What a Week!!!

We've been home with EH for 5 full days now, and it's been a crazy ride.  I have some detailed posts in the works, but here's a (somewhat) quick synopsis of how things have been going for us!

One of my favorite pictures of DH and EH from the hospital!

We're working hard to try to get him to establish a morning/night schedule.  The first few nights that he was home he slept all day and cried all night long.  And I don't mean cute little timid baby cries - he screamed.  It was awful.  My mom spent a couple hours up with him and I took the rest so that DH could get some sleep for working the next day.  I would be lying if I said I wasn't on the verge of tears a couple of times in utter frustration.

Last night we were fairly successful though.  We have to really make an effort to keep him awake in the evening, usually anytime after 5 p.m., but if we can do that, it seems like he's going to be fairly willing to sleep through the night, minus feeding times, of course.  It's really hard on me since I have to be the one to wake up with him each and every time, and sometimes he's not willing to wake up, so what could be a quick feeding takes almost two entire hours, but after that he was willing to sleep through until the next feeding.

He's also doing great with breastfeeding and even though we are giving him 1 ounce of formula from a bottle with every feeding (my milk still does not seem to be in) he isn't having any trouble at all switching back and forth from breast and bottle, which has been really helpful.  Twice in the past two days I have had to miss feedings. The first time he got two ounces of breastmilk that I had pumped and the second time he just got formula but in both cases, since he was already used to the bottle there wasn't any issue in getting him to eat, and fortunately there wasn't any issue with him going right back to breastfeeding when I was home.

So why did I have to miss feedings?  Well, on Tuesday night my incision started bleeding.  It bled through the four layers of gauze that I had on the sutures, through my under and through my shorts.  It was a relatively small amount of blood but disconcerting nonetheless.  Then the next afternoon around 3 p.m. I noticed that it had bled through again, so I called my doctor's office, who recommended that I go to the ER to make sure that there wasn't a hematoma or other serious problem.

So we spent Wednesday afternoon/evening the emergency room.  Ultimately they decided that the bleeding wasn't bad enough to warrant opening me back up and re-suturing the incision, and for that I am glad.  I feel like that would have set me back on my recovery.  The next day I went in to see my ob/gyn practice and the doctor there spent about 5 minutes "draining" my incision.  There was a fairly significant pool of old, thick dark blood just under the incision, so he pushed on my abdomen, watched the thick stuff literally ooze out, and then wiped it up.  He repeated this over and over until the oozing amount finally slowed down.  It was slightly uncomfortable but not horribly painful and the bleeding has definitely slowed down since he did that.  I get a spot here or there, but nothing too significant so I'm hopeful that that issue is behind us. 

It may not sound like much, but all of those things have pretty much been occupying our lives!  DH is working hard finishing up his rental property work and I'm working hard keeping our baby fed, well rested and just generally alive.  Now that we're finally getting into a routine, I should be able to get back into something resembling a routine on the blogging front!