Birth in the Time of Coronavirus, Days 4, 5 & 6
Birdie arrived just before midnight, and by the time we got back to our room it was a new day. The fun was just beginning.
After a c-section M was supposed to limit her movement, not bend over, and not lift any weight heavier than Birdie. This was on top of the after effects of two failed attempts to induce labor. In short, she was not feeling great.
Birdie herself was occasionally not feeling great and not shy about letting us know. Newborns have very tiny stomachs, so every time you feed them, they burn through that tiny amount of food almost immediately. In other words, we were up every couple of hours feeding her formula via a syringe since M wasn't producing very much breast milk (see: not feeling great, prior paragraph). Of course, the flip side to digesting quickly is a lot of diaper changes. Naturally, the timing of the needed diaper changes counterbalanced the feedings in such a way as to minimize the amount of potential sleep we could get. Fortunately, holding a newborn adorable baby is a pretty solid activity for improving ones morale no matter how tired one gets, and lord, we both got pretty tired.
At this point I'd like to give a shout out to the on call nurses. They were basically goddesses of newborn care, happy to answer our stupid questions, help us out and generally take over when we passed out from exhaustion, generally with more patience than Job. If I was Oprah rich and had another baby, I'd just put a bunch of them on payroll for the first month. Mad props to all of them.
With all of that, there were still plenty of down time. We nailed down a name the next day and had video calls with grandparents and aunts. I texted a newborn photo and vital stats to most everyone I had a phone number for. Other highlights include M getting to (carefully) take her first shower since we got there, which I think was on day 5. We had our celebratory pizza lunch. Birdie got her first bath 24 hours after being born, courtesy of a nurse.
I can't be certain of the exact sequencing of some of these next things, because time was definitely unstuck and they may have happened before Birdie arrived or after or both. I read the first half of The Luminaries, which is the Man Booker prize winning book by Eleanor Catton which somehow managed to be a worse book than Breathing Lessons in that it was longer and not even bad enough to hate. I finished it in mid-February through reflex action - 75 pages of decent courtroom scene late in the 800 page length is all it had to recommend for it.
I played several rounds of The Battle of Polytopia on my phone. It was the first computer game I played with any regularity in years, and due to a mix of excellent game balance and my being able to play it one handed while holding a sleeping baby, I didn't delete it from my phone for nearly three months despite my getting the usual game hangover feeling.
We also watched more terrible television. Man, cable television is a wasteland.
Finally, on the sixth day they said M and Birdie were recovered enough to go home. I hauled our suitcases out to the car and brought in Birdie's car seat so it could warm up. Once it had, we left the room took Birdie home. Tulip returned the next day.
From there, I had another eight days off before I had to go back to work. However, I got to work 30 hours/week for the first two weeks back, in what was a previously unknown to me but fantastic perk. Of course, since back to work still means working from home, it was easy enough for me to jump in to help whenever.
While I'm glad the pandemic let me work from home, I have to say that in general the six days in the hospital more or less continuously wearing masks was just one aspect of the whole experience that was pretty lousy because of coronavirus. The biggest one was probably the inability to have family or friends over to help in those days when even medical professionals had had at most one shot. M's general anxiety about takeout kept us from accepting even food from friends, so we were doing it all ourselves. Our daughter still hasn't met anyone in person but pediatricians.
If I had to give anyone advice about having kids, I'd say number one on the list is "Don't have a baby during a global pandemic." Seriously, don't do it.
After a c-section M was supposed to limit her movement, not bend over, and not lift any weight heavier than Birdie. This was on top of the after effects of two failed attempts to induce labor. In short, she was not feeling great.
Birdie herself was occasionally not feeling great and not shy about letting us know. Newborns have very tiny stomachs, so every time you feed them, they burn through that tiny amount of food almost immediately. In other words, we were up every couple of hours feeding her formula via a syringe since M wasn't producing very much breast milk (see: not feeling great, prior paragraph). Of course, the flip side to digesting quickly is a lot of diaper changes. Naturally, the timing of the needed diaper changes counterbalanced the feedings in such a way as to minimize the amount of potential sleep we could get. Fortunately, holding a newborn adorable baby is a pretty solid activity for improving ones morale no matter how tired one gets, and lord, we both got pretty tired.
At this point I'd like to give a shout out to the on call nurses. They were basically goddesses of newborn care, happy to answer our stupid questions, help us out and generally take over when we passed out from exhaustion, generally with more patience than Job. If I was Oprah rich and had another baby, I'd just put a bunch of them on payroll for the first month. Mad props to all of them.
With all of that, there were still plenty of down time. We nailed down a name the next day and had video calls with grandparents and aunts. I texted a newborn photo and vital stats to most everyone I had a phone number for. Other highlights include M getting to (carefully) take her first shower since we got there, which I think was on day 5. We had our celebratory pizza lunch. Birdie got her first bath 24 hours after being born, courtesy of a nurse.
I can't be certain of the exact sequencing of some of these next things, because time was definitely unstuck and they may have happened before Birdie arrived or after or both. I read the first half of The Luminaries, which is the Man Booker prize winning book by Eleanor Catton which somehow managed to be a worse book than Breathing Lessons in that it was longer and not even bad enough to hate. I finished it in mid-February through reflex action - 75 pages of decent courtroom scene late in the 800 page length is all it had to recommend for it.
I played several rounds of The Battle of Polytopia on my phone. It was the first computer game I played with any regularity in years, and due to a mix of excellent game balance and my being able to play it one handed while holding a sleeping baby, I didn't delete it from my phone for nearly three months despite my getting the usual game hangover feeling.
We also watched more terrible television. Man, cable television is a wasteland.
Finally, on the sixth day they said M and Birdie were recovered enough to go home. I hauled our suitcases out to the car and brought in Birdie's car seat so it could warm up. Once it had, we left the room took Birdie home. Tulip returned the next day.
From there, I had another eight days off before I had to go back to work. However, I got to work 30 hours/week for the first two weeks back, in what was a previously unknown to me but fantastic perk. Of course, since back to work still means working from home, it was easy enough for me to jump in to help whenever.
While I'm glad the pandemic let me work from home, I have to say that in general the six days in the hospital more or less continuously wearing masks was just one aspect of the whole experience that was pretty lousy because of coronavirus. The biggest one was probably the inability to have family or friends over to help in those days when even medical professionals had had at most one shot. M's general anxiety about takeout kept us from accepting even food from friends, so we were doing it all ourselves. Our daughter still hasn't met anyone in person but pediatricians.
If I had to give anyone advice about having kids, I'd say number one on the list is "Don't have a baby during a global pandemic." Seriously, don't do it.