Our Journey: The First Month

I go into detail on the first 2.5 weeks in an earlier post which you can read here. Long story short? Lots of tears, very little sleep. It was pure survival mode, and it was more difficult than I ever thought it could be.

But then...like some kind of magical, baby-whispering chariot of the gods...our Rock n' Play sleepers arrived from Amazon. I'll rave about these in greater detail in a later review-style post, but for now let me just say that they absolutely saved our little family. We've been using them for almost two weeks now, and they've enabled us to get on a schedule, as tenuous as it might be.

With the help of the rock n' plays, we started sleeping at night shortly before the boys reached three weeks old. We'd put them down in their sleepers sometime between 8 and 11pm, and we'd go to bed, too. Every 3 hours or so they wake up, we change them, feed them, and then repeat the cycle. By morning, we have about 6-8 hours of sleep...so long as it all goes well, but keep in mind that that sleep is extremely interrupted. Likely none of it is deep or REM sleep, but at least all four of us are asleep and awake on almost the same schedule.

Once the boys started sleeping at night with us though, they started to be more wakeful during the day. This is way more fun in a lot of ways, as they look around more and make eye contact. At the same time, it makes it more difficult to hold both of them at the same time or set them down for extended periods of time. We've enjoyed cuddling with them all day though, and I'm lucky to have a husband who can spend so much time helping.

When the boys were at 3.5 weeks, I noticed that they seemed hungrier and I felt like I wasn't adequately meeting their needs with exclusively breastfeeding. I switched to pumping and supplementing with a few ounces of formula per day. So far, I've been liking this a lot more. It's nice to be able to mathematically track how much they're getting, it's nice for my husband to be able to join in on feedings (and the bonding that accompanies them), and they seem more satisfied, especially at night. We'll see what the future brings, but for now I'm loving the pump I rented from the hospital.

Another new development has been that we've started going out more in the last week of their first month. We took the boys to Zoo Lights at Lincoln Park Zoo and we were super impressed with how sleepy and well behaved they were. They really seem to enjoy car rides. We also have been going on longer and longer walks as my body heals. We even took the boys to a local pizza joint for a quick slice, although we'll likely be avoiding real restaurants for a while. Today, on their one month birthday, we took them to a friends' house for the first time and did our first out-and-about feeding and change. I was very impressed at how well it went!

 All in all, all four of us have come so far in the past month, and it feels like it's been a heck of a lot longer than that. It's hard to think of a time when they weren't a part of our world.

Happy One Month Birthday, Double Rainbows!!!!