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One Month

Our baby is one month old today! I am so thankful for this time I have at home with him, getting to know him and seeing daily the changes in him as he grows and develops. It is so hard not to see each week that passes as one less week of my maternity leave. As I see what Chris misses by just being with Truett on the nights and weekends, I know that I am going to be missing as much when I go back to work. I realize that the life of a stay at home mom is far from easy, and I know that if I was staying home that there would be things I would miss about working, but at this point I am starting to realize how hard it is going to be to leave Truett every day. I am trying to treasure this time I have though, instead of wasting it by worrying about when it will be over.

I didn't intend for this to be a pity part entry, I wanted to document some of what he is doing at one month old-for my self and for any friends and family that might be interested. I have heard so many people tell me how quickly you forget these things so I want to try to record some of it. It is crazy how much difference a month makes . I am demand feeding, and while we are certainly not on any kind of schedule yet, I can see his sleeping and eating falling into more regular cycles. He generally goes 3-4 hours between feedings at night and usually sleeps pretty well between feedings (I think we ended up with a pretty easy baby!). During the day he takes 2 or 3 long naps usually, but his eating is really unpredictable during the day. He sometimes will eat 3 times an hour apart and sometimes go much longer. I am pretty sure he is getting enough food though- we weighed him this past weekend and he was 11 pounds! Today I noticed that he is getting elbow dimples, and rolls in this thighs and wrists. He likes his car seat as long at it is moving, either in the car or in a grocery cart, etc. and he seems to like being carried in a sling as well. We have seen smiles for a couple of weeks now, but they are still pretty rare. Truett has really strong neck muscles, he can hold his head away from your shoulder for several seconds when you hold him, and can pick up his head and turn it over to lay facing the other way when he is on his tummy. Today I laid him down on a play gym on the floor and the next time I looked at him he had rolled all the way onto his side. I know it was just a fluke, that he was writhing around and somehow got enough momentum to roll part way over, but I was surprised that he was strong enough for that! He hates pooping and gets really mad about it, he grunts and cries the whole time he is trying to poop. He also is pretty sensitive about being in a dirty diaper, he gets very fussy until you change him. He is generally pretty content though, and when he is fussy and crying it is usually because something is wrong. It is only in the last couple of days that he has had any tears when he cries, up until now his crying has been totally dry eyed. We have given him bottles of milk a couple of times, he seems to switch between nursing and drinking from a bottle just find-which will make the transition easier when I go back to work. I don't enjoy pumping, but it isn't as bad as I thought it might be. His hair is wavy and is usually pretty crazy looking, sticking up on the top and growing into a mullet on the back. I still think he favors Chris, but after looking at his baby pictures this past weekend to compare, I can see more of me and my family in there-at least in his hair line and mouth and maybe his build (although it is kind of early to tell what his build is going to be).

We took him to North Carolina this past weekend so that his grandparents could get see him and also so that he could meet his great grandma Muriel and his Uncle Nathan. He traveled really well, sleeping most of the drive and didn't seem to notice he was in a different place. This trip means that he has now been in 3 states (Georgia, of course, South Carolina and North Carolina). The Goseys spent the weekend "fighting" over him and arguing about who got to hold him next and who would get to change his clothes, or his diaper or give him a bath. It was a good weekend, and we ate lots of yummy food.

On my own

Today is my first solo day with the baby, Chris was home the first two weeks and my mom was here all last week. I am a little nervous, both about taking care of the baby all by myself and about spending all this time basically on my own. I haven't always done well with lots of alone time, but I am sure that taking care of the baby will help with that. Plus I can always make plans with a friend or something and I have a couple of new books on CD to listen to to keep me company. So far the morning has gone really well, I fed Truett twice, gave him a bath (not in the original plan for the morning!), put him down for a nap (he has been sleeping for an hour now), took my shower and ate breakfast-all before 10! I have a lot to get done today though, so I hope the rest of the day goes as smoothly.

I can't believe Truett is 3 weeks old now! It seems like it hasn't been that long and it seems like it has been way longer all at the same time. I think we have been very blessed with a content baby so far. He has his fussy moments but we haven't had to walk the floor with him at night or anything. He is sleeping really well at night for a newborn, 3 or 4 hours at a stretch sometimes. We had a several fussy nights that I was blaming on something I ate (I was trying to figure out if it was tomatoes, beans or onions) but we figured out that he just needed to be burped way more during the day-more on that later. Nursing is going really well too, we are still learning and figuring it out, but he is a really good eater and the whole process has been a lot easier than I was expecting. Every day I feel like I notice something new, he is focusing on objects more, his movements are becoming less jerky and I am pretty sure we have seen a few real smiles in the last couple of days. It is amazing how he is already his own little person with his own personality.

Glowworm

Did anyone else have this glowworm toy as a kid? I had one just like this green one and when we had Truett wrapped up in his blanket the other day it struck me that he looked a lot like my old glowworm. We are enjoying him so much, and enjoying our time at home with him. Yesterday we gave him a sponge bath (which he hated), and as I was putting a diaper on him afterwards he immediately pooped before I could even get the tabs undone to fasten the diaper on him. I started laughing and Chris came in the room to see what was going on and give me a hand. We got diaper number 2 on him, and got this one fastened before he pooped again. Figuring that he must be done by now, we put on diaper number 3, which he promptly dirtied. Laughing really hard by now, we decided to leave on the 3rd diaper for a while to see if he was really done. I sat down to feed him and realized that there was somehow poop on the outside of this diaper and one his outfit. On my way back to his room for the 4th diaper in 5 minutes I realized that he also pooped on the changing pad cover, the towel we used after his bath and the seat of his little tub! I had no idea he had it in him! We had an awesome first week with him. He
had a check up on Wednesday and got a clean bill of health. However, right after telling me how healthy our child was, the nurse practitioner said that since he was down to 8 lbs 3 oz that we would need to start supplementing with formula. Keep in mind that it had not even been 3 full days since he was born and my milk still wasn't in. I was very frustrated that she was just using an arbitrary standard, and not looking at our perfectly healthy and hydrated child. After telling us all this, she sent in a lactation consultant to talk to us and the lactation consultant was awesome! She totally affirmed everything we were doing and said to keep it up and also said that she was not concerned about the weight loss and that we should do what we feel comfortable with but she said she wouldn't supplement yet. They wanted us to come back in for a weight check on Friday and by the time we had that appointment, my milk was in and Truett was back up to 8 lbs 10 oz. The nurse we saw on Friday told us to "keep doing what you are doing!" which is funny, because what we did was ignore what they told us to do the last time we were in there. It just seemed like a huge overreaction, but I am sure that they have liability issues to consider. He is a champion eater, and I am sure he will be back up to his birth weight (or past it) by the time we go back in for his 2 week check up. The past two days I keep thinking about how I was in the hospital this time a week ago, and trying to remember where we were in the process at that time. The whole story is below for anyone interested:

On Friday, 12/28, I went in for my check up. Chris came with me to this appointment, which turned out to be a really good thing. We started talking to the midwife about my due date. Originally, based on a very early ultrasound, they set my due date at Dec 16, but at later ultrasound around 10 weeks the technician told us that he was measuring a week behind and that my real due date was Dec 23. However, apparently the radiologist felt like my due date was still the 16th when he or she reviewed the pictures later but the 23rd is what ended up on my chart. Anyway, after reviewing all this with one of the doctors at the practice, the midwife said she was pretty sure I was 41 weeks and 5 days NOT 40 weeks and 5 days like we thought. That meant that Monday would put me two weeks overdue, and the midwife did not feel like this was safe. I was kind of surprised at how concerned she was, she immediately hooked me up to a fetal monitor to check his heart rate and also did an ultrasound to check for fluid levels. Both those test results looked good, but she strongly recommended that we not wait until Monday and said that she wanted to induce me the next day (12/29). We have had a great experience with all the midwives at this practice, and they are all very non-interventionist, so we decided to trust her concerns and go with the induction.

We stopped at Chick-fil-a for some food on our way to the hospital since I knew they wouldn't want me to eat once I checked in. Hunger was one of my biggest complaints during the early stages. I started the Pitocin at 3 pm on Saturday and had contractions all day. They were harder than the Braxton Hicks contractions I had been having, but they weren't super intense. Chris and I spent the day hanging out in the hospital room, reading, listening to music and watching TV. (On a slightly cheesy note-we watched most of Shrek, which was also the movie we saw on our first real date (ok, that was really cheesy)). At 1:30 am the midwife decided that my body and I needed a break from the Pitocin and she turned it off to let me try to get some sleep. I was a little frustrated that we weren't making any progress and I wanted to keep going, but she was encouraging and told me that sometimes a little rest after a day of Pitocin would be enough to let me relax and get things moving along. We sort of dozed (as much as you can when you are in an uncomfortable bed with things strapped to you taking your blood pressure every 15 minutes and the alarm on the fetal monitor going off every time the baby changed positions and it couldn't sense the heartbeat as strongly). We started the day with the Pitocin at 2 ml and ended at 14 ml. The next morning we started it again at 6 am, starting at 2 ml. Immediately the contractions were harder than anything I had felt the previous day and I thought that was a great sign. In the meantime there was a shift change and we had a different midwife, both of the two midwives we had were my two favorite at the practice, so I was fortunate in that. However at 9:45 the 2nd midwife checked me and I was only at 1 cm, which was actually less than the midwife the day before had told me in the afternoon. I don't know if you can go backwards, or if it is just such a subjective measurement that you can't have any consistency, but the news that we had made no progress at all in the past 18 hours was so discouraging and I broke down at this point. I was so tired and so hungry and thought that a C-section was inevitable and felt like my body was broken in some way since it wasn't going into labor. The midwife brought in one of the doctors from the practice and he decided that breaking my water might move things along, something I had wanted to avoid since the baby is more protected from germs before the water breaks, but at this point I felt like we we should try whatever might work. He broke my water at 10:30am and right away the contractions got pretty intense. At 1 pm the midwife checked me again and said I was at 3 cm and definitely in active labor, all of which was good news. I was still just trying to relax through the contractions and trying to move around and change positions as much as possible while hooked up to an IV, sitting on an exercise ball worked for awhile but eventually I was just too tired. By 2 pm I was falling asleep between contractions, which meant that I would wake up after they had already started and I couldn't stay on top of the pain. They were also getting more and more intense. When the midwife checked again and I was only at 2.5 cm and realized I had only moved along .5 cm in an hour, I asked for an epidural. The time between deciding I wanted the epidural and actually getting it was pretty hard, but the anesthesiologist came and it was not bad at all. Going into this process I think I was more scared of the epidural than the labor-the idea of a huge needle in my spine freaked me out. I got the epidural at 3, and was able to doze off for a while. I never completely lost sensation, I could still feel pressure on the hardest contractions and was able to wiggle my feet and toes. By shortly after 6 pm I was at 10 cm. I think that the epidural is what made the difference, and helped everything move along much faster. I started pushing at 7pm and he was born right at 8pm on Dec. 30th. We were laughing afterwards because we went against pretty much everything on our birth plan, but I knew as soon as we agreed to the induction that we were headed down a different path than we originally planned, and I am totally fine with that. Going into it, we both felt that the pros of going drug free outweighed the cons as long as the baby was fine and I could deal with the pain, but we also agreed that we would be fine with pain medicine if I felt like I needed it. I will probably try to go drug free with the next one, I still feel like the pros outweigh the cons, and maybe next time I will actually be able to go into labor on my own!

Pictures

This is our son, Truett! We are really enjoying our first few days with him, Chris is taking a couple of weeks from work and we are just relaxing and figuring out what it means to be a family of three. I know everyone wants to see pictures, we are working on it but this little guy takes up a lot of our time in the last few days. We have a flickr account where most of the pictures will end up, but for now they are marked private for friends and family. If you aren't on our flickr contact list and want to be to see his pictures, just send me a contact request. Things are going well, we had his first check up today and everything looks healthy. We are getting a decent amount of sleep for having a newborn, and he generally seems pretty laid back. Right now he is lounging on a pillow in my lap just looking around. It has just been really, really great so far. We really appreciate all the calls and emails, etc. and it has been great knowing how many people are thinking about us and praying for us (we may be a little slow getting back sometimes!). When I find the time, I will post more about the labor and delivery for those that are interested :). We ended up being induced because they were concerned about my due date and worried that I was two weeks overdue instead of just the one we thought I was. Inducing labor basically from scratch was a longer, harder process than I was expecting but everything worked out in the end.