The Perils of Nursing

You're sitting up between 1 and 2 am nursing your newborn on the couch in your living room. You're exhausted, only partially awake and in general simply not fully functional because something about having a newborn mandates that you be tired, even when said newborn is giving you 8 hours of sleep every night. You don't really mind, though. It's just a season and these nighttime bonding sessions are 100% worth it.

So you're sitting there, baby and boppy pillow in lap, held in the perfect position for comfortable nursing for you and baby. You're surrounded by an odd assortment of things - a tube of lanolin cream, a mostly empty water bottle, quite a few snacks, the TV remote, extra burp cloths, etc. It takes skill to get up without completely disrupting your delicate system. And as you sit there, trying to defeat level 30 of Candy Crush Saga (having yet to master the art of reading while nursing), you notice something. A piece of dust is floating down between your iPhone and your eyes. A curiously brown piece of dust. With eight moving legs. Headed straight for a landing site on your baby.

Chaos ensues. You leap up, doing your "OMG get it off me, get it off me!" dance modeled directly after the blonde in Temple of Doom. Somehow, baby stays attached and unaware of the panic moment going on, but as you scramble around like a mad woman the open box of Mini Wheats tumbles to the floor, the open water bottle tips over and the tiny tube of lanolin somehow sinks into the recesses between couch cushions. In the end, you're pretty sure that the spider isn't on you, the baby, your seat or anything else you can see, so you sit back down and finish the session in a state of hyper-awareness, sure that every flickering movement is the nasty coming back for round two.

This happens two nights in a week. You decide it's time to change your nursing location and sacrifice your still-bruised tailbone on the wooden rocking chair in baby girl's room. No creepy crawlies have ever been spotted in there.

But what do you do when you run out of rooms in the apartment...?

Week One

I don't believe it, but my calendar probably is more reliable than my sense of time these days, so I guess baby B really is officially one week old today. I already can't imagine life without her, but I also can't see how that much time has passed... Please stop growing up little girl! I would keep you at this age forever if I could.

I can now officially join the masses of mothers who say things like "All the sleepless nights are 100% worth it, don't worry" and "You can't understand how much you're going to love your kids until you have them." It's true. I didn't know I could so instantaneously and completely love something(one) the way I love my daughter. I also understand what parents tell you about getting duped into having multiple children by the first one - our baby B certainly has us hooked! She's not fussy, she cuddles all the time, and she's even let me have 7 hours of sleep the past two nights in a row. She nurses like a champ and has since she was one hour old. Already daddy is saying things like "Lets have 14!" (It took her about 24 hours to have him completely wrapped around her little fingers.)

All-in-all, this is one of the top two life experiences yet - the other is being married. I love being married. I'm just as hooked on being a mom. I even left the hospital saying "That wasn't so bad... I'd do it again to have another one" - and that was after a 33 hour labor! (That sounds worse than it really was, I promise.)

For any other new moms or soon-to-be new moms - here's some stuff that I've found invaluable during these past seven days:

Swaddle blankets by Aden + Anais - I love these! They are a lightweight but warm material that breathes really well, so I don't have to worry about little girl getting too hot or too cold in them. Plus the material has the perfect amount of stretch to it so that daddy (the master swaddler in this house) can get a really snug wrap.

Swaddleme swaddler - Daddy is the master swaddler here, but I'm not so great at getting a tight fit. Since I don't want to wake him up every time I nurse in the middle of the night to re-wrap baby B, I switch her to this. It is perfect for late nights because it only takes about 10 seconds to get her in it, which equals less time for her to get really upset with me for fiddling with her, which means she can fall back asleep a lot more quickly. My only concern is that the material is pretty lightweight, so I'm not sure it would be warm enough in the winter months.

Boppy pillow - Even though baby B nurses like a pro, I've found this pillow extremely useful. It keeps my arms from getting so tired when I nurse/hold her and also makes it easy to lay her down and adjust things when I switch sides with her while nursing. Also - to you soon-to-be moms out there - it's a comfy thing to sit on the first few days after labor if you're not using it for nursing. Just sayin'.

Keeping my fingers crossed that time slows down and week 2 takes longer to pass - I want to cherish every single second of this period of our little one's life. Even the 2 a.m. feedings.