Darrell & Sharyn

**This post is for me to look back on later when we have another one or for someone to see how we have handled things these first three weeks.

The first couple days was great as I was sleeping when baby slept (being stuck on bed rest helped with that). I was getting about 10 hours total even though it was broken up. Once we started having feeding problems, I started having issues waking up to my alarm and then waking baby. I was just so exhausted as we would wake up, spend 15 minutes waking baby up, 20 minutes getting him to eat, 20 minutes to burp and keep him elevated so he wouldn’t spit up, 10 minutes pumping, and just under an hour of sleep before we had to do it again (the lactation consultant wanted us to keep feeding him every 2 hours until he was starting to wake up on his own. That was a week of that (thank goodness Lorna was here to make sure we ate).

Then we had a week and a half of baby sleeping and waking on his own to eat. During the day, he would wake up every 2 hours to eat and at night, he would wake up every 3 hours. This is great for me as that means I am getting 2-2.5 hours of sleep at a time at night since he is latching quicker and getting faster at eating. The 3 hour stretches are usually between 11pm-8am. I have been lucky so far in that he only cluster feeds during the day. It is usually in the middle of the afternoon or early evening but occasionally it happens early in the morning. He just wants to eat once an hour for 5 minutes at a time. It makes it hard to do anything other than feed the child.

Yesterday (6/24) was Darrell’s first day back at work since Edward was born, so we have had to rearrange our sleeping schedules so that he would get enough sleep to be able to focus at work. Our new routine has been that Darrell heads to bed around 10:30pm and tries to get to sleep while I stay downstairs with Edward. After Edwards 2am feeding, I take him upstairs and we go to bed. The last two nights have been fairly successful. Darrell gets about 5.5 hours straight of sleep before Edward wakes up for his 5am feeding. We will see how long this lasts. It makes it hard for me as my sleep is still broken up as I take care of all of the nighttime changes and during the day when Darrell is working. I am lucky though that I am a stay-at-home mom as I am able to nap when baby naps during the day so I still get the hours. The only problem is I am very attuned to baby and he is very grunty and makes a lot of noises when he sleeps. So occasionally, Darrell will take baby down to his office while I get a few hours of straight sleep without baby grunting near me. It is great and helps get me refreshed and reset for another day. I have no idea on how single parents do it.

As to where baby sleeps: The first week, he mostly slept in the bouncer as it was one of the few places he would actually sleep. He also slept on our bed with us. He only sleeps on the bed with us when one of us is awake so he has a whole half of the bed. Occasionally we will all be in bed, but one of us is awake so we aren’t worried about anything. The second week we started transitioning him to the co-sleeper so that we could leave the bouncer downstairs. It was hard at first as he hates being swaddled, but he will startle himself awake. It was a couple rough nights until we figured out that we could put him in some footsie pajamas so he can keep his hands by his head and still move his feet but he was still enclosed. It worked like a sleep sack and he will just crash once we get that on. So that has been our bedtime routine. I change him, put him in his pajamas, feed him and put him down. It has only failed a couple of times and we have to walk him around a little bit or he has to fall asleep on one of our chests for him to sleep.

Our plan is to move him to his crib in the nursery at about 6 months or so. We shall see how it goes. I am hoping by then we will be down to either not waking during the night or only waking once. Still have a way to go before we get to that stage.

**This post is for me to look back on later when we have another one or for someone to see how we have handled things these first three weeks.

Before we got pregnant, we had discussed using cloth diapers and did a lot of research into that. The advise I got while doing the research was to use disposables for the first couple of weeks until the meconium poop is out so that you aren’t trying to clean tarry poop off your cloth diapers while you are exhausted with a newborn. So when Edward was born, that is what we did. The midwife also recommended using olive oil or coconut oil on baby’s bum to help with the poop not sticking to his butt. We got a small container and put some olive oil in it and kept it by the diaper changing area so it wouldn’t get mixed up. The olive oil worked great and we only had to really work at getting meconium off of baby’s butt once when we forgot.

We used disposables for the first week. After that, we tried to put on the AIO’s (All-in-ones) that we got and they were to big for him. Because his umbilical cord hadn’t fallen off yet, we couldn’t get the diapers on under the stump so it would stay dry. Plus his legs weren’t chubby enough so we weren’t getting a good seal on his leg. Because of this, we ended up using some more disposables while we looked for another solution. We ended up just buying some small g-diaper covers (8-14 pounds) at the grocery store. We only bought one box of 2 covers to see if the liners from our AIO’s would work since the cloth liners for the g-diapers were so expensive and we had already bought diapers. Luckily the liners did work (mostly as they were a little on the big side) so we went ahead and bought another box of covers. We used those for about a week and exclusively went to those.

So he was in disposables for about 10 days and then was switched to cloth. Yesterday at just over 3 weeks, we went ahead and tried our AIO’s again as it seemed his legs were getting chubbier as the g-diapers were starting to get tight around his legs. The AIO’s fit, so was are transitioning him to those. We still use the g-diapers occasionally and only use disposables if it looks like he is getting a rash.

We ended up with 4 g-diaper covers, 25 AIO’s and 25 liners for the AIO’s. So far I am only doing laundry every other day. A lot of the laundry is baby stuff as we have a little spitter here. He spits up a lot so we go through burp rags and receiving blankets like they are going out of style. I have been surprised to only be doing laundry every other day. There are some days when he only fit in the g-diapers and he had a particularly spitty day when I would have to do a load of laundry a day so I could wash the covers since we only had 4 of them. Now that he fits in the bigger ones, I should be fine with only once every other day since the whole diaper goes in the wash instead of just the liner.

We have a routine where we change his diaper before every feeding, so we go through about 10 diapers a day. There are some days where it is more and some when it is less. I really like this stage where I don’t have to worry about cleaning out the diaper before throwing it in the wash. Once we get to solids, we shall see how I feel.

Our next big challenge is to see how we fare cloth diapering while traveling. We are going to Idaho for Darrell’s Grandma’s 80th birthday and we will be gone Friday-Sunday that weekend. I am a little nervous, but I think it will be fine. We are also going to go ahead and buy some cloth wipes and try that out. Right now we are using regular wipes but it would be nice to be able to just throw the wipes in with the diapers (especially when out and about). We are just taking things one small step at a time while we adjust to our schedules.

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