Veronica: First Week

Time passes in very strange ways when you have a newborn. Sometimes two days can seem like a week, then the passing of a week seems to whizz by in a blink. It's because you can alternate between incredible highs and awful lows several times in the same day. At noon you feel like a star and that you have everything under control, then at one in the morning you're in a fit of despair, then everything's totally cool again by breakfast. At this point in time, we're off that rollercoaster officially. Things are great and look to be staying that way. But damn, you really forget what those first few days can be like.

I'll go light on detail here because I suspect Sarah will provide the gory blow-by-blow on her sight shortly. At about 3am on the 24th, Sarah went into labour. With Teddy, the start-to-finish labour was epic, so we were both convinced that we had tons of time. But contractions were two minutes apart by 5am, and we were at the hospital and into serious labour just two hours after that. Mid-way through pushing, our midwife checked Sarah out and discovered meconium -- which meant the baby had pooped in utero. She notified hospital staff and a team of folks were standing by, ready to clear out baby's airway after the birth was through. But then the baby got stuck at the shoulders. While the same thing had happened to Teddy, this was a bigger baby and it turned out to be a greater effort to get her out. They managed to do it without any breaks or dislocations, and at 8:46, less than six hours after the whole thing began, Veronica was born. But she was blue, and she wasn't moving.

After the fact, I've been told that the awful colour and lack of movement isn't totally unusual, and that the midwifes and doulas all knew she'd be fine, but I was terrified she wouldn't make it. From birth to baby's first cries, it was probably only the space of 40 seconds or a minute, but it felt like forever. In the end, hospital staff had her air passage cleared out in short order, and she was pink and angry and just like a baby should be. She was also big: eight pounds, fifteen ounces -- outweighting the Tedster by eleven ounces. We had an overnight in the hospital and we were back home in the afternoon of the next day.

First day (post birth) was great, second day was great, third day: awful. We found out that she had a sort of weak, inefficient suck, and she wasn't getting much milk when she fed. She'd lost a little over ten percent of her body weight, which is officially not good. We had flashbacks of Teddy all over again -- thinking things were fine, feeling we had good instincts, then discovering a massive problem. It's a shitty feeling because once you learn your parenting instincts have mislead you, you start to second guess all the decision you're making and it takes a while to start trusting yourself again. But the midwife put a plan in place where we supplemented breastfeeding with finger-feeding to help improve her suck... and it worked perfectly. She improved in under a day and didn't need the finger-feeding anymore. That day she'd gained three ounces -- and two days after that she'd put on another seven ounces. That was yesterday. The midwife was thrilled with her latch, and Veronica is feeding like a monster, so everything is really great now.

She's very cute. She looks just like Teddy did as a baby, except for her giant cheeks (... and the obvious differences in their gender-related paraphernalia). She has Sarah's feet and Sarah's ears, and she looks like an angry bird when she's hungry (which Sarah does not). Good sleeper, easy to settle down, and just lovely is this kid. Teddy has been great with her so far, but I think he assumes she's French, because he keeps pointing to her and saying "bébé!" (More on him soon.)

So, getting to the end of this I realize it was more doom and gloom than I intended. The bottom line is that she's doing great, and that (while fatigued) we're doing great too.