me I was 5-6 cm dilated and that I needed to go straight to the birthing suites, skip the triage. Huh? What? Baby today?

Once we got in the birthing suite, we kind of waited around with our birthing nurse. The contractions were kind of bad, but by the time I wanted to scream for an epidural, they started to abate. The nurse told me that I wasn’t feeling all of the contractions and that I only felt the really bad parts of them. Sweet! That explains why they never seemed regular. And not feeling all of them is pretty nice. We got to 7-8 cm pretty quickly and at some point I had to get back in the bed to begin the really fun part. There was no part of the birth that was nice. I never want to do it again. The only good thing about birth was that there is an end to it. (Luckily mine ended pretty quickly.) Once the baby came out, I couldn’t believe it… This huuuuge baby was inside of me? No wonder why my back hurt! She looked pretty perfect and I felt relieved.

**end birth**

The rest of the hospital stay was weird. Fun to stare at the baby, not fun to recover. There were a couple of times that I wanted the nurse to come in and make the baby stop crying. I still want that sometimes. I feel so helpless when I can’t figure out why the baby is crying.

Anyway, there was a funny little incident with the hospital photographer. We really didn’t want to do it, and basically it ended up not working out b/c I couldn’t get her to stop crying. I am kind of glad because I couldn’t even get her cleaned up for the photo. She had on a stained hospital onesie and she had spit up and eye crusties that I couldn’t get clean. Whoops… #1 mom right here!

Friday: Got home around noon and got settled in. I think I called Amy to ask her what else we could do with the baby. She just laughed. My brother also got into town. He’s been making us fabulous dinners.

Yeah, I have no idea what we’ve been doing. I’m lucky if I can remember to brush my teeth. Time is continuous– there is no sleep time and no awake time. It all just blends together. Yesterday I forgot to sleep during the day and I paid for it. Or was it Saturday? I don’t remember. I feel like all I do is feed the baby, worry about her crying, and try to find time to eat and sleep.

Paul is a fantastic super A-one dad. He can calm her without milk, he happily talks to her even when we are at our wits end, he changes her diaper better than me, he can also change her clothes better than me. He has also kept his sense of humor and not gotten down during stressful times. We have had some pretty hilarious laughs, but I wonder if half of it is sleep-deprived giddiness.

Toshi is also good. I can’t stop admiring her, which is probably a bit self-indulgent. We had a worrisome weekend because she didn’t have enough dirty diapers. It was a whole crazy thing. Finally she had a good color poop and I felt so happy and relieved. That was probably the highlight of my weekend: her poopy diaper.

Ah, life as a new parent is crazy. Luckily my mom gets here tomorrow.