Typing with one hand here (story of my life these days…)
Reed turned two months old today! We celebrated with his first hike in the woods, which he mostly slept through in his Ergo carrier. Part of me can’t believe he is already this old while another part feels like I’ve known him forever. The past month has been a whirlwind of visitors, but we have the house to ourselves for the rest of the summer. While it’s nice to have company and help, it’s also be nice when it’s just the three of us. My parents were so crazy about Reed that they’re renting a house nearby for three weeks to spend more time with him.
Reed has been growing like a weed. Two weeks ago, we learned that he was in the 75th percentile for height
Adam circa 1971
– which is impressive when you have two shorties for parents. He’s grown 4 inches since he was born
so is 23 and 1/4 inches now. While he eats like crazy, he’s still a pretty lean guy. I’m sure he’ll fill out
soon, though I was never particularly chubby as a baby. I’ve recently seen pics of Adam at this age and he is a chubby version of Reed; it’s really uncanny!
Tummy time or snack time?
Reed’s accomplished so many things this month. Four weeks ago he cracked his first smile and since then he’s been smiling all the time when he’s in a social mood. He’s been cooing a lot and we’re much more clued in to what his various vocalizations mean. He’s started playing with toys — batting at and clutching toys that dangle over him. He’s a whiz at tummy time and has a very strong neck. On Sunday morning he managed to roll himself from his belly onto his back!!! It was a big weekend of firsts since Saturday he also was able to consistently get his thumb in his mouth. He’s still not quite as crazy about it as the pacifier, but he seems to use it more and more each day. He’d been getting it into his mouth on and off for 2 weeks, but he was never able to consistently repeat the feat until now. Good work Reed!!!
I started back at work last week. I’m only working two days per week until mid-August (when Reed is 4 months old) and Adam will be watching him on days that I’m away. It’s difficult to be away from him, but at
least for now he’s with Adam who is so great with him. They have so much fun together and Adam is a really supportive, hands-on dad (and husband). The idea of sending him to daycare really freaks me out, but there really isn’t another good choice for our family.
Lots more to update, but my buddy here seems to want to play, so play we shall.
We’ve been way too busy enjoying Spring and entertaining visitors to post to the blog, but here’s a little movie (taken with my crappy camera) to make up for our lack of updates:
I know Adam’s taken other movies with our video camera, and hopefully he’ll upload them soon as well. And, as always, lots of photos of the Reedster can be found on our Flickr site.
On Sunday, Reed turned one month old. Looking back on this crazy month, I’m blown away by how far we’ve all come. Early on, Reed had a lot of problems with painful gas that left him screaming most of the day and night. Adam and I were scared for him because he was only sleeping 5 or so hours per day (infants usually sleep 14 or so), and we were scared for ourselves because we weren’t sleeping at all. The constant intractable screaming was wearing on us too. I hated to see him in so much pain and know there was nothing I could do to immediately fix it.
He loves to sleep on us
A few course corrections later, and while Reed still has gas, he is passing it much better and is rarely in pain because of it. He’s eating well and sleeping brilliantly. He still needs to sleep with us (or, more accurately, on us), but we’re all getting a lot more sleep than before. I’m hoping that in the coming weeks he’ll be able to spend some time on his own, since right now he cries his lonely cry if he’s away from me or Adam for more than 3 minutes. I don’t mind that much since I love cuddling him, but it makes it difficult to get anything done. My in-laws are arriving for a week’s stay tonight and I’m just excited to have time to clean the house!
Last week, Reed started eating like an absolute pig. Turns out he was going through a growth spurt. He now is 4 inches longer than when he was born and gained 7 ounces in just 5 days. He really feels a lot heavier and his face and tummy are definitely filling out (he still has long skinny limbs). He’s also much more interested in the world around him. He loves looking at his reflection in the mirror and looking out the window on sunny days. He really enjoys
Reed's new friend Jacques the Peacock
playing with his hands and it’s awesome to watch him developing motor control. He’s even starting to become interested in toys — he’s fascinated by a colorful peacock toy, but the others don’t capture his attention yet. Best of all, he SMILED for the first time on Friday (and several times since) without gas. He’s just a very happy little guy and that thrills me to no end!
All in all, he is a dream baby, far more wonderful than I imagined he could be. He’s sweet, funny, loving, and beyond adorable. I could stare at him all day — and do. I keep saying to Adam “how did we make someone this perefct?” I wasn’t sure how I’d take to motherhood (and I especially worried in those first 10 days after having him), but I feel so bonded to him and so happy in this new role. I don’t know what challenges might come in months 2, 3, 4, etc., but I feel like we’re equipped to meet them.
I can hardly believe that Reed is going to be 1 month old in just 4 days! Where has the time gone? It’s amazing how the hours pass when you have a baby. You blink your eyes and it’s 10 pm and you realize that you’ve done nothing you’d planned to do that day because you child wanted to be fed every hour or he managed to poop/pee through every diaper you put him in. I feel like I’m starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel though. This morning, I managed to go through resumes for the Distance Learning Librarian position at my library (yes, I am doing work during maternity leave, but it just means I’ll get to take more time off later on), and Reed is now chilling in his swing, allowing me to write this post.
I came to motherhood having never done so much as changed a diaper. I’d held babies twice in my life and was extremely uncomfortable both times. When Reed was born, I was pretty terrified about picking him up for the first day, and it’s funny to look back on that considering how comfortable I am with him now. Being his mother feels so natural now, as does everything that comes with it. Nothing he does really phases me anymore after dealing with some of his epic diaper blowouts. Well, clipping his nails still terrifies me, but I think I’m going to be forced to do it soon as they’re getting rather long. I tried filing his nails last week and it helped a little bit, but not quite enough. They’re just so tiny!!!
I’m learning a lot more about his cues too. It’s easier for me to tell his “I’m wet” cry from his “I’m hungry” cry now. Some of his cries are still a mystery to me, but I’ve gotten better at calming him down during those times when he doesn’t need something obvious.
I’ve also learned a lot about the mental side of being a mom. I spent way too much time over the past few weeks beating myself up over things and, as a result, being irritable with Adam (I’m sure Adam would use a word other than irritable to describe my behavior, probably a word starting with “B”, but I digress). I was starting to worry that I had post-partum depression, but what I realized was that I was making myself sick and miserable trying to keep doing things that just weren’t working. What I’ve learned is that while a mother should always do what’s best for her child, a big part of that is taking care of herself and not being stressed or miserable. Stress isn’t good for a baby. Yelling isn’t good for a baby. Crying while feeding a baby isn’t good for a baby. After having a good talk with my pediatrician the other day, I’ve made some changes that have resulted in me being much happier and more relaxed. The measure of a mother is not how miserable she is, and I think it took me a little while to realize that. I feel much more able to enjoy Reed now and even Reed seems a lot more relaxed. Happy mommy, happy baby. We like that.
Reed’s over 8 pounds now and we have another well baby visit at the pediatrician’s office tomorrow, so we’ll see how he’s progressing. He’s crying a lot less now, seems much more interested in the world around him, and is sleeping so much better. I’ve started pumping breastmilk a bit, and Reed does much better with the bottle in terms of his gas. I do feel sad that breastfeeding just doesn’t seem to be working for him (or at least it’s not making him a very happy camper), but if something else will prevent him from being miserable, I’m willing to make a change. It’s all about him being fed, healthy and happy. And looking over at him in the swing right now, with his eyelids drooping towards sleep, he seems to be all three of those things.
I know we’ve been terrible about posting updates here on the blog, but when the choice is between blogging and sleeping, sleeping will win every time. Adam’s mother was here from Sunday night until this morning, and she gave us the opportunity to get some very needed rest. Her help was invaluable and Reed so enjoyed spending time with her.
On Friday, Reed turned two weeks old. Other than his gassiness, he’s doing quite well and growing like a weed. At an appointment on Monday, we learned that he is now around 7 lbs, 14 oz. Wow! I am really at a loss as to what to do for his gassiness though. We give him simethicone before every meal and burp him after. When he is gassy, we try putting him on his stomach across our legs or bellies or massage his abdomen (which he doesn’t really seem into). I’m trying a new nursing position — since I have forceful letdown when nursing — which we thought was working since he was doing great yesterday, but this morning he’s been in a lot of discomfort. I just can’t stand seeing my little guy in pain. If anyone has some tips for preventing gas or calming a gassy baby, I’m very open to suggestions.
Now that's what we like to see!
Last Thursday, Reed had received his circumcision which was far more traumatic for me than it was for him. He slept through the whole thing (!) while I cried and cried. It definitely threw off his eating and sleeping schedule though. He is slowly coming back to how things were before, which was frantic crying from 9 or 10 pm until 2 or 3 am (coupled with crazy cluster feeding), and then around 8 hours of relative mellowness where he eats every 3 hours and sleeps in between. The afternoons are unpredictable, but he usually has one long nap after an hour to hour and a half feeding. I am sure as soon as we really get used to this he will throw us another curveball, but it’s nice to know right now when I can expect to get a bit of sleep.
It is so amazing to be able to watch him learn and grow. Already I can see big improvements in his hand-eye coordination. He can hold his pacifier, can often keep it in his mouth with his hands, and last night he even nearly pushed it back into his mouth after it had fallen out. His neck muscles are crazy strong for a baby his age. It blows my mind how quickly he is developing new skills and strength. And the best part is that it is only going to get better! I can’t wait until we see a smile that isn’t gas!!!
A welcome distraction
This is the first time I’ve been on my computer for more than 5 minutes since Reed was born. I use my iPhone sometimes while nursing, but it’s rather difficult to write a blog post on one of those. After a marathon (1 1/2 hour!!!) feeding session, Reed is sleeping and I feel like I might actually have time to finish this post. Fingers crossed!
Reed has been an absolute joy over the past 11 days. I could spend days just staring into his beautiful eyes and holding him close. The love definitely makes the sleep deprivation more tolerable. The first five nights of his life, I got about three hours of sleep cumulatively, but I’ve been doing much better with sleep this week and am feeling a bit more lucid and less stressed. It also helps that Spring has finally sprung in Vermont and we’ve been able to take some nice walks with Reed.
One of the things I was most concerned about before Reed was born was nursing. Would he be able to latch on? Would he be satisfied with my production? Would my milk come in in a timely manner? Would it hurt too much? It’s kind of scary to have another person completely dependent on you for sustenance. And nursing him has been one of the great pleasures of motherhood, but also one of the greatest stressors. On the whole, things are going really well, but he does have occasional difficulties latching just because he gets so frantic on the breast. I’ve had to unlearn some of the things that I was taught in the hospital that were contributing to his freak-outs — some of the nurses had me shove my breast into Reed’s mouth, force his head onto my breast, and one even put sugar water on my nipple. Really, all it takes is good placement and patience. Things get better every day and my soreness is improving, so I feel very optimistic about our nursing relationship.
Mere minutes after Reed was born, I tried nursing him for the first time. And it was about as easy as a nursing session can be. I thought wow! This is great! It’s going to be so easy to nurse this little guy!. The nurses kept commenting on what a mellow little guy he was.
Unfortunately, by the next evening, Reed was not so mellow. He was extremely gassy and frantic about it, screaming all the time unless I was nursing him. He seemed to want to nurse every hour. I spent the entire night awake trying to calm him down and was really worried about him. I didn’t realize at the time, but it wasn’t that Reed wanted to nurse every hour, but that he wanted to suck for comfort while he was gassy, and it didn’t matter if it was a nipple, a finger or a pacifier that he was sucking on. I had mixed feelings about giving him a pacifier the first time, but it’s been one of the major things that’s kept the three of us sane and it hasn’t had any sort of negative impact on our nursing relationship (his latch keeps getting better every day). The first few nights at home he was extremely gassy and kept us up all day and night. He’s still gassy, but we’re giving him medicine before every meal, and he’s getting better about sleeping and letting us sleep.
On the morning that we were going to leave the hospital, we were visited by a different pediatrician in our pediatrician’s group. She asked me how nursing was going and I said that he was demanding feeding nearly hourly during the night. She then said that I should supplement with formula because it sounded like I wasn’t giving him enough food. When I expressed reservations about doing that, she told me that if he came into the hospital with dehydration, he’d have to go through a full battery of tests, including a spinal tap, so I shouldn’t take chances just nursing him. That scared the living daylights out of me, but it didn’t seem to me that he was dehydrated considering how moist his mouth was and how much he was peeing. But she seemed so sure that this is what I had to do and clearly she has a lot more experience with babies than I do. She also said that he looked small and may have lost too much weight since birth (mind you, this is the first time she’d seen him and had not checked his weight yet). Turns out, he’d only lost 5% of his body weight (over 10% is concerning), but she still continued to push the formula thing and made me question whether wanting to nurse exclusively was about me being stubborn and not about me doing what’s best for Reed. Even Adam said that maybe we should supplement, so I was definitely doubting myself as we left the hospital.
Fortunately, I trusted my body to do the right thing for Reed and my milk was totally in by the next afternoon. Within three days of leaving the hospital, he had gained 11 oz. from his discharge weight and was well over his birth weight. He eats well and pees so well that his diapers can rarely hold it all (in fact, he peed all over me while nursing early this morning). There is not now, nor was there then, any evidence that he is not getting enough from me. But the pediatrician seemed so sure that I should supplement with formula that it was difficult for me to trust my own judgment at the time.
In the hospital, you can pretty much convince a mother to do anything by just telling her it’s “for the good of the baby.” I would have undergone any medical intervention to ensure that Reed was healthy and happy. So when you hear from a medical professional that you’re not doing enough for your child, you tend to believe them. I’m sure a lot of people have heard that line about needing to supplement with formula and just trusted that the doctor knew better. I’m sure some people actually do need to supplement, but that should be based on evidence that the child really and truly needs it. I think medical professionals need to be more careful about creating doubt in a new parent’s mind in the absence of compelling medical evidence.
I’m thrilled that I can give Reed the nutrition and antibodies that he needs to grow and be healthy, and it pleases me to see him growing so quickly. His newborn diapers are already getting tight on him and I think we’ll be able to move on to the Level 1 diapers (8 lbs and up) very soon. Adam is doing such a great job feeding me, taking care of the baby, and making sure I get enough sleep to function. Things are definitely looking up from those first few sleepless nights full of doubts. We can do this!
I’m happy to announce the arrival of baby Reed at 6:32am today! He was a healthy 6lbs 13oz, and 19″ long.
Mom and baby are doing great, they are both conked out right now after a long, long night.
Reed, a few minutes old...
looked like the boston cream pie worked a treat… off to the hospital!
So Meredith still hasn’t delivered. She hasn’t gone into active labor. And she’s more than a week overdue. It feels like we’ve been in a holding pattern circling the airport forever, with no end in sight. But just like with a flight, the end comes one way or the other (ie, land or run out of gas.) I’m just hoping that she won’t need to be induced. We’ll know a lot more within the next couple of days i’m guessing.
In the midst of this personal frustration, something really interesting happened in my professional life. I don’t talk about it much, but I have a number of side projects that I work on.
Since December 2000, I’ve been constructing and running a site called ODwire.org, which has become the largest social network for eye doctors. I actually started it at the behest of my father, a retired eye doctor, just as a way for him to keep in touch with his peers and old friends.
When I started the initial design for the community I thought the site would be a major flop (sorry, dad), for several reasons:
- It wasn’t clear to me back then that folks of my father’s generation would take to the site, or that highly paid professionals would take the time to browse such a site
- I did not think my father would have the sticktuitiveness to act as a site facilitator without alienating large chunks of the member base.
- My father also demanded that the site should be run as a closed community that required registration and manual verification before a user could “enter the club”. He felt that professionals would want a more private space to share their feelings, and without some degree of privacy, no one would want to chat or open up about issues of substance. Great idea, but this made it really difficult to get noticed by search engines, because search bots couldn’t get inside the site. As far as the bots knew, our content was limited to 3-4 pages.
Despite my initial concerns, and much to my amazement, the site didn’t flop. It has grown from nothing to being an important, legitimate media property serving the profession.
This morning, we went over the 10,000 registered, verified user mark. This may not sound like a lot of users when you think about general social networking sites like Twitter, but in reality it represents 1/4 to 1/3 of ALL optometrists in the United States, and it is a highly targeted, sought-after population. The site does over a million page views a month, and it is far and away the biggest site of its kind in eye care. Not bad for a ‘gated online community’.
Meredith has long asked me to comment about how we managed to build the community and keep it relevant and growing over the past 8-9 years. I’ve been reluctant to share, simply because… I don’t know the answer! That is, i’ve never really taken a step back to analyze the success factors or ’secret sauce’ that made our small community into an important venue.
Meredith is going to teach a class about online community for SJSU in January, and she’s asked me for some real-world examples that I can share with the students. So it is probably high time that I wrap my head around what it is we’ve built, why it is so popular, and how it can be replicated. Or at the very least, come up with some anecdotes about the pitfalls of building a community like ours so that her students won’t make the same mistakes we did along the way.
In commemoration of our 10,000th registrant, Meredith was kind enough to get me this awesome Boston Cream Pie this morning. Yay chocolate! Yay creamy goodness!
Thank You, Meredith!
Who knows — maybe the cake will push her into active labor, and we’ll have something even more important to celebrate today
According to my mother, I was born 9 days late, which is exactly how late little Reed is today. At this point, I’m having contractions 24 hours a day, some extremely painful and lengthy, others more mild. Often, they develop a pattern — coming every 10 or 7 minutes — and just when we think maybe we should time these they manage to dissipate into randomness. I also now have a cold (thanks Adam), which is only adding to my discomfort. When getting a non-stress test yesterday to make sure the baby was tolerating contractions ok, my contractions actually pegged the meter (going way over 100 — not sure what that really means, but I know it was measuring uterine pressure), so I’m pretty sure they’re legitimate contractions. I just don’t understand why I keep having so many of them when they never seem to turn into labor. I’m having one right now as I write this and were I standing, I’d have had to lean onto something to stay on my feet. I can take the pain, but I can’t take it all going nowhere.
Fortunately, the non-stress test and the ultrasound we had this week show that the baby seems to be doing fine, so at least I don’t have to worry about that point (and he’s still a boy, which is also good to hear). But as we get closer and closer to Monday — the day they’ll want to induce me — I’m starting to get more and more anxious for labor to start on its own.
The really annoying thing about not going into labor by your due date is that people constantly feel the need to comment on it or ask about it. I know they’re just being nice, but I really don’t feel like talking about it since I’m frustrated enough with the thoughts in my own head. While I like my neighbors, I purposely tried to avoid them (unsuccessfully) on my walk today because I just didn’t want to talk about how I haven’t had the baby yet. I hate feeling so anti-social, but I really am getting sick of answering questions about how late I am and all that.
Not surprisingly, all of these things are making me rather cranky as Adam can attest. I know I’m taking things out on him sometimes, but, to be blunt, he should consider himself lucky for not being on my end of things. To have uncomfortable and painful contractions all day, to feel big as a house, to have a nasty cold, to be exhausted because you just can’t seem to get enough sleep, and to be worried about how long it’s taking for this baby to get the show on the road is much worse than having someone crab at you. While he has lost his patience a few times, he’s been taking very good care of me and deserves a medal for managing to stay positive.
It’s funny… during this pregnancy, I put so much thought and concern into what would happen when I was in labor (what I wanted, didn’t want, etc.). It never occurred to me that going into labor period was going to be the major issue. At this point, I just want to have a healthy baby and I don’t care what it takes to make that happen. I’d really rather avoid a c-section, but induction is actually starting to look appealing, even though it would probably lead to a cascade of other things I don’t want (like an epidural, which scares the living daylights out of me, being a person pathologically afraid of needles, especially those going into one’s SPINE!). #1 for me right now is meeting my baby and I will accept whatever it takes to make that happen.
