Hell Week

This post is probably only interesting if you're in the middle of the newborn phase of child-rearing or facing it in the very near future.  If that isn't you, go ahead and skip to something more interesting, like read a book, or. . . hey!  have you seen this BBC series about an Italian police officer named Zen?  I love it.  

Baby number five is now a month old.  This means that I have now had a little over a week to recover from her third week of life, or as my mother and aunts affectionately refer to it: Hell Week.

Week three of a new baby's life is Hell Week because everyone goes back to their normal schedule and leaves you alone with the baby.  Mom and Mother-in-law go back to their regular lives, Husband goes back to work and they leave you alone.  She's three weeks old after all.  You should know what to do with her.  But you don't.  Because a three-week-old baby is still pretty much an insensible lump.  She has no recognizable schedule and can't maintain eye contact for more than a couple of seconds.  How are you supposed to know what to do?

By week three, the sleep deprivation is setting in with a vengeance.  You probably haven't slept through the night for at least two months. Now that the baby's head isn't pressing on your bladder, she thinks she should be able to suck on your breast non-stop.  Which still hurts.  Even if you've breastfed multiple babies before, it still takes a newborn a while to figure out how to eat without causing mommy pain so bad she wants to cry.  And your body is still regulating milk production - odds are you are making too much, which adds to the pain. Even if you aren't breastfeeding, your breasts are still very tender by week three. And while I'm on the subject of pain -   By week three your doctor prescribed pain meds are gone, even if you've been rationing them.  But the pain? the pain is NOT gone.  In fact it is made worse by the sleep deprivation.  I don't know why doctors don't prescribe medication to last as long as the pain will, but they never do.  The stool softeners last for at lest a month, so they KNOW that you won't be back to normal by then, but the happy drugs only last two weeks, tops.

And if you are me, your first excursion out with the baby and whomever else you may have to take care of all by yourself will be to the doctor's office to get yourself another prescription, this one for a UTI.  (Which, by the way, does not come with pain medication - I asked) This is very common and has happened to me after every single baby. So you may find yourself wrangling five small children at the insta-care and trying to give a urine sample while the youngest two scream bloody murder because they are still traumatized by the doctor's visit last week which involved immunizations.

By week three it will be dawning on your other children that the new baby isn't going anywhere, and she really isn't much fun.  Expect the bad behavior and regression to worsen as they adjust.  Your own hormones are going through yet another shift, so the crying and tantrums will not be coming only from the children.

Right now I'm trying to focus on the best, simplest baby advice I ever got.  Two things:  Feed the baby right when she wakes up and try and give her a "full" feeding every time.  Lots of babies like to take ten swallows of milk and then fall peacefully to sleep - only to wake up 45minutes later wanting to eat again - repeat cycle all night long.  If she's full, she'll sleep or be awake and content for a lot longer.  Plus, my kids tend to sleep better if they fall asleep after a feeding, not during.  It sounds pretty simple, but it's not.  Actually right now I'm focusing on the feeding thing.  I feed her as much as she will eat all at once and then I know if she cries in the next couple of hours, it is because she needs something else.  The schedule will come, everything else will fall in place eventually.  And now that I'm past it, I can tell you that even Hell Week will end.