The first few weeks at home
7:07:00 amWhen you bring your baby home for the first time you'll probably be thinking. What now?
The moment you had been waiting for the past 9 months is here. The nursery, the bassinet, the pram it's all there and ready to be used (:
We had Charlie's bassinet set up in our bedroom on my side of the bed. It was close and easy for me for those night time feeds. We also had the change table in the hall way outside our bedroom, the light was dimmer so it didn't wake him as much.
Those first 4 weeks are such a blur, I was recovering from a cesarean and both Shane and I were severely sleep deprived.
It was lots of trial and error in the first 4 weeks. Week 5 we were at our last resort the cot, and guess what?! He slept like an angle. He still woke for those night feeds but I actually was able to sleep for atleast a 3 hour block (:
Week ONE
The Bassinet was next to my bed, he would grizzle throughout the night wanting a feed every 2-3 hours. I had no clue what I was doing! Looking back I could have done so many things differently and looking back I can probably fix why he was grizzling. But at the time he was a newborn baby and I was a first time mum. We were both learning!
I remember rocking the bassinet and putting his dummy back into his mouth millions of times. I think I fell asleep rocking him a few times. He would wake for a feed two hours later and I would think it was only 5 minutes later and get so frustrated and exhausted.
Week TWO/THREE
I caved in after a week of no sleep.
Charlie would go down to sleep in his bassinet, when he woke for his feed I would bring him to bed and let him "self serve" because I was breastfeeding. I would wake up a few hours later and he would have latched on again for his next feed.
This was easy, apart from having a sore back because of a newborn baby taking up most of the bed. I got some sleep. You will learn that a new mum will do anything in the end to get sleep.
After two weeks of co-sleeping with Charlie, Shane didn't want it to go on. Which I agreed with him. We didn't want a 3-4 year old still sleeping in our bed. So that was the end of that.
Week FOUR
By now we had worked out Charlie hated his bassinet. He would rather sleep in his pram.
It was getting into winter and it was really cold in our house. So I decided to change up the way I dressed him for bed. I put an extra layer of clothing on him and put his pram in the lounge room where the fire place was. The noise of the fan from the fire also calmed him.
He slept like an angel for the first few nights, but after a whole he didn't like that either.
That's when at 5 weeks old we decided we would try the cot (:
1 comments
Great post. My best friend just had her first and called me at 4am wondering if it was normal to be having a breakdown after only being home for less than a day. I probably lucked out with my first daughter, she was an 'easy baby' but my second daughter had jaundice and I seriously cannot remember the first 3 months of her life. I had a six year gap between my second and third daughter so when we came home with her, the challenges of a newborn came flooding back to me. Its such a guessing game with newborns but it is great watching them grow up.
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