transcended.net

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!