Yesterday, I took a quiz on how to decode crying.
While I read some articles on this topic before, taking the quiz, trying to find the right answer, and then reading the correct answers made a deeper impact on me.
Right after taking the quiz, Timothy woke up with a sudden piercing cry. I knew what to do – I grabbed and burped him 
Got this interesting chart in a newsletter today:
So somewhere between 1 month and 3 months, Timothy is supposed to be transfer from sleeping 8 hours a night to 10 hours a night.
Right now He goes to sleep after a feeding somewhere between 10 and 11, then eats somewhere between 4 and 6, and then wakes up between 7 and 8. Which is the suggested 8 hours, but not the desired 10 hours. He naps a lot during the day (like right now).
Hmm. Maybe I should start putting him to sleep at 8-9 pm and let him sleep (with 2 feeding breaks) until 7-8 am? Right now he has a nap before his 10-11 pm feed. Perhaps this should be turned into the first phase of night sleep?
In the article, they also recommend putting baby to bed sleepy, but somewhat awake – and NOT after a feeding. Hmm. Right now I usually wait for him to nurse in the evening – and then put him to sleep. Perhaps I am on the path to create a bad sleeping habit? Maybe I should just decide that from now on Timothy goes to bed at 9 pm. He’ll demand his milk when he wants it.
What do you think? When your night time starts?
Timothy is 5.5 weeks old. I look in the mirror and analyze what I see.
While I lost two thirds of the gained weight pretty much right after birth (and no wonder – Timothy alone was one third of the extra weight!), I still have a jelly belly thing going on. It’s not big, not to me in any way in comparison to the huge bump I used to have, but I am still in maternity pants. No pants would close on me.
And I tried a jacket – same thing. Won’t close on me. Furthermore, it’s tight around the upper arms.
So once I am done breastfeeding, I will have some weight-struggle to do…
Throughout the whole pregnancy, I was stretchmark-free. I got some on my boobs now. Just a couple, but they are there. Which reconfirms the hereditary nature of stretchmarks: my sis also has stretchmarks only on her boobs, after two pregnancies.
My boobs are huge and heavy and seem drooping to me. I look at them and wonder what will they look like once the milk is gone.
Linea negra is still there, as vivid and visible as ever. I wonder how long will it take for it to go away.
I got lots of beauty marks or whatever they are during pregnancy – on my belly (quite a few along the linea negra) and on my boobs, primarily. I wonder if they will go away. Most of them are the sticking out kind of beauty marks which makes me thing they are warts or something else. Maybe I should see a dermatologist. I never had spots like this before. Well, I’ve had two since forever, and that’s it.
My hair has started falling out again. It’s weird. I got so used to mess-free bathroom, and it’s my hait everywhere again – in the bathtub, on the sink… everywhere! And from what I heard, it’s only gonna get worse.
My navel is all an innie again, but a HUGE one like a crater. Don’t know if it’ll become smaller again, once the loose skin of my belly (hopefully) tightens up?
The c-section scar is still red red vivid. And it seems that while the scar is just below the hair line, the inner scar is above – that’s where the skin is tender to the touch; that’s where there’s unevenness in the belly outline, sort of a step.
Saddest of all, I got hemor.rhoids. Not from pushing (as I did none) but from all the constipations during pregnancy. So far, I was not lucky dealing with it using a cream. I switched to suppositories. Huh, I am glad that I know so well how to use a suppository after I spent 3 months shoving them up my @ss in the first trimester twice a day, two pills at a time… Now I can do it in no time, with my eyes closed, so to speak.
My face, on the other side, is normal again, not all puffy with a potato of a nose that it used to be in the last months of pregnancy.
And my legs! I was never fond of my legs, but a few days postpartum I looked at my legs while showering and was struck by how thin they are. I mean, I know you retain lots of water during pregnancy and all, but I didn’t realize just how much my legs were swollen. They seemed like sticks to me
And then I realize that heartburn is gone, that I can finally sleep on my belly (well.. not really – now my boobs are in the way),
Best of all, my hormones are restored and I have sexual drive again. Now I only need to wait for this bleeding to FINALLY stop. Argh.
No, actually, best of all is that my body produced a whole new human being, grunting and screeching in his playpen now. In his sleep
Timothy is an awesome nighttime sleeper. Has been ever since he was born. 4-5 hours stretches during the night? Easily.
When I was struggling with my milk supply issue, everyone was telling me that I should wake him up for feedings every 3 hours. Including the night. They were saying: baby this small sleeping for 5 hours? This just isn’t right.
I have to guiltily admit: I secretly thought people were envious because their babies don’t sleep that well even now that they are over 1 year old. And then I spoke to my mom and my sis and they both told me that in our families babies do that – sleep well and long at night. Right from the get-go. So I decided not to wake Timothy for nighttime feedings.
Milk supply issue resolved itself with Timothy requesting feedings all the time during the day and sleeping happily through the night.
Later, I read that after the first 2 weeks, you should let baby sleep as much as he wants at night – once the milk supply is established. So I was right, after all. And Timothy, who is 5.5 weeks old now, sleeps 4-5 hours at a time most of the nights.
Today I woke up stunned: Timothy went on 7 hours between feedings!!! Which means I slept for 6 hours straight! He had a bath last night, I started feeding him at 10:15 pm and he woke me up at 5:15 am! Needless to say, my boobs were very heavy and hard, and I was worried he would get full with one boob and I’ll have to pump the other (and I really wanted to go back to sleep, not pump… especially since I didn’t bother washing the pump parts and the bottle the previous night). But he ate one boob and most of the other one (with some sleepy pauses here and there).
You know what’s even more amazing? It’s not like I put him in bed fast asleep from the boob. Most of the time he’s semi-awake or fully awake. Last weekend, after the time change (daytime savings or whatever the name), I put him to bed an hour earlier than usual. I fed him in semidarkness, turned on the humidifier for the noise, turned on the video monitoring camera and left the room. Timothy stayed awake for almost an hour. In total silence! We kept checking through the camera – he was just lying in bed, staring either at the camera light or somewhere else (the night light was on, so he could just see stuff). He didn’t cry or fuss or anything. And then he feel asleep.
Amazing. I thank him every morning for letting mama sleep 
Daytime sleeping is a whole different story, though. He wakes up, eats, then it’s playtime and around 1-1.5 hours after he woke up, he starts to get cranky and fussy. I now know that it’s because he wants to sleep but he can’t fall asleep on his own, for some reason. I have to hold him, give him the pacifier (he does not take the pacifier at night), even rock him. And then once he’s asleep, transfer him to the playpen. He usually wakes up a bit at this point, but falls right back asleep.
I am not sure why falling asleep is such a problem during the day – if at night it’s so easy – but hey, I prefer it this way than the other way around
I don’t really have any night time routine. We bathe him rarely and I don’t want a bath to be part of the routine – I know it will get too cumbersome at some point, to have it nightly. All I do is change his diaper, then turn down the light so that I just can see what I am doing (we have a dimmer), feed him without talking or any noises, turn on the humidifier, swaddle him, let him sleep.
I don’t know if today’s 7 hours of sleep is a sign he’ll be sleeping for longer stretches now; regardless, 4-5 hour stretches are great. I love my baby. He’s awesome!
Some of you following me know that I had some bumps in the bf road.
It all started well. As they wheeled me from the OR and gave me Timothy, he latched right on and started sucking, minutes after birth. I don’t really remember the details, but the nurses said he had a perfect latch.
Because of the c-section scar, I couldn’t place Timothy on my tunny – it hurt. So I sort of put him across my chest, face down on my boob (because I was not allowed to sit up for the first 36 hours or so). And my nipples started to hurt a lot. One had a red bloody crack across the middle of the nipple, the other got a bloody blister. They even got dry and sharp (I was wondering how Timothy can eat – so sharp the blisters were).
Every nurse seemed to have her own idea of how things should be done. I’ll share what worked for me.
Use the football hold position: the baby is not on your belly, AND you can see how he’s latched. Always make sure his lips aren’t curled inwards as this will cause him to suck on the nipple, not the areola!
Put cream BEFORE as well as after each feeding. This way when your baby sucks, the areola slips into his mouth along with the nipple, allowing for a much better latch. Of course, make sure the cream is safe for bf.
Let him take his time, but be realistic. If he stays on one boob for over 30 minutes, then he’s probably asleep, using your boob as a pacifier. It’s not a bad thing altogether – his sucking stimulates milk production increase for later – but I wouldn’t recommend going beyond 30 minutes per boob.
Don’t drink too much around the time your milk is supposed to come (3-5 days postpartum). Your body will turn pretty much all the liquid you drink into milk and you’ll get uncomfortable engorged. And feed at least every three hours – also to avoid gross engorgement (huh, I am feeling milk let-down as I write this )
Colostrum (the substance that comes before milk) is yellow. Like almost orange yellow. I was surprised. And then I knew when it turned into milk – because of the colour change Although my milk is still yellowish.
I started having milk supply issues at some point – Timothy (as I figured it later) was going through a growth spurt and I didn’t have enough. I did lots of things combined – medicinal as well as old wives’ tales – and it worked:
There are more things you can do, but the above ones worked for me, so I didn’t take fenugreek or boob massage that’s supposed to open up milk ducts…
The other night Timothy ate one boob and fell asleep so deeply that I had to pump the other boob. I was thrilled to get 100 ml out of one boob! Although, I have to mention he slept for 5 hours prior to this, so there was more milk there than usual.
And the best sound in the world is hearing Timothy’s gulp-gulp-gulp. That tells me I got lots of milk. Even though he often chokes on it now and it’s hard for me to not get scared…
Yesterday I all of a sudden thought of the huuuUUUUuuuge belly I had had a bit over a month ago and realized I don’t really remember the feeling. It now feels so weird that I had such a big belly. Carrying it without bumping into anything. Propping it with pillows for the night’s sleep. Rubbing it.
All of it seems surreal now – having such a huge part of my body sticking out. Only a month after the belly transformed into Timothy.
Although… I still hold my hand to my belly when I sit down or stand up at a table or desk
When I was ttc, time didn’t seem to move. CD1, CD2… 2ww… It always seemed like tomorrow will never come.
Then I got pregnant, and the first trimester was pretty much the same: I was willing another week to pass, to get closer to 2nd trimester, then mid-pregnancy, then viability. It was like 5w2d, 5w3d, 6w1d…
And then after reaching the viability point, it became more of a 25 weeks… 26 weeks… 27 weeks… I stopped paying much attention to the days.
The last month of pregnancy was just it – the last month of pregnancy. The state of mind “it can happen anytime” – although it happened after I reached the 40-week mark.
And then it happened – my baby boy was born. And that was OVER A MONTH AGO. How did this happen? Where did all this time go??? Incredible.
Time is relative. I hope it won’t be flying that fast all the time from now on. I need to enjoy my baby more, to remember all his cute faces and gestures and noises.
But the fact that a whole month has gone by so fast has a positive side to it, too – in no time he will be able to sleep better, communicate better, self-entertain better… And I will be able to sleep better, too! Maybe he will even stop waking up before 7 am, who knows?
As I was changing him, he peed in his own mouth and all over his face! He scared himself enough to actually stop peeing (he proceeded a couple of minutes later).
Dr. Google says it’s safe and nothing to worry about. So I’ll share a laugh with you instead of worrying Ahhh, the joys of being a boy…
My sis and niece left Sunday noon. The first few days were fine – I even cooked on Monday and Tuesday, went for walks almost every day, had some time to read and relax…
Well, not today. First of all, waking up was TORTURE. It was a very dreary grey day here, albeit warm. Getting out of bed to feed Timothy was next to impossible, especially since it’s been a while since I last felt well-slept. I cannot sleep during daytime so cannot catch on my sleep ;(
Due to weather, we didn’t go for a walk, either.
So I spent the whole day locked up with a very fussy Timothy, who slept for 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there and fussed and cried the rest of the time (a couple of times even in the middle of his meal). By early evening, I decided he must be colicky. People say colic usually starts in the first three weeks, and Timothy is 4.5 weeks now, but he was screaming his head off, curling his knees, and was almost impossible to soothe (and whenever I soothed him, he would fall asleep for maybe 5 minutes).
To make things worse, my hubby is sick. Whether it’s cold or flu or whatever we don’t know – but he stays away from Timothy. So there was no relief for me even in the evening.
My back hurts. My arms hurt. My incision started to hurt again – from having spent the entire day rocking, walking, bouncing on a yoga ball and doing everything imaginable to soothe him.
In the end, I think his stomach was bothering him. He now is asleep, having had a great noisy-smelly poop. I don’t have it in me to change his diaper. He’s asleep! Let him sleep. That’s what diapers are for – to absorb things…
I am exhausted. I feel like a bulldozer ran over me.
But you know what? As I was rocking him to sleep now, he started smiling in his semi-sleep. And it all makes it SOOO worth it.
Going to bed now. Tomorrow should be a better day (and, well… hopefully this night will be better than this day, too).
All of a sudden, I got curious yesterday: when did I start this blog? Is it one year old yet? Funny enough, it is exactly one year old today! On the 8th of March last year, I started this blog with the standard “Hello World!” posting. jennawoestman was my first commenter – and a big support throughout my TTC worries – thank you Jenna!
Since then I got pregnant and gave birth to my beautiful baby boy Timothy – AND found many new virtual friends!
I got 144 views on my busiest day – out of the total 12,058 views. Wow! That was when I posted my labour, part 1 story – the one I posted WHILE STILL IN LABOUR. I guess it was the shock factor
My most popular items (except for home page) are: the pic of me in preggo progression (Preggo 6-10-14-18), about me page, and – surprisingly – “From Ejaculation to Fertilization – How Long?” – I guess lots of people google the same thing. Unfortunately, I am not the one giving them the answer. I’ve no idea how long it takes even today!
I posted almost every day throughout my pregnancy, so I managed to post 331 postings! Am I prolific or what? Maybe I should pick up my old pace again and document Timothy’s life more thoroughly!
Anyway… happy blogoversary to me
