I had wanted to watch the presidential debate on Friday, but instead, we spent the night with a very unhappy baby. Tummy ache = unhappy baby. Matthias finally consoled her to sleep around 2 AM. After pumping, I walked into the bedroom to this site and just had to take a picture. This happened not long after she puked, spectacularly on me. Fortunately, it all landed on my shirt rather than the couch - the puking seemed to make her feel better.
Luckily, whatever was bothering her seemed to pass by Saturday. Matthias’ parents arrived on Friday afternoon, and they came to find a cranky baby who only wanted to be in the arms of her mom. Fortunately, after a long night, she was back to her mellow self. Today, she was totally calm and in a great mood. Well, at least she was until about an hour ago when she started fussing for some unknown reason.
Anyway, in her good mood, we took her out for her first visit to Kaminski. She slept through the entire visit and the walk along the river afterward, but we enjoyed it.
We are slowly starting to figure out how to take care of this kid. She is slowly learning that mom’s breasts are more than just a nice chew toy, so even the beast feeding is starting to come together. I hope that in a few weeks, we can forgo the pumping and bottle feeding completely. I have a great breast pump, but it is a pain to have to pump, store the milk, and clean out all of the containers in addition to breast feeding sometimes.
My body is slowly recovering. It is changing everyday as things go back to normal gradually. I am still 10 kg over my prepregnancy weight, and I blame a couple of those kilos on my gianormous boobs! My stamina is still a bit low, and I notice it when we take a walk around the city. My stomach will definitely take bit of time to recover as it is still a soft, squishy blob. I can still articulate the different abdominal muscles if I try, but it will be a while before I can really use them to do any exercises again. Mostly, my exercises invlve walking and lying on the floor.
Ok, the fussy baby is back, Matthias is working on her so I can take a much needed hot bath.
Today was my first day out of the house on my own since the birth! I walked into town and met Sarah for coffee at Kaminski - just like old times. Matthias got some much needed time alone with Clair, who slept most of the time. She woke up just before I got home, threw up and pooped on Matthias and was screaming as I walked in the door. He had fun, regardless.
As we were cleaning up a bit in the kitchen in the afternoon, I said “Hey, I didn’t even spill anything today.” I hadn’t even finished the sentence before the thing I was dumping out in the sink spilled over the counter and onto Matthias’ feet. I think that is the hardest we have laughed in the past week.
The little victories are the most precious. Now if my kid would just help me learn how to feed her. She is a great teacher of patience.
We are at the end of the first week of Clair’s life. Time is doing strange things these days, and I feel like I am walking through a haze of laundry, breast pumping and struggles with breast feeding. We are coming out of the week in pretty good shape though (though we spill and lose things a lot more often than we used to). I have learned not to wear anything fancier than a white t-shirt while I am at home because they wash easily. I’ll wait until the bodily fluids are under control before putting on better clothes.
Clair and I are starting to get an idea of how to do the breast feeding thing. I read in a book that breast feeding is a right brained activity, and given my proclivity toward left brain activities, I will need a bit of time to figure it out. Since Clair is a combination of Matthias and me, she may need even longer poor child. The midwife had a break through today in figuring out what she is doing, so we may be moving forward now. The advantage of not being able to feed properly, is that we had to use bottles of my milk to feed her. When she drinks from a bottle, she gets all of the food she needs at once, and then she sleeps like a log for 6 or 7 hours at night. As we transition to breast feeding, she’ll be waking up much more often. It’s not that we’ve been getting a lot of sleep, but those 6 or 7 hours are nice.
I was feeling really good and pretty energetic all week. I thought I would be totally wiped out after the birth, but I wasn’t in bad shape. Then, Saturday came, and I woke up feeling destroyed! I must have slept about 15 hours yesterday, and I felt like I had the worlds biggest bought of PMS. Apparently that was a nice hormonal transition marking the change in my milk supply - it really sucked.
Today, I felt human again, and we even managed to go for a walk and get a coffee in the Stadt. It was Clair’s first time in the stroller (she slept most of the time). It only took us about an hour and a half to get out of the house for the walk. Clair decided that she needed to practice breast feeding again and again before we left. The last time we took her out on Friday for a doctor’s appointment and a trip to pick up her birth certificate, she was totally over stimulated in the evening, and she had to have some quiet time with mom before being able to sleep. I think she may have been OK on the walk today though; we’ll see tonight.
Hopefully week 2 will be a bit more linear than the first week, but we’ll see. Matthias got himself a computer game to help find distraction from the chaos and sleep deprivation. My escape is a nap whenever possible. I think I could use another escape now……
PS - I have about 150 congratulatory emails from family, friends and coworkers, so if I fail to reply to yours, please don’t take it personally, I am overwhelmed!! I keep avoiding my email (actually, I just never get around to it these days). We really appreciate the love though.
Clair is finally with us. She arrived at 5:00 AM on Sunday September 14th after about 7 really f**king painful hours. She is 3060 grams (6 pounds 12 ounces) and has a length of 50 cm (20 inches). The first thing she did when she arrived was plop onto the birthing table and sneeze! I laughed when I saw that. Mom and Matthias were amazing birth assistants, and our midwife was fabulous. Thanks to good fortune and a great team, we had a natural delivery without any complications. They even let me be the first to pick her up. We were able to come home after four hours since we were all in good shape - the midwife will be coming by to check up on us for the next ten days to make sure we stay that way.
We are all tired but enjoying the new presence in our lives. Though I would appreciate if she would sleep just a little more! Matthias and I have been tag-team consoling all night. Mom is passed out in her hotel room, so I think there will be a hand off once the well-rested grandma arrives. I’ve heard a few women say it was so strange to see a baby come out of them, but I have to say that it didn’t seem strange at all. Matthias also felt completely normal holding Clair; it seems like we have known her for a while already.
I’ll post more photos at some point in the next few weeks. For now, we just have the one from the hospital. Time to wake Matthias back up and switch!
For reasons I won’t detail here, I am pretty sure I am in the early stages of labor and have been since yesterday. We’ll see what happens, but some action should start this weekend. This is what I look like today - mom took a photo in the park.
Here is a nice graphic from the Washington Post summarizing the tax plans for the two candidates - Most of the people I know would getting a bigger tax decrease under Obama’s compared to McCain’s plan. Why is it that the Republicans keep saying that the Democrats want to raise your taxes? maybe they are only talking to people who earn more than $600k per year.
Today is a special day (no, I am not talking about the birth of our baby - she is still happily gestating). Not only will mom arrive in a few hours, but the largest man-made particle accelerator will see first light today!
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern (on the Swiss-French Border) is scheduled to see first light today. Actually, it really saw first light in August, but they didn’t send particles all the way around the ring. Today, they are going all the way around!
The project has had a lot of controversy in getting to this point. It is over-due and over-budget as all major science collaborations seem to be these days. Most recently, there have been at least two lawsuits (one in the US and one in the EU) trying to stop it from ever seeing first light.
Apparently, some are worried by the possibility that the machine could create small black holes and fear that they will engulf the Earth! I’ve heard a few interviews with project scientists who say, “Well, there is a small probability that it could happen, but we are not worried.” I suspect these statements don’t do anything to ease the fears that some have raised. Scientists need to do a better job of conveying the difference between something being ‘possible’ and something being ‘probable.’ There is also a possibility that the sun could freakishly, spontaneously outburst and destroying all of us, but the probability of that happening is so small that we can put it pretty far back on the list of things to worry about right now.
Anyway, happy birthday LHC, may you provide many doctoral students with degrees that won’t help them find stable jobs in the real world! And, hopefully you find that pesky Higgs boson too.
If I should notice a black hole approaching Regensburg later today, I’ll try to throw up a thoughtful post before meeting you all at the horizon!
This article explains the Republican VP pick better than anything I have read so far - this coming from the sister of a very proud redneck. Everything in the article pretty much reminds of of the things my brother holds dear Feel free to disagree Marky.
On a totally different topic, mom should be boarding her plane in Phoenix within the next hour or so. So far, it seems like we will be able to meet her at the airport without a problem. We developed a ‘plan B’ in case we are in the hospital when she arrives, but we probably won’t need to use it. Once mom arrives, all we have to do is wait!
Luckily, whatever was bothering her seemed to pass by Saturday. Matthias’ parents arrived on Friday afternoon, and they came to find a cranky baby who only wanted to be in the arms of her mom. Fortunately, after a long night, she was back to her mellow self. Today, she was totally calm and in a great mood. Well, at least she was until about an hour ago when she started fussing for some unknown reason.
Anyway, in her good mood, we took her out for her first visit to Kaminski. She slept through the entire visit and the walk along the river afterward, but we enjoyed it.
Feel free to disagree Marky.