Zelie's First Days

I wrote a similar post for Will after he was born, so in the interest of keeping things equal between siblings (har har), here is a small taste of what we've been up to. 

Staring at her sweet baby face. (Duh.) 

Staring at the wall in hospital sleep deprivation.

At the foot of my hospital bed.

Little Will has been handling the adjustment pretty well. There have been a couple of meltdowns, mostly from lack of attention or for not being allowed to hold Zelie all on his own, but for the most part he is either (a) gently affectionate or (b) utterly indifferent toward her.  

Their first meeting was pretty cute . . .

He checked her out and gave her a quick kiss upon our prompting. Then Zelie gave him his big brother gift, a toy postal service truck. My boy is obsessed with the mailman. Probably because we are in these days leading up to Christmas where there's a UPS, FedEx, or USPS truck in every direction. Once he had his new truck, he pretty much ignored his little sister in favor of exploring the hospital and his cool new toy. He even went to bed that night with truck in hand. 

The next day, we left for home. I couldn't wait to get out of the hospital. I barely slept in that hospital bed! Once Zelie had reached 24 hours old (i.e., in the middle of the night the second night in the hospital), she could be taken to run all her tests necessary for discharge, so she was out of the room most of the night. It helped—she was kind of a loud sleeper those first couple nights!—but I still wasn't able to get much sleep. Will had gone home for the night to take care of Little Will, so I thus started penning my birth story. In case you are wondering, and rightly so, how I was able to get it up so fast.

Someone didn't like the car seat at first.

Others were a bit preoccupied with putting things in his mouth that he shouldn't. 

Zelie spit up a lot of amniotic fluid/colostrum that second night in the hospital necessitating use of a certain aspirator. So this is pretty gross.

(Yeah, I'm just over here snapping away rather than intervening. Yeah, that's the slight remnant of a black eye from a Flip 'n' Play collision.) 

"Don't want your paci, Zelie? I got this." - Wm. H. Brez.

He gnawed on it on the drive home until he passed out. 

Things have been going pretty well since coming home. Zelie is a MUCH better nighttime sleeper than Will was. I am jinxing it right now, fine, but she's been one that I need to wake up to nurse rather than being woken up to nurse every two hours. I'm sleeping so much better now than I was the last three weeks of my pregnancy. It's making me very impatient for the physical part of the recovery to be over with! But I'm being good and taking it easy. 

We've had a rough start with nursing, though, which I was not expecting after such a smooth experience with Little Will. During her first nursing session right after the birth, I was a bit absorbed with, oh I dunno, birthing the placenta and not dying as I was stitched up and my abdomen was crushed by well-meaning nurses, that I wasn't paying attention to Zelie's latch and she took off a chunk of my left nipple. The nips were further destroyed in the colostrum phase in the hospital. I met with the hospital's IBCLC for over an hour yesterday to work on things and they are much improved. At Day 5, she was 8 pounds even and she took in 61mL/2oz. during our in-office nursing session. (She also showed off for the LC just how nicely she was producing diapers. So proud. So proud.) The LC gave me some gel pads to "heal from the inside" rather than using lanolin, so I think things are looking up despite some marathon nursing sessions. They wear me out because I have to really focus on keeping her in tight and fixing her latch, but it will be worth it over time when things (hopefully, please Lord) become effortless. She also had another blood draw to check bili levels, but all easy fine on that front (her forehead scan was 19, borderline, but the corresponding blood draw was only 13.8!). 

It's allllll worth it obviously . . . 

. . . for those precious moments when my daughter looks up at me with that grumpy newborn scowl. 

;)