The Calm and the Storm
The moment I had my very first skin-to-skin time with my daughter, the whole world quietly froze into a surreal crystal of happiness and bewilderment. The preceding fast-paced, cross-functional, everybody-was-an-expert-except-me-and-I-was-trying-not-to-get-in-anyone’s-way experience in the OR came to a screeching halt when my daughter and I were left to ourselves in the serenity of our unit. We got nowhere to go and nothing to do but bond and bond we did.
Well, that didn’t last very long. When the nurse came in again with my wife from the recovery unit, it was ON. From then on, we were practically playing catch-up with the reality of how to keep this little fragile human being alive. All things considered, she didn’t have a significantly difficult circumstance. Nevertheless, because she was born through a C-section after 3 full days of difficult labor (another story for another day), she was borderline lethargic and had to wait a couple of extra days for milk to naturally come through. That more or less framed our tasks for the next week or so, which the hospital staff made sure to hand over to us along with the baby.
As the to-do list stacked higher and higher, it dawned on me that 24 hours might not be enough for what this family needed every day. Of course, that wasn’t true, but it was one thing to sit down and think everything through with pen and paper, and quite another when I had a head start with 3 days’ worth of sleep deprivation while facing the most monumental undertaking of my life. As I failed to make the mental math work, I became overwhelmed with the feeling that it was impossible to sustain our new lifestyle.
Let’s Run the Numbers
It wasn’t until after two volatile weeks of scrambling that I began to work out the detailed accounting of our everyday life. Since there was no day off for this baby business, every 24-hour roughly looked the same. The silver lining was that it made the math easier. For the foreseeable future, we needed to feed the kid 8 times a day, AT LEAST. That neatly divided our days into 3-hour chunks that went a bit like this:
- Every 3 hours, my wife breastfed the baby for 30 minutes, after which we “topped up” with formula for another 15 minutes. I might think the baby would be eager to dine at every 3-hour mark, but no. We spent around 5 minutes each time to wake her up and get the ball rolling. That was feeding, 50 minutes in total.
- Then came the burping, which was my favorite part because of all the cute noises she made. A rule of thumb for burping was 15 minutes at least. Any temptation to shorten it ended up costing us extra time to clean her spit-ups. Somewhere in between feeding and burping, we needed to change her diaper, which took only 2 minutes if all went well. If it didn’t (Oh, there were plenty of colorful ways it didn’t), we could end up cleaning after her for 10 minutes. Let’s say 5 minutes on average including the interruption and overhead.
- What followed was the dreadful part, putting her back to sleep. There was no hard and fast number for this, and many things could go wrong in the meantime, bringing us back to square one. It was not unusual to take anywhere between 30 minutes to 1.5 hours, but 15 minutes was a fair estimate. If she did sleep soundly, we got to, no, not sleep, but clean up after her. Once we had the bottles sanitized and all the supplies ready for the next round, 10 minutes would have passed.
- If you are counting, that’s 1 hour and 35 minutes if things went exceptionally well, leaving us these 1-hour-and-25-minute breadcrumbs scattered throughout the day. First, we used them to do the irregular tasks for our kid, like running around town getting the supplies, handwashing laundry 3 times a week, daily tummy time that always got her upset, then extra time to pacify her after tummy time, and other cares such as nail trimming and bathing. Lastly, babies apparently needed awake time to interact with us, so let’s not forget about that.
What If the Stars Don’t Align?
Mathematically speaking, it didn’t look all too terrible if everything went well, especially considering that many of them could be shared and partnered between my wife and me. If I was into the idea of “sleep by installments”, which I was assuredly not, I might call it marginally worse than a 9-9-6 lifestyle. But as it turned out, things didn’t tend to go well with a newborn.
We in fact spent many of those 3-hour slots feeding, burping, changing, back to feeding, changing, then spit-up, then clean-up, then changing again, taking us right to the 2.5-hour mark. (“Hope you enjoy your 30-min nap, dad.”) The timing of her poopy diaper was also a variable that randomly interrupted her sleep, bringing us back to the previous scenario. Sometimes, she employed the tried-and-true technique called “simply-refuse-to-sleep”, during which I would keep on inventing new ways to keep her from waking up the entire block. Any of these easily consumed that entire 3 hours, pushing back our plans and sleep, or worse yet, leaving us wondering what to do in the middle of her crying fit.
The final squeeze came not from the physics of spacetime, but from the mind. The uncertainty of whether she would kindly fall asleep so we could get on with the schedule, my alertness and fear at her every noise dreading that she would test our skills of putting her back to sleep so soon again, and the ongoing struggle with a new paradigm of sleep of my own were what really drained my dwindling supply of willpower. (Wait a minute, they all revolve around sleep… Interesting.)
Against All Odds
Nevertheless, we managed to scrape together enough pieces of tranquility to enjoy some precious alone time, savor a few finer things in life like coffee and sweets, and gather pittances of free time to finish a blog post in over 20 sittings. It turns out I was wrong to think this was impossible. It’s possible, not comfortable, not by any stretch, but possible. You know what they say about beggars and choosers… I’ll take it.
~ Du
Quicknote
Never skimp on burping.