April 8, 2019
My goodness, where do I even start? Time flies when you have a baby. The past five weeks have been a whirlwind. Caroline is absolutely everything we could have asked for. Milton and I look at her every single day and just wonder how we got so lucky to have such a precious baby. My mom says, “We just make them that way.” God has really blessed us with the most wonderful gift we could imagine.
I suppose I can start with where we left off on Caroline’s birth story. If you need to catch up, you can read that post here. One big plus about Caroline’s scheduled delivery was that my parents had time to pack and come down to the island. We had planned on my mom staying for about two weeks. Well…she ended up staying for three.
One-Piece: Posh Peanut | Bow: Nordstrom
Sleep (or the lack there of)
The first few days home I did not sleep much, or at all. I was in awe of Caroline and I did not want to take my eyes off of her. I was also in pain from the surgery and was taking pain medication every three hours. If I missed a dose the pain would get worse, so I did my best to stay on top of it. Breastfeeding was another reason I was up so much. I had heard breastfeeding was hard, but man it is hard. If y’all are interested, I might do a post just about my breastfeeding experience thus far.
For about the first week Caroline slept for super long chunks of time during the day, and shorter bouts at night. Caroline totally had her days and nights backwards (I mean duh, she just spent nine months in the darkness of my womb). I remembered she was the most active in the evenings. Milton and I would be laying down to go to bed and she would start kicking like she was at soccer practice in my belly.
At the two-week mark I decided to finally start using my resources in order to get her sleep a little more straightened out. I have a few baby books that I started reading before she was born, but I specifically used Moms On Call for her sleep / starting her on a schedule. I first heard about Moms On Call early in my pregnancy from my friend Rachel (who is a nurse). She told me to definitely put the book on my registry. Later I talked to some girlfriends with babies of their own about the book. They raved about the schedules and how much it helped their babies sleep. Sold. Sign me up.
Once we got a few days into the suggested schedule for 2 to 4 week olds, Caroline was sleeping four hours at a time. This felt like a win. Now, at 5 weeks old, Caroline is sleeping 7 hours at a time, with an occasional 9 hour night. In her crib. Not even kidding.
C-Section Recovery
This has been the most challenging part of the past month for me, outside of the complete change of sleep schedule. For the first week or more it hurt to do anything. Just sitting up from the couch was extremely hard to do, so you can imagine what it was like to try to get out of bed when the baby would cry. Laughing even hurt. You don’t think about having to recover from a major surgery while also caring for a brand new baby. I feel like you never real hear about how hard it is coming out of a c-section. Well, it’s freaking hard.
I am 5 weeks out and still having pain in the area. One side of my incision is refusing to heal, and we had to make a trip to the doc the other day to get it checked out. The area is still numb, and will be for months and months to come. All momma wants to do is take a warm bath. Fingers crossed that everything straightens up before my 6 week appointment and I can get the thumbs up from doc.
Help at Home
I am so extremely thankful that I had the help of my mom AND Milton for the first week out of the hospital. They helped me with changing the baby and handing her to me when she needed to be fed. Milton would run to the store when we needed things, or would go pick up lunch. Poor thing probably went to Walmart or Target every day.
My mom ended up staying with me for three weeks. Bless her. She did the laundry, dishes, and just helped keep things a little more sane around the house. She would make me nap while the baby was down (which I fought most of the time). One thing that made a huge difference was being able to trade off night feedings with her. Around two weeks we decided it would be easiest if we put Caroline in her crib at night so my mom and I could trade off the baby monitor. Otherwise we would have had to move the bassinet from room to room. This is also when I started giving Caroline a bottle.
Milton and I have been keeping up with Caroline (lol) on our own for almost three weeks now. Per Moms on Call, we have a good evening routine. Dinner bottle, play time (dad is very good at this), bath time, and bed time bottle. Milton will often be the one to give Caroline her bed time bottle so I can eat dinner and pump. Caroline goes down around 9:00 pm right now. We will have a glass of wine and watch some tv together once she has gone down, but sometimes we are so tired that we try to get to bed asap. Every hour is precious!
More Baby Posts…
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Caroline Elizabeth’s Birth Story
