Maia Week #1 Battle Report

Maia is one week old as of yesterday and everyone is doing well. Rebecca has dibs on the birth story and days in the hospital, so I can skip ahead to the days spent since we got home on Sunday afternoon.

Babies have to eat 8 times a day in the beginning, and some early concerns about Maia's weight and ability to breastfeed resulted in a byzantine progression of feeding steps requiring two people. This involved boobs, pumps, and syringes, such that each feeding took 1 - 1.5 hours for both of us to accomplish (8 - 12 hours per day).

Boiling down to pure logistics, caring for a newborn is really just a discrete calculus of hours in the day. With a fixed number of hours required for feeding both the baby and yourself (which you can overlap if you are a pro like me), what you do with your "free time" really comes down to how many hours of sleep you want to get. Every hour you spend doing something fun is an hour of sleep you'll never get back.

For the most part, my free time has all gone towards sleeping and critical errands, a far cry from the week I played Far Cry 3 for 6 straight hours a day. As a result, I am constantly tired, but definitely not sleep-deprived, and reserve a little bit of "me" time for sorting through 8 million photographs, updating this blog for you worthy readers, replying sporadically to work emails, and rereading the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander to verify that they are a safe recommendation for reading by Anna's precocious youngsters.

After getting an "A+" from the lactation consultants we visited with today and the extrapolation that Maia will regain her birth weight far ahead of schedule, our feeding time should drop down to about 30-40 minutes in each sitting, during which Rebecca will feed Maia with her magical founts of life-giving mana and I will tackle small household chores like cleaning dishes, starting laundry loads, or fixing the slowly dripping toilet tank. This will increase the amount of sleep we get and pave the way for non-sick visitors to stop by (Maia has met both sets of grandparents so far).

Being a dad is pretty easy so far, especially since Maia is a very calm baby who communicates her needs well and doesn't get dramatic about much. She spends a lot of alert time looking around at the beauty of her parents and our 1978 Sterling house decor and rarely wakes up in distress. She has only seriously cried a couple times and spends the rest of the time being super cute. She is an overachiever in all medical tests performed on her, but I'll be totally content even if that is the most overachieving she ever does in her long life to come.