By the 2nd night with the baby, we had understood 2 things :
1.Feed the baby as soon as he starts to make the faintest sound of waking up
2.Change his diaper every 2 hours..else you'll end up waking again as he will be uncomfortable with the wet one (yes...in the initial one month Diapers seemed as good as nappies...slightly wet and he will start crying)
And he had started to make a seriously funny faces when we fed him..like as a rule you need to make the baby burp after you feed him...and the moment we used to hold him to make him lean on our shoulders...he used to start swaying like he's high on milk :D Looking something like this kiddo below :O
We also understood that he had a sleep cycle of 3 hours after every feeding...day or night...didn't matter.So we were better prepared now...I was getting great support from my husband who was on his paternity leave for a week. He helped me hold the baby as I could not bend much...since we were feeding him with a bottle at night anyways, he also helped me with the feeding sessions. We took turns...since I am more adept at staying up at night...I took over the late night part and he used to take it on from morning 5 onwards. I thought this can be managed...not that bad!
Another big task for me was to get comfortable with cleaning his poop...and I was not too cool with the idea (unlike the assumption most people have that mothers can do anything for their babies...it takes effort and you will make a face doing it too initially)...like he was my baby yes but cleaning poop is not exactly what I looked forward to.So once my mom had left..my husband and sister in law helped me get over this...I was quite touched by this gesture especially coming from my SIL...I mean I dunno how cool would I have been doing it for her baby...I probably wouldn't have initiated it too...but she did and that was something I will remember fondly..the poop story :P Looking at them I felt..may be its not that bad...and thats how I started doing it myself eventually.
During the day time, my mother in law used to look after the baby for some time...he anyways used to just sleep...so it was like - Sleep, Feed, poop/pee, feed, sleep cycle that continued.She helped me with giving bath to the baby as well...we were still on sponge baths for this week.It was quite amusing to see how he reacted to the whole bathing scene.Either he used to get too worked up and start crying or he used to just stare at us like we are aliens from the other planet!!
He had another peculiar habit...while sleeping he used to keep both his hands up..even when you tried to turn him...the hands stayed up :D I loved to watch him sleep like that...I still do..though now we have to keep a pillow over his hands as he moves them way too much...there is that constant fear in our mind that he'll wake up!! Its surprising to see how a tiny little baby can scare the hell out of you...you are living in constant fear..you do not want to do anything that makes the baby cry or wake him up...even breathing loudly seems dangerous :D
I read this beautiful quote around then which really helped me -"Being a Mother is discovering strengths you didn't know you had and dealing with fears you never knew existed"
And you might think I'm obsessed with pink..well...I like pink for sure and I was hoping for a daughter so may be I did go a bit overboard and bought a lot of pink..yeah I just may be did that!! But it looks cute..isn't it?? I know he's gonna kill me looking at these pictures once he grows up :( I'll have to hide these somewhere ;) but wait these are too many to hide..I mean I'll have to show him how he looked when he was a week old...Like I would have loved to see myself that young but back then pictures were rare...occasional...you had to go to a studio to get one clicked...like my mum has a record of all my pics with dates on them which was more like a quarterly affair...like a milestone achieved..may baby is 3 months,..then 6 months...etc etc...so I guess we'll have to make him a bit open about colors...cos there's a lot of pink in most of his early pics and it suits him...see matching with his cheeks :P
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