Parenthood: Day 2

So, unsurprisingly, the last 28 hours have flown by in a blur. After the birth, we had to play the waiting game for a while. Apparently there are a lot of other babies in Evanston that share Anabelle's birthday (or the preceding couple days) because there were no recovery rooms available to us right away. Probably the biggest issue with this was that in the labor and delivery rooms there are no sleeping apparatuses for people other than the mother, and at that point I had been up for about 30 hours straight. So when Christy took a nap at 1:30 while Anabelle was up in the nursery getting her first bath I left Christy's mom to watch over her and headed home to get a few hours sleep (another big benefit to living 2 blocks away from the hospital). Never have 2 hours of sleep passed so quickly or felt so good.


By the time I got back to the hospital Christy had been moved to our recovery room and Anabelle had joined us again. That's pretty much where we've bee since, doing our best to please Miss Anabelle and keep her happy when she's awake and comfortable when she's asleep. We all tried to go to sleep at around 9:30 with varying degrees of success. At about 11:00 Anabelle started fussing so mommy fed her and she went back to sleep. Then at 12:30 the nursery came and took her away to get her Hepatitis immunization shot. At 4:30 she woke up again and after mom fed her it was dad's turn to get her to go back to sleep. Then at around 8:30 we all woke up for the day.

Since then it's been a bit of a circus here. Our pediatrician, Dr. Bernstein (who goes by Dr. Andy) came by and took a look at her at 9:30 and said that everything looks good and she is definitely on track to go home tomorrow. At about 9:30 she started to get cranky and we were joking that it was because she had just turned 1 day old and was depressed about how old she's getting. Between 10 and 11 we had visits from the food service people with our breakfast, the on-duty nurse to check on Christy and the baby, one housekeeper to attend to the trash and a different housekeeper to change the linens, and Christy's doctor. Finally, a lactation consultant came by to help Christy with breastfeeding and just left a few minutes ago. In between all that I also got to change my first of many, many diapers. Now we are just awaiting a circus of a different sort as various friends and family stop by to visit.

Tomorrow my mom is flying in from Texas so it will be nice to have an extra set of hands around the house to help out during the first week and I'm so glad she was able to make it up to visit her new granddaughter!

Think that's all for now. Here's a few more pictures from Anabelle's first day of life!