At Home With Lily

We've been home four days and still haven't found the owners manual.  We have found a little routine, however.  Maybe you're familiar:  Sleep, cry, change diapers, feed, repeat.  Lily spends most of her day sleeping in the bassinet next to the bed or kangarooing with Amanda.  Amanda spends most of her day hanging out on the bed next to Lily's bassinet or kangarooing with Lily.  I go to Starbucks, walk Pearl, run errands, feed Lily a few times a day, and have even been able to get back to the gym recently.

After all the practice we had in the hospital with the nurses support, we were pretty sure we were ready to take care of Lily, until our first night at home.  After her first middle of the night feeding, we couldn't get her back to sleep.  Typically, she had been falling asleep within minutes of eating, now that we were home, not so much.  We (and by "we," I mean Amanda) eventually did get her to sleep, and have been figuring out some of her idiosyncrasies as we go.  She seems to have a little reflux, which is common in preemies, and we discovered that if she is put down on an incline it bothers her a lot less.  We have since found that it's even better if she is on an incline while she eats, rather than lying flat, and have been having good luck with that.

While it's great having her home and not having to go the hospital everyday, there are a few things we got used to that are hard to give up.  While Lily was in the NICU, we had a ritual of calling first thing in the morning to see what her weight was and how much she had grown from the day before.  Now that we're home and don't have a scale accurate enough to weigh her, we'll only find out her weight once a week or so, and after obsessing over it for four weeks, it's a long wait.

We also got used to having Lily monitored 24/7, so it was a bit disconcerting to get home the first night and not be able to see her heart rate at any given moment.  I'm o.k. during the day, but at least once a night I have woken up wondering if she's still breathing.  So far she has been every time.

And of course we miss the nurses.  Not only  were they amazing with their care and wealth of information, but we became friendly with a few of them.  There have already been numerous times when I would have liked to consult one of them for one thing or another, it's difficult to give up a crutch once you get used to leaning on it.

Well, it's nearly midnight and I'll probably have to feed Lily in an hour or two, so...

Don't Forget To Breathe