I have several friends who have recently had their first babies. Thinking about them with their new little baby in their house has really brought back a whole flood of memories of bringing baby Ellie home and what it was like to have our first baby.
When leaving the hospital, first Jeff had to take all the crap we'd brought with us out to the car. I can remember thinking that the nurses must have thought we were such assholes. We had a laptop, movies, CDs, books, two suitcases, and all the stuff that you steal from the hospital. I don't know why we had so much stuff, but it was as if we'd been at the hospital for a month, rather than 2 days. Jeff wheeled me and Ellie down and we all got in the car. It was raining, and warmish for January, and as we drove past the other cars on the road, my kept thinking how strange it was, our whole world had shifted on it's axis and these other people driving by had no idea. I wanted to shout at people, "Don't you know I had a baby?!?!?!"
We arrived at our townhouse and went in to introduce the dogs to Ellie. Like most childless dog owners, we had treated our pups as our kids and we were nervous about their reaction to the baby. My parents took one of Ellie's hats home from the hospital so the dogs could sniff it and get used to her smell. We had watched "Baby Story" on TLC with the dogs in the room to help them get used to the sound of a baby. We carefully planned our arrival home so that Jeff would walk in without the baby and greet the dogs, so that they wouldn't feel "replaced." In a nutshell, we forgot while treating our dogs as children that they are, in fact, dogs and they really don't give a crap about a new baby in the house unless it affects mealtime.
I remember arriving home, putting the carrier on a chair and wondering, "okay, now what?" My mother was staying with us and had already been at the house for a couple days, so it was in pristine condition - every surface cleaned within an inch of it's life, every scrap of clothing washed, folded and put away. The house felt foreign, felt like I was visiting my house after someone else had moved in. I was a stranger in a strange land, a parent in a house that had been childless.
I'm sure we ate something and then made some phone calls to friends and family. What I do remember more clearly was that first night. Oh holy night. Our perfect baby had been a wonderful sleeper in the hospital and I know that I secretly thought it was my natural parenting ability. That first night, and the next day, a Friday, will forever be called "Cryday" in the Lacey lexicon. No one, not the nurses, not the doctors, not our friends with kids, had warned us about day three, when Ellie got hungry and my milk hadn't come in.
Breastfeeding hadn't been going well since jumpstreet. Starting all the way back at our breastfeeding class, the lactation consultant teaching the class completely freaked me out. She made it sound like every doctor, nurse, orderly and quite possibly total strangers, would be trying to sneak my baby formula in a bottle, thereby ensuring "nipple confusion" and the failure of my ability to breastfeed. I tend to be dramatic when pregnant. In the hospital, the nurse, an angry woman with bad breath and unfortunate facial hair, had basically grabbed my breast and shoved it in poor Ellie's face. Now, I'm a pretty self conscious person, and not really into having strangers touch me while naked. Ellie screamed, I cringed... it was bad all over. After several attempts, the nurse told me that she had to eat before midnight or else I HAD to give her a bottle of formula. The minutes ticked by, I kept trying, but she kept refusing. Midnight came and the nurse brought us the little "ready to feed" bottle and told us she'd be back to check on us. I don't know what came over me, but I got out of my bed, took the bottle and poured most of it down the sink drain. Ellie wasn't born until 4:30 PM, and something just told me that this nurse was checking a box off, not really thinking about our situation. When the nurse came back, I smiled at her and pointed at the bottle. Score one for the boob nazis. Sure enough, about an hour later, Ellie threw up an astonishing quantity of brown gunk, amniotic fluid as it turned out. About an hour after that, she nursed and all was right with the world.
However, that was day one and this was day four, and oh what a difference a few days made. Ellie was up all night. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. And so on, until my poor boobs felt like I'd been nursing a bench grinder. Finally, sometime around dawn, when Jeff went to give her to me again to nurse, I had a little freak out - "There has to be something wrong with her besides being hungry!" I yelled. Then I demanded he open the pack of pacifiers that we had, but hadn't given to her for fear of "nipple confusion". I nursed and then ever so carefully took myself out and slipped the pacifier in, a slight of hand I'd get very good at in the next months.
Sleep deprived and disheveled, we took Ellie to her first doctor appointment. In the car, the silence overwhelmed us... for the first time in hours, Ellie wasn't crying. I called my mom and informed her that we would be driving to Mexico and back. At the doctors, I cried silently the entire time. The doctor assured Jeff that this was totally normal, and to expect frequent outbursts of crying from me for no good reason. Ellie was a little jaundiced and had lost more weight than the doctor liked, so we were sent to get labs and with an appointment for a weight check in a couple more days.
More crying from both Ellie and me. Finally, my mom was on the phone with my Aunt Barb, who gave me the following advice: Drink a beer. Now, that's Aunt Barb's advice in pretty much any given situation, but this time she had the old wives behind her. It's an old wives tale that beer will bring in your milk. Well, never one to question good advice, we went to a mexican place and got take out and picked up a 6 pack of Coronas. Lo and behold, sometime in the night, I was visited by the milk fairy and spent the next two weeks drowning poor Ellie in milk as my supply worked itself out.
That first week, my mother didn't do a lot of things... she didn't offer unsolicited advice, she didn't hold the baby endlessly, she didn't try to manage our baby for us. What she did do, I can never repay her for. Meals showed up on the table, clothes continued to get washed and put away, and the poor dogs, who fell from their pedestals faster than Oprah gains and loses weight, still managed to get fed and watered. She was truly the hero of the week. I hope that my kids think I'm 1/100th the mom that my mom is. After Ellie was older, she did tell me that the first night, she stood inside the guest room, which was next door to the nursery, hand on the door knob and talked herself out of coming to help us. I would have welcomed her help that night, but I'm sure that it was better in the long run that we did it ourselves.
After Mom left, and I stopped crying over nothing, there was a night where I looked at Jeff and said, "there's still another person in the house." It was the moment that I really understood that parenthood fundamentally changes everything in your life in a way you can't grasp until you've experienced it. Everything around me was the same, the thing that had changed was me.
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