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Dear Titus,

Even though in a way this day means nothing, it’s not after all the day you were born (or anywhere close to it), it’s special because today is your zero day! You are an adjusted age of zero now! Gone are the days of being negative days/weeks old.

So even though you are zero days old, you have actually been an outside-baby for five weeks and two days now. Even better, you’ve been an outside-the-NICU-baby for two weeks and two days.

It’s weird because it feels like so much time has passed since you were born but each day flies by so quickly I barely have time to process everything that has happened since the moment the doctors told me you were coming – ready or not! (For the record, your pops and I were definitely under the not category).

There is so much I want to remember about this time of your life, I wish I could capture all of it and save it in a bottle somewhere. When you were in the NICU and we couldn’t really touch or do much of anything with you or for you, your papa and I would just sit and stare, literally for hours, at you. Drinking you in. Savoring your newness and your ridiculous cuteness. We would marvel over your gigantic (for a tiny baby) feet. Stroke your unbelievably soft, full head of hair. Try to learn your cries – your pops in particular picked up on your wet diaper cry pretty quickly.

Speaking of the NICU, I feel like you should know, the nurses and doctors in the NICU adored you. Every day we were there, so many of your previous nurses would come by and exclaim about how much improvement you made and how happy they were to see it. One day you had a new nurse and she remarked about how you had quite the fan club coming to see you all day long! The doctors and nurses called you their little miracle (and would have to correct themselves that you were OUR little miracle!) because of how quickly you went from the very sick baby to a completely normal, healthy, happy little guy.

Your nurses all told us what a good baby you were, how you were so “appropriate” and only cried when you needed something and so easy to calm down once your need was met.

Another thing every nurse and doctor who has had the pleasure of examining you has remarked about is how crazy strong you are for a little baby. One time you almost managed to kick a vial of your own blood out of the phlebotomist’s hand! Your pops is hoping this bodes well for his dream of you getting a basketball scholarship =P (Just kidding! Totally no pressure!)

Now that we are finally home with you, we’re starting to get to know you better every day. There’s still a lot that’s confusing but hopefully day by day that will change. You have started staring at our faces and following us with your eyes. You remain a very “appropriate” baby and I swear the hardest part of taking care of you is trying to get you to burp! You get SO angry when you are gassy, you flail and kick your strong legs but once the bubble has passed you calm back down like, “What? Where’s my milk?”

You can already look at our faces and follow us with your eyes! We can’t wait until we get a real smile out of you (instead of a gas smile – although your dad does adore your crooked, one sided gas smile and always exclaims, “He’s winking at me!” when you do it. He’s tried so hard to get a picture of it but so far you are not cooperative about it). The other day I read you a book your Uncle Darwin sent called “Duck and Goose: How Are You Feeling?” and I swear you were looking at all the pictures! I think you like Duck and Goose 🙂

As of this past Monday you were 6lbs 11oz and gaining approximately 1.5oz per day so you are most likely about 7lbs now! You love to eat (usually 100ml every three hours now!) but we still haven’t figured out which nip.ple works best for you. Breastfeeding is great but makes you so sleepy that we have to take lots of breaks and I’m never really sure if you’re full or not. I’m still hopeful that at some point before I have to go back to work we can BF for the majority of your feeds.

Your cheeks are coming in nicely and this past week your pops and I have noticed how chunky and dimpled your thighs are becoming. So cute!

Your grandma says you have the same hair I did when I was a baby. You have TONS of hair and it is super soft and downey and such a light brown that it sometimes looks red in the light! I wonder if it’ll stay this way or if it’ll darken up as you get older. Other than that we still can’t really figure out who you look like, except when you’re being burped you really look like your Grandpa Andy (papa’s dad)! We joke about how you look like a seventy year old man.

When you sleep you make these odd little dinosaur noises, like squeals and grunts. The visiting nurse said that that’s normal for preemies so we just laugh about it (can you tell you bring your pops and I hours of laughs and entertainment?). We call you our baby T-rex, maybe that nickname will stick? I keep reminding myself that I need to make a video of it before you stop doing it. It does sometimes make it hard for us to sleep though!

So welcome to being a non-negative age my little baby T-rex. I love you more than anything and I can’t believe I get to be your mama forever.

Love,
Mama

Since it’s past midnight, my baby is officially five weeks old! And we’ve had him home with us for two of those five weeks.

I just did my last feed for the night and a diaper change which found me using my hand to shield the rest of the room from his fountain-like pee. Question for you Lisa, can you leave the pee-pee tee-pee on while rubbing diaper rash cream around the pe.nis and scro.tum? Because I generally throw a rag over his delicates but he always gets me when I have to move it to apply the cream everywhere. If the tee-pee solves that problem then I definitely need to get myself some of those!

For now I’d say it is definitely easier being home than in the NICU. This may change in 1.5 weeks when Paul goes back to work, but for now I’m actually getting about the same amount of sleep at night (since Paul does all the night feeds, I just have to wake up to pump) with the major difference being I can also sneak naps during the day since my bed is much more conducive to sleep than the NICU chairs.

However, what is not easier is having to navigate this whole baby thing without seasoned professionals making sure we don’t do anything stupid! And I have no clue how our parents managed to parent us in the Days Before Google. Because Paul and I are pretty much constantly googling things like, “how to bathe a newborn” or “why does my baby suck the bottle nip.ples flat” or “can baby still breathe with a stuffy nose.”

I wrote the beginning of the post almost 48 hours ago and it was pretty prescient! Today Paul and I discussed getting a night nurse because a) I don’t know how much longer Paul can go on doing all the night feeds and basically doing chores all day long instead of taking naps and b) I don’t know how I’m going to do all the night feeds once he goes back to work.

I’ve had the awesome luxury of only really getting up once per night to pump these past couple weeks. Since we’re all sleeping in one room I do get woken up by the loud crying every three hours but it’s not the same as having to completely wake myself to feed, burp and change T every three hours.

We’ve increased his feeds by more than double the NICU minimum he came home requiring and yet we still can’t get him to sleep more than 3 (with the occasional 3.5) hours at a time. In reality this means a max of 2 hours at a stretch if we’re very lucky.

A few of my coworkers have used night nurses and all of them said it’s pricey but absolutely worth the money. One of them actually said something like there is no point in making money if you can’t spend it on something like that. Initially when people asked if we would get this kind of help I immediately said no, mainly because there was pretty much no way we could afford it. But we’ve been extremely blessed in that our financial has changed pretty drastically this week and we’re now in a position where we definitely can afford a few nights a week, possibly five, which would be amazing once Paul goes back to work.

Beyond just the “getting sleep” aspect of it, from what I’ve read it makes a lot of sense for noob parents like us to hire someone like this for the teaching aspect. Obviously, we have no idea what we’re doing and I’m constantly afraid that we’re teaching him bad sleep habits that we’ll have a hard time breaking later. Bringing a professional into our home to teach us in a very hands on, tailored specifically to OUR baby, kind of way may help prevent problems and an ounce of prevention, blah blah blah. I figure if we hire someone worth their salt that maybe we’ll only need them for a month or so. Hopefully he’ll be sleeping through the night by then (oh, please dear God, let him be sleeping through the night by then).

So tomorrow the search for a night nanny begins. If anyone has any suggestions for someone in the SF area, I’m all ears! Otherwise, Ye.lp it is!