My baby boy is 6 weeks and 5 days old today. What a roller coaster it has been. I must say that I don't think anything can prepare you for being a new mother.
First of all you get this primal, overwhelming love for your baby. A love that is so intense it hurts and you are constantly worried that something is going to happen to him. It was hard to have him out of my sight for the first three weeks or so. I remember sitting on my porch with him and watching cars drive by and I thought they were going to hit him, I was sure that people were going much too fast.
On one of the hot days in June, when he was only a week old and we were headed to his one week appointment, I got this vision of a baby in a hot car and started crying and made Brent promise me we would never leave him in a hot car. I was so sure that one of us would forget him. It was hard to leave the house with all this worry, not to mention, no one exactly tells you what you need to bring in a diaper bag, and at first you either forget vital things or bring too much. And infant slings and other carriers are hard to deal with at first, especially when your body is still recovering from birth. And some days it's too hot to use any of them. It took about a month to really feel comfortable taking him out places.
Plus you have hot flashes and your emotions go from being overjoyed to feeling downright suicidal. There were many instances where I cried to Brent that I couldn't do it, "I can't raise a baby, it's too much responsibility!" And I'm a person who is very hard on herself for being depressed, I can't just be depressed, I have to feel like a loser and a failure for getting depressed, "how dare I get depressed, what is wrong with me?" So I've been working on first accepting that I'm depressed sometimes.
But it's not just depression, it's anxiety. I wanted everything to be perfect and was pretty much unable to make any decisions for the first few weeks. I remember Brent asking me what I wanted for breakfast and I told him, "I can't decide, just bring me something!" Any decision meant I was not choosing other things that might possibly be better, so I was stuck. I let Brent lead the way for a while. I'm better at making decisions now.
Also, people act so excited that you are going to have a baby, but then never call you after you have it. I got various emails and texts from people saying they wanted to stop by, then I would tell them that they could, just call me before to make sure we're up, and pretty much no one actually called. There are family members who haven't been over to see him yet, and friends who acted very excited who I haven't heard from at all. It really brings you down, I was expecting way more visitors, we've had very few. This led me to cry to Brent, "am I a freak? Does no one actually like me? Do I have no friends?" Even trying to reach out to others who have recently had babies has been turning up dry so far, though I have hope that someone will want to do SOMETHING with me at some point.
Newborns are boring. I was not a person who bonded well with her baby while it was in utero. The ultrasounds were kind of cool, but I just didn't feel much for my baby before it was born, I wanted it, and was glad I was going to have a baby, but I didn't feel connected to him while I was pregnant. After his birth he would wake up to eat and poop and then fall back to sleep for several hours, that's it. Repeat for many days. Then when he was about a month old he started to have longer awake periods where we could actually play a little and then around 5 weeks he smiled at me for the first time. Having your baby smile at you when he's looking at you after weeks of nothing is amazing, and last night he smiled at Brent for the first time. Our baby has these huge, full mouth, full face smiles too that just melt your heart. He also seems to really love the pattern on the blanket on the couch and the pictures hanging above the couch. He's slowly becoming a person, and I think he looks a lot like me right now.
I'm lucky that breastfeeding went pretty well for me, besides the over-active let down (milk frickin' SPRAYS out of me!), which was kind of scary for a couple weeks when our baby was choking on it, I've had no problem with supply or latching, and my nipples toughened up in about 5 days. Baby gained weight rapidly and when I started pumping, I had no trouble with it. Introducing the bottle took a little while, but he takes it pretty well from Brent right now. We gave him a pacifier at two weeks, which is super early, because he really just wanted to suck on something. Since he was gaining weight the lactation consultants OKed it. I was also a baby that liked to suck a lot.
Sleep has also gone well, we lucked out with our baby, it took about a month, but he seems to know when it's night now and I can lay him next to me, sometimes swaddled a bit, and he will eventually give in and go to sleep too. Last night he was swaddled, but his arms were out and he sucked on a pacifier while laying in the co-sleeper, because mom and dad wanted to cuddle without baby and baby seemed happy, and he just fell asleep just like that. He amused himself with his arms a bit and then fell asleep. Though after his first night time feeding probably around 2 am, I kept him in bed next to me. Feedings are kind of on a regular schedule now at night, one at about 10 pm, one around 2 am, and one around 6:30 am. Then he'll wake up again at 8 or 9 am, and I generally get up then. He takes several naps during the day and feeds every hour at some points during the day.
He still rarely cries. The only time he really cried significantly was when he was choking on my over-active let down. That pissed him off. It was hard to comfort him through that because he was hungry but it was painful to eat.
So that's a kind of rushed overview of the first six weeks of being a mother.
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