L&D and Everything After, Conclusion

I guess this could have just been called "Everything After."  If I kept up the same level of detail from here out, I'd not only lose readership and my own interest in typing it, I'd also never catch up to the present day.  So here's the highlights version.

At 8lbs, 10oz, and 21.5in, Fiona Mae Drummond was the biggest newborn in the hospital.  She was also the best looking.  Newborns look a lot like aliens most of the time, and can come with such attractive qualities as cone heads, baby acne, scaly or flaky skin, blotches, beady eyes, and myriad other generally weird-looking traits.  Fiona has none of those - she is a babe in the making.

The rosy cheeks are from eating - she takes it seriously.

They keep babies and moms for 48 hours after delivery as standard protocol.  Fiona had some extra tests to make sure she didn't get any infections from the long labor (all good), so she got pulled out of bed at 1am both nights to get stuck with things.  I learned that they draw blood from babies' feet.

We had a regular parade of visitors, though many of them were repeat customers (parents mostly).  Fiona was a gracious hostess in her hospital room, allowing most anyone to hold her and flash cameras in her face with minimal grimacing.

Well, maybe a little grimacing.  But look at that tight blanket burrito...nice work!

With everything going on, I didn't pay attention to my school's calendar (yes, I have a school!  More on that in another post), and showed up to teach on the wrong day.  Oops.

In the hospital, you're not allowed to go anywhere out of your room while holding your baby.  She had to go in this clear aquarium-looking bed thing with wheels.  When mothers are discharged, they must leave in a wheelchair.  This is perhaps the strangest part.  Not only can I walk with my baby wherever I please immediately after leaving the hospital, Tori got up from her wheelchair when we got to the car, leaned in, and strapped Fiona into the car seat herself.  The irony.  Anyway.

I'd also like to let it be known that I changed Fiona's first two diapers (no, they are not the only two I've done.  I change many diapers).  I also learned that newborn poop looks like the blackest, most foul evil ever to emerge from anyone's butt hole.  In a bizarre mode of cognitive dissonance, it is both sterile and odorless.  I kid you not.  No smell.  And tar-like, so it's kind of concentrated in one spot.  Really, it looks like marmite, this nasty tar-like substance Brits and Aussies eat on toast.  The marmite poop goes away after two days or so, and now I kind of miss it.

Gross.

So we've been home several days now, and each one is different.  She has no routine, other than eating, sleeping, and pooping.  She doesn't know what she likes best, so when she's upset it's hard to know what will help.  One day she's nice and placid and seems content.  The next, she is either passed out asleep, or screaming.

We like the passed out asleep.  We wish it would happen at night sometime.

She is ALWAYS hungry.  She's supposed to eat every 2-3 hours right now, which is already pretty crazy, considering that it takes 30 minutes or more to do a whole feeding session.  But not long after, she starts doing what the doctor called "rooting," and which we've come to call the "little bird face," which means she's looking for something to suck on.  Sometimes it's her own hand.  Sometimes it's your arm.  Tori has a hickey on her chin, where a hungry Little Bird got too close and latched on.  No one had to teach this one how to breastfeed - she definitely has the mechanics down (not so sure she knows when to use her skills though).

Little Bird Face.  She's about to latch on to my collar bone.

So we're parents.  We don't sleep much at all.  We have a hard time remembering things like where we parked the car.  We laugh at stupid stuff like how loud and often my little girl farts, and we drive to nowhere at 1am, hoping it will make her stop screaming.  We're struck a dozen times a day at how effing cute she is, and are so thankful that God gave us this screaming, pooping, tiny Little Bird.

And that, my friends, is the story of how she got here.