Little Sugar & Cloth: Gwen’s One Month Update!

I realize that she’s now just over two months old by the time I’m getting around to writing this post, but that basically sums up almost everything about how smoothly the first month went, haha. So here I am, finally digging my way out of the newborn haze a bit enough to share Gwen’s one month update!

Let me just say that the first four weeks were simultaneously the longest and shortest four weeks ever. In a lot of ways it felt like one giant 24 hours that never ended on account of that fact that she slept when she felt like, had no sense of day or night, and we basically didn’t leave the house at all. At the same time, it felt like she grew with the blink of an eye.

We also lived on our second-floor (living room, dining room, kitchen) to avoid the third-floor stairs leading to our bedroom while I wobbled around for two weeks trying to walk again after labor. On top of that, I could barely hold Gwen because of how awful my postpartum recovery was, and I’m sure by now you already know that I plan on writing a post with far too much personal information in it about that too! Coming soon along with her birth story, so not to worry!

I also thought FOR SURE that the Lord knew I needed a chill baby, but that was not the case. Gwen is quite the little ball of sass which is super fun because of how alert she was from day one in comparison to most newborns, but rough when it comes to actually trying to get anything done…at all. She either wants to be held, worn in the baby wrap, fed, or to sit at my boob using me as a human pacifier. Despite the fact that we are VERY unproductive in this house and have almost no clue what we’re doing most days, there is no better feeling than her looking at us and smiling or sighing from relaxation in our arms.

Weight: at her one-month appointment she had already gone from 7lb 12 oz at birth, to 7lb 4 oz leaving the hospital, all the way up to 10lb 2 oz! She’s quite the chunk and we are in LOVE with every roll she’s got!

Sleeping: Sleeping is a total crapshoot for pretty much everyone in this house right about now. In fact, we camped out in the living room sleeping on the sectional for the first two weeks until I could get up and down the stairs more easily, but we basically watched her take every breath for that entire timeframe. I’m the poster child for paranoid new mom. Gwen also didn’t really have any sort of sleeping schedule but did get her days and nights sorted out by the end of month one by us putting her in her sleep sack and turning off all of the lights at 8pm every night so that when she did finally go to sleep, she wouldn’t be wide-eyed the second she woke up. We’d quickly change and feed her, then put her back down.

Thanfully Nana came to stay with us quite a few times for us to basically regain consciousness while I simultaneously had a diaper sticking out from my PJ bottoms as I walked like a sumo wrestler to and from the bathroom. It was all very beautiful, haha.

Feeding: Gwen is still on breastmilk, but it’s been quite the unsmooth process. I still majorly rely on the nipple shield (despite the lactation consultant’s dismay), but it’s what works and keeps me sane without fighting her to feed all the time. I’m all for whatever is convenient while keeping everyone fed and as happy as possible, despite what the purists say. We had a rough go of it in the beginning because she had to be syringe fed pumped colostrum and breastmilk for the first week and a half of her life because of jaundice and needing to be under the phototherapy lights.

That’s another part of her birth story that I will get to soon, but the hospital insisted that we feed her formula to “flush her right away” until my milk came in since I only had colostrum at the time, but I didn’t want her to use the bottle before she even got used to breastfeeding, so syringing it in her mouth it was. The problem with that was that we made her latch on our finger with one hand and syringe the milk or formula in with the other hand so she wouldn’t get used to a free-flowing bottle instead of learning to latch and work for it. It also took FOREVER to feed her that way, so every time she woke up at night it was a full 45 minute process of being hunched over with syringe just to feed her.

Because of that, when the time came to actual breastfeed or use the bottle, she wasn’t used to controlling the flow of the milk so a nipple shield helped control my let down and the premie bottle nipples had to be used to she wouldn’t choke herself. We had a lot of things working against us there to say the least! I could literally right a whole blog post on our breastfeeding saga, but we finally started to get a better hang of it towards the end of four weeks.

Little quirks: She LOVES to have her tongue out and to do what I like to call her “drunk smiles” after a full tummy. She also makes a lot of interesting baby goat grunting noises, haha! She is literally the opposite of quiet. An unfortunate quirk we’ve found is that she has acid reflux and gas issues, which I’ll get to in her second month update.

Current favorite thing: Since she obviously didn’t have a current favorite thing during month one besides milk, I’ll just tell you that ours was finding that the Love to Dream sleepsack was her favorite because she could be swaddled with her arms up, which she always insists on doing!

All in all, I’ve literally never been more in love than I am with her. So much so that I would cry from being overhwlemed with emotions just looking at her in disbelief for the first week. That slowly turned into some baby blues mixed with irrational anxiety that was to be expected after diagnosing my antepartum depression, so I went from 25mg of Zoloft to 50mg to keep things in check while also making sure it was still in a safe range to breastfeed her.

Shew! That’s a lot of info I know, but month two gets even more interesting haha! I’ll be sharing that and her birth story soon!

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