Facts from my First Week with Ian

Now that I have gotten my birth story out of the way, I can take my father's advice and stop "looking backwards" and look forwards. My first week with my son has been absolutely amazing. First, some facts:

Weight:

March 16, 2009: 8 pounds, 6 ounces

March 17, 2009: 7 pounds, 13 ounces (it is normal for the baby to lose weight after birth)

March 18/19, 2009: 7 pounds, 10.4 ounces

I went home from the hospital on Thursday, March 19. Although insurance will pay for 96 hours in the hospital post C-section, I chose to leave the hospital 1 day early for various reasons. These include the fact that I had actually been in the hospital since Sunday morning, March 15. I was also unable to get any rest because there was a constant flow of people in and out of my recovery room, including the pediatrician, midwife, nurses, student nurses, cleaning crews, photographers selling their wares, and administrative types. And by Thursday, I definitely felt well enough physically to head home and wasn't worried at all about getting up the stairs at home.

However, because Ian had come close to losing almost 10% of his birth weight and because I was leaving the hospital 1 day early, the pediatrician on call at the hospital thought it would be best if Ian saw a pediatrician on Friday, before the weekend. So on Friday morning, my husband, me and Ian made our first outing to the Harvard Vanguard, Wellesley location. I was very happy to see that Ian had stopped losing weight and weighed 7 pounds, 11 ounces. So he gained .6 ounces in one day. The pediatrician had hoped for a .75 ounce gain, because that is typical of babies at this stage, but we were close. She told us that if we kept seeing the orange/reddish uric acid crystals in Ian's diaper (which looks frighteningly like blood), we should supplement his feedings with formula. My milk supply had really started coming in and so I was hopeful that we wouldn't have to supplement (but knew if we had to, we had good samples of formula sitting in our kitchen cabinet).

Because I left the hospital early, we also qualified for a nurse to do a home visit in the first 48 hours after being discharged. I thought a home visit was WAY better than another day in the hospital. So a very nice nurse came to our home on Saturday morning and we got to ask all sorts of questions. She also weighed Ian and I was pleased to see that he now weighed 7 pounds, 15 ounces.

We went to the pediatrician again on Monday morning to make sure that Ian was gaining the appropriate amount of weight. And he weighed 8 pounds, 6 ounces (back to his birth weight!) The pediatrician was extraordinarily pleased that he was able to gain 7 ounces in 2 days! Ian is a feeding machine and I, apparently, am quite the cow. :-)