Six Things I Didn’t Expect About My First Two Weeks Home with a Baby
Considering that the feelings are all still fresh in my mind, I decided to document all of the things about coming home with our new baby that took me by surprise. I suspect that many other new moms may also deal with some of the same things, and so I decided to write this article. Whether it prepares you for it before having the baby, or helps you to realize you are not alone in the rough road to recovery, below are my top six surprises in the first two weeks postpartum.
1. Recovering from labor and delivery is a long and painful process.
No one told me that I would feel great once the delivery was over, but something in me just thought that the labor and delivery was the hard part, and that I would be so glad not to be pregnant any more that I would just feel great. This is not at all the truth.
Yes, I was very excited to have my beautiful baby to take home with me, but I was not at all prepared for how much pain I was going to be in. God must have a sense of humor, because here you are in so much pain on the lower half of your body that it hurts to walk, and even hurts to sit in a chair, yet you are expected to deal with the demands of taking care of a newborn. Now, I know women have been doing this for centuries, but it just isn’t easy.
I expected the first few days to be a bit rough, but I certainly didn’t expect it to hurt as long as it did. It took about two weeks before the pain was not constant; after that it just hurt when I did anything too strenuous.
2. The constant bleeding is just so frustrating, especially if you are used to tampons
I suppose I should have realized that nine months without a period means having my period right after the baby comes. Well, I guess I did realize that; I just didn’t know how frustrating it would be. Since I have worn nothing but tampons since the first day of my first period when I was 13 years old, I was not prepared for how uncomfortable wearing pads constantly is. It felt like wearing a diaper, but even worse, it is this uncomfortable cottony, wet thing, rubbing up against an area that is already incredibly sore to the touch. Yuck.
3. Even if you get plenty of sleep and take naps throughout the day, you will still be unbelievably exhausted.
My labor was about nine hours. Afterwards, I realized why they call it labor. Even if you are laying in bed the whole time (which I was due to the need to constantly measure my blood pressure and the baby’s heart rate), nine hours of contractions certainly takes its toll on your body. I spent two days in the hospital just lying in bed, and then when I came home I barely got off of the couch, yet I felt daily like I had run a marathon. If I spent more than two or three minutes up and about, doing chores, changing the baby, or whatnot, I felt like I was going to pass out. It was about a week before I started feeling like I had the ability to be up and about for longer periods of time. Even then, after we took our baby for his one week check-up, the trip to the doctor and lunch afterwards was enough activity to do me in for the day. I spent the rest of the day in bed.
4. There will be a million visitors and it will be very exhausting.
I am a very social person, so I thought that I would really enjoy having friends and family come over to see the baby. To be perfectly honest, I did enjoy it, but at the same time it was very exhausting. While none of my friends or family expected me to do anything, it was still tiring. Given the lack of energy I was experiencing, just staying awake throughout the day while people showed up to see the baby was so tiring. Trying not to be a total downer when anyone asked me how I was feeling was hard. I am a very honest person, but they did not come over to listen to me complain about how much pain I am in, so I tried to not complain too much.
Plus, there are things about having so many visitors that makes keeping up with the house exhausting. Many of them brought gifts, which was wonderful, but it meant constantly putting things away and doing something with all those gift bags. In addition, my husband and I tried to be good host, so we usually offered something to drink and had some snacks available. This was not that big of a deal, but it does mean cleaning up afterwards. These seem like trivial little things, but the amount of energy I had was even smaller.
5. A pleasant surprise- newborn babies sleep most of the time.
I had read things about the fact that newborns sleep a lot, but I guess I had thought that he would require a lot more work than he did. The whole being born thing was a lot of work for him too I guess, because the first few days, he barely wanted to wake up to eat and have his diaper changed. This meant that there were many two to four hour stretches where he would sleep and I could nap. It was a beautiful, unexpected break during that first week.
6. When the baby wakes up in the middle of the night, you can count on being up for an hour or more.
Since breastfeeding was taking me about 10-15 minutes at a time during the day, I somehow thought that the nights were going to be a lot simpler than they were. I knew that he would wake up to eat about every two hours, but I did not realize that each waking would take a lot of time. He wakes up with a dirty diaper and wants it changed before he is calm enough to latch on to my breast. Then he takes his sweet time about eating, sometimes even taking 30 minutes for a feeding. Then, he might need a change of clothes, since he sometimes drips breast milk everywhere. Inevitably, after putting him in a new, dry sleeper, and then swaddling him tight, I would lay him down to bed, only to hear a loud squirt meaning he had pooped, followed by the “I’m uncomfortable” cry. By the time we have cleaned up the poopy mess, cleaned his umbilical cord, changed the gauze on his healing circumcision, strapped on a dry diaper, and put his clothes back on, it will have been at least an hour since he first woke up. Considering that he wakes up about every two hours, this means very little sleep for mom and dad.
Overall, having a baby is an absolute joy. Even though it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, I certainly don’t regret it a bit and I would do it again in a heart beat!
