Home with New Baby

So, about 9am on the third day in the hospital we packed up the mountain of baby stuff with a little help from the hospital nurses, stuck Berkles in the baby seat we had studied over for 30 minutes in the store before finally selecting based on color, and off we drove, headed home with our little bundle of joy.

The little booger even fell asleep on the drive, all half a mile of it. How cute. So, we took the seat inside and put it in the middle of the den, went in the bedroom and went to sleep. Turns out that's a bad idea, but we didn't know babies don't get much oxygen while sleeping in a baby seat. Looked happy to us, and after sleeping no longer than 37 seconds in a single stretch in the hospital, we left him there. Hell, I'd have left him on the roof if I thought he preferred it at that point. And so we all slept. Joyous, wonderful sleep, for a couple of hours.

Then he woke up, which was fine. Time to eat. So, we tried breastfeeding. And here was our schedule for the next 10 days:

Minute 1: Baby cries like it's hungry
Minute 2: Courtney whips out a breast, and somebody, just whoever is close, brings the baby over to feed.
Minutes 3-30: Baby screams at breast as if it's made of actual fire and is burning baby.
Minute 31: Baby magically latches onto breast and drinks for a while.
Minute 60: Baby falls asleep
1Hour Minute 20: Baby cries as if it's hungry...
Rinse, cycle, repeat.

Except sometimes, we skip the sleep part. All total, there is on average negative 432 minutes of sleep per day. In contrast, there are 7 migraines and at least fifty-eleven tears. And keep in mind, the baby can't make tears yet, so they're really all mama's tears. If someone came to our house they would have been justified calling social services, or maybe the police. Social services to say "there is no way these two people can care for a child, they need help." The police to say "obviously someone is coming in here and torturing these people when no one is around. Maybe the Chinese and their advanced methods with sleep deprivation."

So, finally I called BS on this whole situation and make Courtney give me one reason to not give the baby a bottle. In her totally destroyed and mind-altered state she couldn't come up with one in 10 seconds, so I made a bottle, and Berk drank it as if he had just caravaned across the Sahara.

And so that was the end of the great breast-bottle debate in the Willis house. Courtney was not happy and neither was I. We presume all the screaming at the breast meant Berkley was less than amused. But since the first bottle, all cartwheels and sunshine, much better sleep for everyone, etc. So, we stuck with it.

And after 7 days of wearing cabbage and ice packs on her breasts, Courtney's breasts returned to normal from the size of small planets.

Our next challenge was sleep (for the baby). We both used to go to bed at about 11, and sleep for 8 hours, straight. No waking up, no going to pee, nada. Babies are horrible at that it turns out. I slept light and if I woke up I was up for good. So, we went on a search for how to teach Berkley to sleep.

And after trying the cradle thingy, and his bed, and our bed, and a sleep sack, and a swaddle, and the couch, and the car seat again, and even pondering that roof idea, we settled on just dealing with it. We'd feed him about 10, then put him to bed until about 3am, then feed him, then again about 6am. This is not the same as sleeping 8 hours straight.

This went on for a couple of weeks, until someone suggested the novel idea we just NOT feed the baby in the middle of the night. Swaddle him tight, shut the door on the way out, and then walk back in there in the morning. That's it. This sounds very simple. We would feed Berkley about 7pm, change his diaper, put him to bed swaddled like a mummy (I call this baby jail), then close his bedroom door and do our thing until we went to bed. About 7am we walk back into the room and feed him again.

This is NOT so easy. The baby cries. And when you live in a home the size of a postage stamp, you hear it, all.the.time. But, sure enough, after a couple of nights he started sleeping the whole night. And has pretty much done just that every night since.