The Aftermath

After Shannon was born, I was exhausted, elated, and sore. Among about a million other feelings.

I had her at Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington, and I have to give a HUGE shout out to all the staff on the labor and delivery floor, as well as my OB. They were everything I needed them to be, and about a million things that I didn't know that I needed them to be. It made our experience wonderful.

Anyways

After Shannon was born, and cleaned up, I got to go use the bathroom, and test out my legs. They were a bit shaky, since they'd been numb for about 5 hours straight, but I managed to make it up, go pee (and it wasn't as scary as I thought that it was going to be), and back to bed. After they ripped her out of M's hands. They got me all set up in the wheelchair, handed her to me, and off we went to the Mother and Child part of the hospital.

Keep in mind it's about 4am, and everybody is exhausted. I just pushed out a (very) small human being, after all. The nurse that got us settled into our room was a bit chatty. I think she was very excited. She chatted away to us for a while about hospital policy and how to make my bed go up and down, and then left us alone to get settled. M got his own bed, and my Mom got to go home and get some sleep.

My one and only gripe about the hospital is that they tell you to try and get some rest... and then there is somebody knocking on your door every half hour, asking you if you've peed yet, and taking your blood pressure. Not very restful.

They took Shannon to do some baby screens, and then brought her back to me to try out this whole breast feeding adventure. We were all up for good at about 8 am, I got some breakfast, and we pretty much just tried to enjoy our munchkin.

I wanted a shower in the worst way.

Our daytime nurse, Heather was the BEST. She got Shannon latched on, and made learning how to breastfeed her a snap. She tried to let me up to take a shower, but I got really light headed and my ears started ringing, so I wasn't allowed to right away. My in-laws were coming up, and no way was I going to let them see me in all my post-birth sweaty glory. I ate some more, sat on some ice packs, and tried again and hour later.

Success!

The rest is pretty much a blur of people visiting, snuggling my kiddo, more attempts at breastfeeding, blood pressure taking, and trying to take a nap.

That night (Monday 2-21-12) was long, as I was getting used to the idea of getting up every five minutes, and Shannon was getting used to the idea of nursing. Trying to get a successful latch at 2 am, the day after you've given birth, is pretty difficult, not going to lie.

The angel that was our night nurse, Maggie, taught me how to nurse her laying on my side, and that made life perfect. I've never been an advoacate of co-sleeping, or having the baby in the bed with me, and I always swore that I would never be one of those people. How things change when you get desperate!!

I am a big fan of co-sleeping now. When you're up every 2 hours, and your who-ha feels like your sitting on a catus, being able to have my child right there with me was a blessing I never thought to expect.

The post birth thing is sore. You feel like you just wrecked your entire body at the gym with the worst workout of your life. Ice packs and a peri-bottle were my best friends. If you think about it though, I just pushed out a human being. An entire human being. It's the hardest thing that my body will ever go through. If you think about it like that, the soreness and bleeding, is really not that bad. I made a point of being up and down pretty often, and moving around.

We were discharged Tuesday morning, and everybody was pretty impressed. Shannon is healthy as a horse, and I was doing pretty well too. Normally they keep you two days afterwards, which wouldn't have had us home until Wednesday morning, but it was so much nicer just being home, surrounded by your own things, sleeping in your own bed. The hospital is nice, people clean up after you, and bring you food, but when push comes to shove, it's a hospital, and in my opinion, they just smell weird.

The two days we've been home, leading up to this one have been pretty easy. Shannon sleeps, eats, and sleeps some more. We have a great system going, and M and I are trying to stay as relaxed as possible. Even the night times aren't that bad. The first night she had a stint of cluster feedings, and that really stunk. Last night she was up every two hours, almost on the dot, and that was easy as pie.

My milk really started to come in last night, and that made nursing on my side really hard, since my boobs were solid as a rock, but I managed to pump right into a bottle, and M fed her. No problems!

We had a drs appointment yesterday, and she was looking great, just a little bit jaundice, so we went to the hospital for some blood work, but it all came back great! She didn't have any meltdowns (except when they were trying to get blood out of her feet for the blood work. She wasn't a huge fan of that, and Mommy had to go wait in the waiting room, since I couldn't stand to hear her scream), even though the drs. office was full of screaming children.

Don't get me started on the one child in there. He was a little too curious...

Now here we are. She's sleeping in her pack and play, M is working on college stuff, I managed to type up two HUGE blog posts, and that's it!

Off to lunch and a shower!