The First Week
When there is a full moon the moonlight fills over half our lounge room. Someone in a unit I can see from our balcony keeps late hours and leaves their bathroom light on all night. Regardless of the time of night there is never more than a few minutes without the sound of a vehicle passing on Pacific Highway. There are two particular spots on our new floorboards that creak loudly when I am walking on them. These are just some of the things I have learned since being up every three hours at night this week feeding Keira.
Keira sleeps a lot, so we can’t complain about a screaming baby. She is being fed a combination of breast milk and formula at the moment as I have low milk supply (a problem I also had with Alesia). As you can see from the photos, most of them are Keira in various sleeping positions! She lost more than 10% of her birth weight while in hospital, so they wanted us to get her weighed this week. She had not put anything on, and may have lost some further weight, so we started topping up her feeds with formula. Since then she basically eats and sleeps on a three hour cycle, with two brief waking periods during the day – one between 7 and 9 am one between 6 and 9 pm.
Alesia is doing really well, especially with Chris home to help entertain her. I think she would like Keira to be a bit more interesting, and she is always glad when Keira opens her eyes for a bit. So far Keira gets lots of hugs from Alesia, but has not been squashed so far. In contrast to Keira, Alesia looks like a giant with big hands and big curly hair.
Both Chris and I look as you would expect after a week of interrupted sleep. Chris is taking the look further by not shaving so he has the haggard new father look down pat. A couple we know had a new baby on Friday and we saw the husband yesterday and he had the same unshaven new father look also, so it is a trend around here. We read in the paper that more babies have been born in Australia in the past year than in the past 30 years.
I have recovered very well with hardly any bleeding and I am basically unaware of my stiches. I am staving off a minor UTI, but the biggest decision I have to make is how long to persevere with breast-feeding. Alesia asked me today what was in my tummy, because it still looks big! We have been walking to the park every day, which means a climb up a hill on the way back. So far that, and cleaning up around the house, has been the limit of exercise that I have wanted to do.
We went to church yesterday. Taking in a new baby is a great way to talk to people. We had conversations with people who have only smiled at us before. I wouldn’t recommend it as the best strategy to meet people (due to all the other work involved) but Keira has had an unintended benefit of being an ice-breaker in starting conversations.
This afternoon we went to the kids concert that was part of the Carols by Candlelight program at the Sydney Adventist Hospital. Both Alesia and Keira were crying as we loaded them into the car, which was noisy and made strapping them into their car seats harder. The concert (featuring Wag the Dog) was ok, Alesia did lots of dancing and Keira slept through most of it once she was wrapped warmly. On the way home both were asleep. We drove into the garage, turned the engine off and sat in the silence, drinking it in. Both of them looked so cute - Keira with the usual old-woman face of a newborn without any teeth and chin sunken into her chest, Alesia with her dummy half-hanging out of her mouth and her head rolled back.
So far Keira still has that full head of hair!
