My life as a pacifier :)

So, Anconeus . . . . . . . . . all right, who are we kidding, here? I've never had the remotest indication that anyone I know IRL (other than one particularly astute friend, who figured out who I am from - I kid you not - the tone of voice I used in comments I left on another blog we both read!) has ever even seen this blog. And if someone did, and figured out who I am, then what would happen? They might find out that - gasp - I'm a neurotic freak about which seat in the library I like to sit in to study? I didn't start my business project until the last possible second? I have an irrational aversion to necropsies? I really really love french toast? OH MY GOD THE HORROR.

** This is the part where I decided to just use our real names, freaked out 5 seconds after I hit publish, and went back and edited them out. Sorry. I just feel WEIRD about not being anonymous! I'll just call him H. That's his real initial. **

H was born on June 6, I was in labor for 36 hours, I caved and got an epidural after 24 hours and consider it one of the best experiences of my life (the epidural, I mean), and my OB, whom I picked largely because he personally delivers something like 90% of his own patients, which is unheard of, was out of town that weekend BUT I ended up liking the on-call OB WAY better than I liked him, so it really couldn't have worked out any more perfectly!

He's a champion nurser, so far he sleeps surprisingly well (occasionally he'll go a 6-hour stretch in the middle of the night!), and I'm madly in love with him. :) MM is a total rockstar and alternates nights being "on duty" with me, even though I'm on maternity leave and he is not. So we take turns sleeping on the couch with H in his travel crib (while the off-duty person sleeps in bed with the dogs). On MM's nights, I still get up around 2 AM to feed him while MM takes a nap in the bed, but I am almost giddy with the anticipation of trying to introduce a nighttime bottle this Friday, because if he takes it then I'll get an uninterrupted night's sleep (I can't even explain to you how much I love sleep) other than a quick 15-minute pumping session in the middle of the night, which is faster than feeding, burping, changing, and settling him back down. But even my on-duty nights aren't that bad, and I probably average about 6 hours of sleep on those nights, which for a 3-week old baby seems pretty luxurious!

I've been working at home for the past week; I'm collaborating on a project with one of the surgeons, entering an ungodly amount of data into a massive spreadsheet for a retrospective study, and it's due tomorrow. So I've spent pretty much every daytime second that H's asleep working on that. I have 5 more cases that have gaps I need to fill in, and then I'll be done! Which will be really nice.

He likes riding around in his Baby Bjorn, so I can walk the dogs, run errands, and do laundry with him in there, which is convenient. The dogs have mostly calmed down about him -- the first week we were home, Red Panda whined constantly. I mean, for many hours out of every day. She cried WAY more than H did. She could not STAND being out of the room that he and I were in, and if I tried to put her in another room, her whining would escalate to full-blown barking, which would make all the OTHER dogs start barking, and she was driving me CRAZY! CRAZY! CRAZY!!!!! Eventually she calmed down to the point that I wasn't afraid to take a nap with us all in the same room together (she had been sticking her head over the side of his crib, and I was afraid she might think he was a squeaky toy or small animal. But she eventually either figured out he's human, or just lost interest in him, and now she mostly ignores him). Mr. Bear was never really interested in him to begin with. Monkey is mildly curious about him but not worryingly so, and Bug is just a little nutjob anyway, so she's not allowed to hang out with him, but I'm no longer frantically worried about her intentions toward him. So things have generally settled down with the dogs.

The first week was extremely stressful. I worried about everything, all the time. I couldn't even sleep when H was sleeping, because I was so worried about something happening to him. Part of it was profound sleep deprivation (when we were discharged from the hospital, I had slept something like 10 hours in the previous 5 days) and once he started nursing enough in the late evening to sleep a several-hour stretch at night, I started getting more normal amounts of sleep and regained most of my rationality. I still worry about things, of course, but it's not overwhelming.