Mom, Dad, and Baby are Doing Well!

Thank you so much everyone for the well-wishes! I’m afraid I’ve been too busy being a human faucet to spend any time at the computer, but I have so much to tell! Gabe is amazing, and so is his dad. Chris has blown me away with how he leapt into fatherhood – he is way ahead of me in the diaper department, among other things, and he has a way of talking in stream-of-consciousness to Gabe that keeps me in stitches. He is a natural father.

Gabe is living up to his angelic name. He is amazingly strong for a newborn, and bigger than I expected a newborn to be. He also came with claws that had to be filed down, a suck that could peel that paint off the side of a building, and if you push on the back of his head, he fights back fiercely. All he needs is a flaming sword. (All archangels have a flaming sword in their inventory, right?)

That he refuses to have his head pushed on has made nursing difficult. I had to give up on the “easy” nursing positions for a few days, going instead for the lying-on-the-side position that requires an extra set of hands. I can’t say enough that Chris has been invaluable in toughing it out.

This morning was Gabe’s first trip to the pediatrician, and our first trip out of the house with baby. I was hoping we would be out and back before Gabe required diaper maintenance or (the terror!) feeding, but as it turned out we went through two diapers and half an hour of productive nursing right there in the doctor’s office. The outing went surprisingly well.

Up until last night we had been sticking to a schedule of waking up Gabe every two or three hours to feed him, if he didn’t wake up on his own. But the doctor visit confirmed that he is gaining back his weight ahead of the curve (all babies lose weight immediately after birth), and my 4:30 attempt to wake him for a feeding this morning resulted in furiously shrieking baby, so he has graduated to waking and eating on his own schedule.

I see that Chris has shared the awesome pictures he took before and after delivery. Oh my! I’m blushing at having nekkid pics on teh internets, but I’m too proud of myself to object. :)

I’m recovering nicely, by the way. I had a “third degree” episiotomy, which apparently means the nurses eyes would bug out when they saw my chart afterward, but it was nothing. By now I have taken almost as much Motrin for lack-of-sleep headache as for stitches discomfort. I am so very grateful that I did not require a c-section.

One of these days I plan to write an epic post about the labor and delivery, but it may have to wait a while, because I’ll have to pay for it with sleep, of which I am deficient.

I love you all! Thanks for visiting our baby blog. Time for another snippet of sleep. . .