Grandma, baby wearing, unpredictability

We are settling in to life with Maren.  For the first week and a half that we were home, my mom was out visiting from Oregon. It was incredibly helpful to have her here, and she helped with baby holding while also cooking dinner for us every night and helping with cleaning and laundry. We were fortunate to have help starting immediately when we got home.

She left very early on Friday morning, and we are now learning to take care of everything with just the three of us. Fortunately I am starting to feel better, and recovering from the birth, although I am definitely still not at 100%. The sleep deprivation is also starting to catch up with me a bit, but in general things are going well.

One thing that we are finding very helpful is baby wearing. We currently have a borrowed Boba wrap that Jeff has been using, and a Baby K'tan wrap that I have been using. Maren generally sleeps while one of us is wearing her, and Jeff has been going out for walks with her in the wrap, and I have been practicing wearing her around the house.

I think that this will be an extremely useful tool for us to be able to get things done while keeping Maren close. However, so far it only works for me if she is very sleepy to start with, because otherwise if I put her in that position (held close to my chest) she just wants to nurse. As we get used to this arrangement I imagine I will be able to use it in more situations.

We are starting to understand the unpredictability of life with a newborn. For example, Maren has had some incredible nights of sleep, and some quite poor nights. The night before last she slept for a five hour stretch, was up for about an hour for feeding and changing, then slept another three hours. We were incredibly well rested yesterday. Then last night she had a bout of projectile vomiting probably related to eating more than her little stomach can hold, and gulping down a lot of air. We have been diligent about burping her, but sometimes apparently this projectile vomiting of copious amounts of milk cannot be prevented. After that, she was hungry and restless most of the rest of the night, so I slept very very poorly.

We are working on strategies to manage this, and Jeff is insisting that when I am not sleeping well I wake him up. I have been working under the idea that if I can let Jeff sleep then at least one of us will be well rested, but I think he is right that sometimes it makes sense for him to wake up and take the baby so that I can get a bit more sleep. We will figure it out. In the meantime, we are managing quite well, and still  totally loving being parents :-)