One Month In

My dad has asked me a few times since my son was born if it feels like he was always here or if I even remember a time without him. My honest answer is I remember my life before being a father, but it has been such a monumental shift it's difficult to mentally put myself back in that position. Fatherhood suits me and I have fallen into the role right in step. A month in, I'm still suprised at how much has come naturally and how well I've adapted. In this post, I'm writing a whirlwind lookback at the first month of being a dad, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The time in the hospital after he was born was an interesting mix of being worried about Megan and trying to take care of Jacob while feeling like I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. What stands out in my mind was not knowing how to pick him up effectively. I knew I needed to support his head and neck, but the actual mechanics of how to get a good grip on him from different positions eluded me. The first night while Megan slept, I got some skin to skin with Jacob with him curled up in my shirt asleep. We sat in the chair next to Megan's bed, rocking and listening to music. I got to just enjoy his presence, reflect on the day, and revel in the pure joy of my first night of being a father. The rest of the hospital stay went without issue and then we were ready to take him home. It was a surreal experience bringing him home because the place was the same as we left it a few days before but everything had fundamentally changed. Showing him his new home was a beautiful start to being on our own as a family of three.

Like many parents, I think we didn't know what to do with ourselves at first. We completed the basics like getting our bags inside and getting him fed and then it was like, "ok, now what?" We called the pediatrician and made his first appointment for two days later because the doctors who saw him in the hospital weren't concerned about anything. However, over the next few hours it became clear something wasn't right. We kept checking his diaper and he hadn't peed or pooped, despite not having any issues the two days in the hospital. When he got to 13 hours without a wet diaper, we decided to start supplementing with formula. Because the plan was to exclusively breastfeed, I figured this would be a difficult decision, but in the moment it was so clearly the right choice for him that it was easy. He eventually did pee after about 16 hours, so we felt a little better, but overnight it still wasn't as much as we expected. In the morning we called the pediatrician and got an appointment for him that day.

Babies lose some weight in the first few days of life. It's normal for them to lose up to 10% of their birth weight and the goal is to gain it back in the first two weeks. In his weigh in at the pediatrician, he had lost a little more than the normal 10%, so they wanted us to make sure we were feeding him no more than two hours apart and come back two days later for another weight check. Megan nursed him before we left the office and unfortunately that was the last time he latched for a few days. This meant Megan was pumping and I was bottle feeding him a combo of the pumped milk and formula. This was a lot of work, but he gained a few ounces in the two days and we thought he was doing great. The next weight check a few days later he had only gained an ounce and the pediatrician was concerned about his weight gain. Between her and the lactation nurse we saw, they recommended we proceed with triple feeding every two hours during the day and no longer than three hours apart at night. These times are from the beginning of one feed to the beginning of the next.

Triple feeding is, to put it bluntly, an absolute nightmare. When the baby needs to eat, you offer the baby the breast, then when they're finished eating, you pump and give the baby a bottle until they're full. It's an insane amount of work and we were utterly exhausted. Because he was still learning how to nurse, eating until he's done at the breast was not a fast process, then I gave him a bottle while Megan pumped for the next feed. Together that regularly took over an hour and then he had to be burped some more and held upright to keep him from spitting up. If we were lucky there were 45 minutes between when he fell asleep after one feed and the time we had to wake him up for the next one. Both of us had to be involved in every feed and in the short time between feeds I had to wash bottles and pump parts. We ordered some extra pump parts, but it still felt like all I was doing was giving him bottles and washing his dishes.

He needed to sleep a lot and frankly was not hungry when we woke him up half the time. It was a struggle to get him to eat and we were basically force-feeding him. It felt horrible to have to wake him up and feed him when we knew he wasn't hungry and just wanted to sleep. He spit up a lot because he was eating so much and we worried we were teaching him to ignore is own hunger and fullness cues. We did those for about a week and it was all-encompassing. We were both exhausted because it was impossible for either of us to get sleep and it was emotionally difficult to keep up with this schedule. But, he gained a pound in the week we were doing this, which was more than the pediatrician told us to expect and got him up past his birth weight within the two week window. This let us back off on the intense schedule and go more to feeding on demand, which was an incredible change. The first few days were difficult because he was so used to the rigid schedule he still ate almost as frequently and spitting up because he ate too much. After a week or so he got into a better rhythm. He gained almost another pound in that week and feeding has been going pretty smoothly since then.

Reflecting on the early feeding experience, I wish we didn't need to do the aggressive triple feeding, but it worked out. We met with a lactation consultant and she seemed less concerned about the slow weight gain because it sometimes takes babies a little longer to get the hang of eating and a little longer for the mom's milk supply to reach what the baby needs, but many pediatricians are very rigid with the expected amount of weight loss and getting back to birth weight in the two weeks. Much like supplementing with formula, triple feeding was absolutely the right decision with the information we had at the time and reinforced our ability to make decisions on what's best for our baby.

Through all of the discussions about having a baby, even long before we were seriously considering trying to concieve, I was worried about the sleep deprivation. I have never functioned well with a lack of sleep and think I need more sleep than the average person, so I expected to be absolutely dragging until our child was in school. A month in I can honestly say it wasn't as bad as I expected, with the acknowledgement that our baby has slept very well. If he's sleeping well, it's much easier to get more sleep as a parent. That being said, there have been some rough spots.

Starting almost immediately in the hospital, I was very disoriented when I woke up. Jacob would make noise or Megan would try to wake me up and I either wouldn't wake up at all or I would wake up startled. I didn't know where I was or what was going on. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings and actually function as a human being and parent. This continued for a few days after we got home. Once I woke up and misread my clock, thought it was time to wake him up, and woke him up even though he'd only been asleep for a half hour. He was understandably very upset and it took a long time to get him back to sleep after he ate. A common issue we both experienced was waking up in the middle of the night thinking he was in the bed with us and frantically looking for him lost in the covers. One time I looked directly at him in his bassinet and then thought, "he's in bed with us and I need to find him before he gets hurt," then proceeded to rifle through the covers until I realized what I was doing. Another time we woke up because he was making noise and Megan wanted to let him settle back to sleep on his own but I thought I saw a large bug run across her pillow , so I made her get up and we woke Jacob up in the process. There was no bug, I had imagined it. I had read about some new parents hallucinating because of sleep deprivation. I don't think this was really a hallucination, just thinking something was there while still half asleep, but it made me feel for the parents going through that.

We eventually figured out waking up from my alarm did not startle me as much as Megan trying to wake me up. Thankfully, after the first week Jacob making noise usually didn't cause me to wake up disoriented either. To handle the disorientation problem, we have a system for how we handle nighttime wake ups. Before he got back to his birth weight, we'd set an alarm for the time to wake him up, now we wait until he wakes up and makes noise. We both get up and I change his diaper while Megan uses the bathroom. Then she feeds him and I go back to sleep for 20 minutes. When my alarm goes off I get up again and once he's finished eating I take him and Megan goes back to bed. I get him settled back to sleep and then return to bed myself. This system works well because I'm not being startled awake and I get a little bit of sleep while he's eating and she gets a little bit of sleep while I'm getting him back down. He doesn't always go down quickly and I've had a few particularly difficult wake ups where he was up for over two hours before finally going back to sleep, but on average it works pretty well.

It has been interesting leaning on Jacob making noise to wake me up. I don't always hear him depending on where I am in my sleep cycle and I feel like an awful father when I don't hear him fussing or crying. Once in the hospital and a few times at home he was crying and Megan was up comforting him before I woke up, if I woke up at all. I felt horrible in those situations knowing my baby was crying looking for help and I didn't even hear him. On the flip side, sometimes I hear him and get up to check on him before Megan wakes up. Sometimes it's useful for us to hear different things or wake up at different times so we know he's covered. There have also definitely been times when one of us imagined him fussing when he wasn't actually making any noise. We usually don't accidentally wake him up in those situations.

Overall, sleep is going very well as far as early parenthood goes. I'm not getting as much sleep as I like to, but it's enough given the circumstances. In the first few weeks I napped sometimes during the day even though I never napped before. I always hated napping because I either wouldn't fall asleep or I would fall asleep and would wake up groggy and feel like it wasn't worth it. I still had some issues like that, but when sleep deprived enough the extra rest was useful no matter what. One funny thing with sleep is how I don't always go back to sleep well when he does because he just makes so much noise. People talk about newborns making a lot of noise, but I was not at all prepared for just how loud and how often he makes noise while he's sleeping. I often get up to make sure the weird noises aren't him spitting up or having trouble breathing. He's usually fine and happilly asleep, newborns just make a lot of weird noises during active sleep.

Feeding and sleeping dominate caring for a newborn, which can make it difficult to find time for any of the other things that need to get done to keep our household functioning. Thankfully we had a lot of support from family and friends bringing us food so we didn't have to cook much. There have been a few times I had the energy to cook and I even made salsa and hot sauce to use up some of the produce from our farm share. Those times were very satisfying, but much of the housework has been difficult. In the first few weeks, I wanted to prioritize Megan having time and space to rest and focus on her recovery, so I didn't want her worrying about house work. Once we got past the triple feeding stage, Megan had all of the feeding responsibility, which meant I was doing literally everything else. Food prep, dishes, laundry, cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming, grocery shopping, etc. I didn't mind doing all of that because it was important to me for Megan to rest, but it had the unintended effect of me spending a lot of time away from Jacob. On top of that, I had a funeral to attend and both cars needed to go in for maintenance. All of this work was necessary, but it felt like I was slacking on caring for him or just dumping him on Megan. I felt bad for taking time to do anything for myself even if they were both ok and happy. At the same time, because Megan is spending so much of her time feeding or with him napping on her, she feels like she isn't contributing to the household or getting to spend time on any adult tasks. This is horribly unsustainable and not good for either of our mental health.

Through this proces I've determined I had wildly unrealistic standards for myself. Over the last month I've often felt like I'm not doing enough to take care of him or that I'm failing as a father if I'm spending time on other things. I've been really hard on myself when anything goes wrong and while I recognize now that's making the situation worse, it's been difficult to realize that in the moment. Since I've realized that I'm pushing myself so hard I've been able to flag some of the times when I'm doing it and back off, which is helping. I'll keep working on it and hopefully it'll get easier as I get more used to this parenting thing.

Megan and I both care about sustainability, so we wanted to attempt to use cloth diapers as much as we could. Because we had read it's difficult to get sizing right when they're really small and we didn't want to make things too hard for ourselves, we decided to use disposable diapers the first few weeks and then gradually transition into cloth diapers. The first time I tried did not go well because he was too small for it and immediately peed through the leg hole. We tried again around three weeks in and have been more successful. We're using diapers from Kinder Cloth Diaper Co, which are intended to be one size which changes with the baby. They accomplish this through sets of snaps which adjust the rise and tightness of the waist. This is pretty cool because in theory we bought all of the cloth diapers we'll need until he's potty trained. The downside is there's a big learning curve to figuring out how to set them and how to get the diaper seated correctly so it doesn't leak, but we're getting better. For now we're using cloth diapers during the day and disposable at night to at least reduce our disposable diaper usage. We may change to exclusively cloth in the future or we may keep the routine the same. So far I think cloth diapers are great. I'll probably do a post about them in a few months talking about our experience in the longer term.

I want to finish by talking about joy. A lot of this post has been work or parts of early fatherhood which have been difficult, so I want to be explicit that the hard parts are not the only parts. Just having him here and welcoming him into our lives has brought me immense joy. The times I'm actively caring for him are often the happiest times of my day, even when taking care of him isn't easy. I love getting to hold him and have him fall asleep in my arms. The first night with him in the hospital I remember pacing the room trying to get him to go to sleep and the overhead lights, though dimmed, were bothering him. So I walked with him back and forth across the room, Megan asleep, with my hand up shielding his eyes from the light. It was a beautiful example of how we are this little boy's entire world and there are so many little things I can do to make the world better for him. I love trying to calm him down and saying, "It's ok, Daddy's got you." While there's so much to do and so much responsibility, my biggest takeaway of the first month of fatherhood is simply the joy of getting to be his dad.