Tonight was our fourth and final childbirth class. This time it was more about what to do once the baby is out. I learned...
• How to swaddle. As a bonus, I also learned how properly to wrap a burrito, because this is the same thing as swaddling. Only, you know, one involves a baby and the other involves refried beans.
• That I can't seem to wipe the grin off my face when I watch good parents take care of little babies, like we saw in the video tonight.
• How to transfer holding a baby in one arm to holding the baby in the crook of your other arm without letting go of the head. It's kind of a nifty spin-move.
• That newborns wake up about 3-4 times a night for the first month or so, then begin to settle in to a pattern asymptotically approaching sleeping through the night. Honestly, nobody around here is looking forward to that, but at the same time it doesn't sound much worse than Lucy when she was 8-12 months. There were weeks at a time when an average of 4-5 wakings per night was not unusual, and this continued for a lot longer than a few weeks. So perhaps the culture shock of not getting a full night's sleep won't be so bad this time. Perhaps.
On that last point, I do wish that before we had gone over to adopt Lucy in 2004, we had gotten some sort of serious advance warning of how much of a shock it would be -- how much work it is, how little sleep we'd get, and above all how much confusion and outright depression was going to come from transitioning from DINKs to new parents literally overnight with no intervening period of pregnancy to get us ready. We probably got more information about that kind of shock, which correlates with depression and the "baby blues", in the first hour tonight than we got in the months leading up to our first adoption. And we could have used it back then, as we really struggled once Lucy -- a very high-maintenance baby -- was home with us. I hear that adoption agencies do a better job with keeping parental expectations realistic and preparing parents for the shock of a new baby these days, and I hope that's true.
Monday, November 24, 2008
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2 comments:
The months leading up to giving birth are helpful for getting mentally prepared for the enormous change to take place, esp with the first child. Having two infants already will make it easier and frankly that first year is pretty freaking awesome with all the dramatic changes that take place.
J and I actually managed to get 5 solid hours of sleep during those first few months...I feed Riley around 11p and J got up and fed him a bottle of breast milk around 2a. I then got up with him around 5a. Worked out nicely and I wasn't nearly as exhausted as I though I'd be.
Shelby- Since I usually go to bed around 11 and am up at 5, and Cathy is up at 3, that kind of schedule may work out perfectly -- assuming Harrison goes back to sleep after being fed!
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