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After the delivery and the chaos that ensued[1], we were moved to a postpartum room. I forgot its actual name, it was something less medical, like "mother and baby care". The room was much smaller, probably because they didn't expect to have as many people in the room at the same time. But except for the bathtub that was traded for a small shower, it had more or less the same perks:
We made our way there—my wife on a wheelchair pushed by the nurse, our baby in his dedicated nursery bed (the ones with transparent Plexiglas sides), and me with our cart of bags, snacks, and stuff. I was pushing both the baby and the cart, trying not to hit anything, especially on the baby's side.
It was a very strange feeling when the nurse closed the door behind her. It was about 6 or 7pm, we had only had a couple of hours of sleep in the past three days, and it was the first time in hours that we were alone with my wife after all the craziness around the delivery.
Except we were not alone. A tiny human being was asleep in his tiny bed. I had a feeling of fascination. He was our baby, finally, just right there.
We stayed in the hospital for two nights, so about a day and a half. I didn't take any notes then, so I won't describe every event in detail (it wouldn't be very interesting either), but I'll cover a few key topics.
While we were prepared for the lack of sleep with a newborn, we didn't anticipate how tired we were going to be in the hospital. None of us had pulled an all-nighter for many years, let alone two in a row, which I probably have never done, even in my craziest young adult times.
Back in the day—or maybe still in other hospitals—babies were put in a nursery for their first night. Now, they're all about having the baby in the room, spending as much as possible of those first hours with the mom, which is supposedly good for them. I'm sure it is. But it also means that we didn't have a break—or a nap—between the 60-ish hours delivery and the next steps.
We had to learn how to take care of a baby while being shadows of ourselves. Reading this, you must be like "duh!" We just really didn't think about it that much, and living it made me realize how important sleep, or the lack of it, was even in these early hours.
And then there's the constant ballet of people coming into the room. I'm pretty sure the first night it was *at least* once every hour. Blood test at 2:00 am, blood sugar at 2:30 am, nurse checking in 20 minutes later, etc. Once you think you can close an eye, you're interrupted.
Finally, and obviously, the baby. I'll get back to the feeding in another section, but while I knew that we were going to feed him "about every two hours," I didn't realize that it meant we had about one hour of "free time" between feeds.
Also, the couch-bed was awful. It's more or less a plank with a sheet, and a very shitty pillow. Not that it mattered that much. I was so tired I could have fallen asleep snapping my own fingers.
One real-life anecdote: the second night, baby was quite fussy, and was "cluster feeding", meaning he wanted to eat all the time and was sleeping only for very short periods. At some point, he was eating for 5 minutes before falling asleep, but waking up as soon as we transferred him to his crib. On the twentieth time he fell asleep on the boob, around 3:00 am, I think we googled that they're supposed to be in deep sleep after 30 minutes. My wife was dying, so she asked me to watch him sleep on her for 20 minutes before transferring him, while she took a nap. It was probably a bad idea, but what did we know. Regardless, it was the longest 20 minutes of my life, trying not to fall asleep. But it worked. Until about 10 minutes after I put him in his bed, when the blood test lady came in the room to take what looked like a gallon of blood from his lil foot. He understandably screamed to death and was very much awake. Rinse and repeat.
I may have held my nephews and/or nieces once. That was my experience with babies then. So, virtually none. The first times I carried him were a little awkward, but overall it went fine. I guess one good thing about having a big baby is that there is less of that feeling of a fragile, tiny newborn. He seemed a little more... solid.
Still, we had no idea what we were doing. The nurses were quite present and helpful. Even though we felt completely lost and left on our own after being constantly surrounded in the previous hours, it wasn't *actually* the case. A nurse was always checking in, helping us, and even in the middle of the night, they would come at least every two hours.
The counter-effect of all these visits from various professionals is the amount of information we received. Everybody was telling us a lot of different things on various topics. With the lack of sleep, our short-term memory was kind of messed up. We had a few occurrences of "what did she say during the discussion with that person an hour ago? No idea." In the end, I don't think we brought much of what was said home.
However, babies aren't rocket science that early. They sleep and eat. And from time to time, they need a diaper change. Then something doesn't "work," or a pattern changes, and we end up googling things, hoping to find an easy solution. They usually do not exist.
Overall, things went pretty fine. On the first day, he was sleeping more or less as soon as we put him down in his bed. Then it started to get slightly complicated on the second night, where he began to fuss when put down without any help to fall asleep.
For the first feeds, the nurse checked the baby's blood sugar level before feeding him, to make sure that he was getting enough to eat. You have to "pass" the test, i.e., have a high enough sugar rate, three times in a row.
My wife's breasts didn't produce anything before birth, so it was kind of amazing to see that it started to happen just as he was there. It was the tiniest amount, but at first they need very little. It still wasn't enough, as he barely passed the second test and failed the third. Or maybe his latch wasn't good enough then. Or maybe he fell asleep too quickly. Regardless, we fed him a formula bottle prepared by the nurse. She was very reassuring, telling us that it didn't mean we would need to complement with formula later on. It went fine, except for the fact that he threw up most of it later.
Three feeds later, he passed the tests, and he was off the hook until a couple of other blood sugar tests later on to make sure it was still okay.
Another feeding-related test that they do is weighing them 24 hours after birth (or was it the morning before we left?). It's normal for newborns to lose between 5-10% of their weight. But they like the weight loss to stay under 7%, and he was 8-something. So we saw a lactation consultant who asked us to use the "modified triple feeding" technique. Triple feeding consists of pumping after feeding the baby and offering him the supplement (I don't understand the name since there are only two feedings there). The modified version is to do it only if he didn't feed well or long enough.
I don't think we actually did it in the hospital. Also, my wife was completely spacing out when the lactation consultant was talking, so it's a good thing that she gave us a paper explaining the technique.
After the second night, at about 11 am, it was time to go home. I went to the car with a few bags, and brought the car seat and its stroller up to the room. We packed up everything, installed baby Bobby in the car seat for the first time, and just like that, we were out of the hospital, on our own. At first, he was fussy, but as soon as we reached the (very hot and humid) outside air, he calmed down. That was new.
It's a good thing we lived really close to the hospital because driving with barely any sleep for days really does feel like being drunk. And I was self-conscious about having a baby in the back. I think I probably drove quite below the speed limit.
And then we were home. With baby Bobby. And nobody was going to check on us every 5 minutes. It was so deliciously calm.