The First Week Home

The time spent at the hospital with your newborn is all a blur. Emotions, pain, sleep deprivation, paternal cluelessness, hospital staff, family, friends, ER strangers who smell baby, all create a whirlwind of activity your first 48 hours. It's nice to have all the doctors and nurses waiting on you hand and foot, teaching you about caring for your new creature and having the nursery as a 24/7 babysitter when you can't stand the crying anymore. But the strange comfort ends when you take the baby home.

Thankfully, I was able to take a whole week off work to stay home with mom and baby. And I'm so glad I did. Anlee didn't sleep much the first two nights, so it took a lot of tired gumption for these two new parents to work through. Besides learning how to speed swaddle and hold your breath while diaper changing, supporting your partner is the biggest priority for a new dad.

If your baby is breastfeeding, moms have to feed the baby once every 2-3 hours in the first two weeks...think about that. That's potentially 168 feedings around the clock! Tired or hungry, sick or sick of baby, moms sacrifice, giving up their bodies and own well being to keep their baby healthy and satisfied. So dads: what do you do?

Since my mother-in-law already had cooking and cleaning taken care of (she also stayed with us the first two weeks), I took on the task of diaper changing and feed timing. I went from never changing a diaper in my life to unnervingly comfortable with green-yellow stinky slime in just a few days. And to track all the pees, poops, breast feedings and bottle feedings, we found a great free smartphone app (Feed Baby, which I highly recommend). So my duty was to record the doody diapers and time the feedings night and day. I got up with Jesse every time she fed Anlee, gave updates on the clock and sometimes just chatted...anything just to show new mom she wasn't alone and I had her back.

We didn't get to spend all the time sitting around the house, because Anlee had high bilirubin levels with a concern of jaundice. So we had to make runs to the clinic to get her foot poked, blood drawn and screams tested. By Day 6, her levels finally went down and she had gotten rid of her banana complexion.

In the first week we learned a lot about our daughter:

Anlee likes

• Sleeping (I hear newborns do this a lot)
• Eating (sometimes she would "snack" every hour, much to sore mommy's dismay)
• Car rides (snug in her carseat)
• Sitting up (so she can see the world)
• Piano lullabies (CD we play at bedtime)

Anlee dislikes

• Getting her diaper changed (shrills like a banshee)
• Taking a bath (if a banshee had a gallstone and a megaphone, it might sound like her)
• Lotion massages (sensing a theme of being naked)
• Socks (she always kicked them off)
• Nich Lachey lullabies (CD we tried to play at bedtime: if a banshee had laryngitis...)