Until this afternoon, I had been out of the house exactly 4 times since we brought Griffin home on the 19th. Twice to pediatrician appointments, and twice for short walks around the neighborhood while visiting grandparents watched the baby. Between the lack of sleep over the past 2 weeks and Griffin’s near-constant feedings (we suspect he’s in the throes of a growth spurt), I had been getting pretty unhappy and cabin-fever-y.

The baby carrier we ordered (a FreeHand mei tai that we both can use) came in a few days ago, and with the weather so nice today, Jag insisted that we try taking Griffin out for a walk in it. I am SO glad he did.

Yep, there’s a baby in there.

We only walked for about 10 minutes, but it was extremely nice to get out of the house for a little while.

Griffin’s a week old!

We just got back from his 1-week checkup, and he’s “perfect”, gaining weight and otherwise doing all the stuff a baby’s supposed to be doing. We don’t go back until he’s a month old.

Jag and myself are holding up OK, although we had an absolutely awful 24-hour period on Tuesday/Wednesday where neither of us got more than about an hour of sleep due to some incessant fussiness and crying (on Griffin’s part, not ours, haha). We haven’t figured out what the problem was, and probably never will. Last night was a big improvement, but “normal” still means waking up every 2 hours or so for feeds/changing, so we’re just at our regular exhaustion level instead of zombie level. If you are friends of ours and we have not invited you to come over to see the baby yet, it’s because we’re limiting visitors to immediate family because we are just too freaking tired for anything else. Getting a load of laundry washed, plus a couple meals made/eaten, are about all we can manage in a given day (if we both get showers, we’re doing really well).

Here are Daddy and Griffin after breakfast this morning:

Our first days with a newborn have been quite illuminating.

Stuff we’ve discovered so far:

1.) Baby boys can squirt not only the people changing them, but themselves! In the face! Poor Griffin.

2.) Severe swelling in mom’s feet/ankles AFTER giving birth is apparently normal. No one told me this and I freaked out when my feet got so hugely distended that I could barely bend my ankles to walk. Nothing to do about it but wait until the fluid goes away.

3.) Engorgement. Ow, ow, ow. Also, holy crap!!! Ahem.

4.) Griffin is in 3-6 month clothes already. The newborn ones won’t come near to snapping at the crotch, and the 0-3s are tight. Most of the stuff I knit for him is way too small. The flannel blankies are working out great, though!

5.) Overnight cluster feedings are grueling, but we’re still getting more sleep now than we did in the hospital.

6.) Breastfed baby poop DOES stink, despite claims to the contrary by certain groups. At least it’s easy to clean up.

7.) It is of vital importance to keep a stack of clean onesies at the changing table.

8.) As best we can tell, cats are incapable of hearing baby cries. Ours show no reaction whatsoever to even the most banshee wailing. We consider this a good thing.

9.) Everyone at the hospital will give you totally conflicting breastfeeding advice. No wonder so many people just give up and bottle feed.

10.) Single mothers are amazing. We have NO IDEA how they do it.

11.) Things that used to be real annoyances leave us unfazed now. Cat puking in the other room while the phone rings and the timer just went off on dinner? We’ll get to all that after the screaming infant is changed.

12.) Griffin’s farts are hilarious to us now, but we think this will change once he’s 16.

13.) Swaddling rocks.

14.) The “My Brest Friend” nursing pillow: stupid name, awesome product.

15.) When Griffin looks around, all unfocused and newborny and bald, he reminds me of the confused second Picard in this ST:TNG episode. 😀 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Squared_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

Well, we’re home with our not-so-little Griffin (9lbs, 9oz, 23 inches, in case you missed the stats). The past 48 hours have been a blur, but we have this little cutie to prove that it all really happened.

I’ll probably write up a detailed “birth story” later on just so I can look up the details later, but the summary is that I avoided the interventions I really didn’t want (pitocin induction, C-section) and that the folks at Rex were mostly very supportive of my preferences. Being forced to lie still for 30 minutes during transition with the fetal monitor belt on was probably what doomed my natural childbirth attempt (I had been holding up pretty well by walking/moving a lot), but I think I made the right choice, and neither me nor Grifflet appear to have suffered any ill effects as a result of the medication. He latched on like a champ within minutes of birth and the feedings have been going well so far.

A hospital birth is absolutely brutal on new parents. I had been up since 4am on the 17th with contractions, and I woke up Jag at 4:30, so we were running on very little sleep going into labor. After giving birth at 9:14pm, I got back to the postpartum room after 11, and after a brief visit from all the grandparents, the constant stream of sleep interruptions started, from Griffin crying for food/diaper change/cuddles, to people wandering in to take vitals and give medication, to the 5:20am visit from the lab tech who wanted 3 vials of blood, to the 9pm visit from the lady getting a heel stick for the PKU screen, ad infinitum. We even got harassed during labor; I was ready to strangle the woman from the cord blood bank who showed up to give her spiel while I was having intense transition contractions 1-2 minutes apart. (Well, I was ready to strangle EVERYONE by that point.) I feel so much better now that we’re at home; we all three managed to all get in a nice nap this afternoon, and at least I know my sleep tonight will be interrupted only by Griffin, not some nurse wanting to give a HepB shot at midnight (?!?!?).

Jag was great during labor and we’re settling into the whole diapers and feedings routine. We sure know a lot more about diaper changes and soothing a newborn than we when Griffin woke us up with inconsolable screaming at 1:30am on the 18th.

It’s after 5 on the “official” due/guess date, and Griffin is still pulling his “Hell no, we won’t go!” act, so it looks like it’ll be at least another day before we get to meet him. Sigh.

Over the weekend I decided to mix up the knitting with a little sewing. I ordered a bunch of cute sale/clearance flannel from fabric.com last week (I’m beginning to really love that place!) and decided to make some nice big receiving/nursing blankets. They were really simple to make, just 2 different pieces of flannel sewn together, but they’re thick, warm, and cuddly and should be good for swaddling, letting the baby crawl on, and all sorts of things. They’re a good bit bigger than the commercial blankets I’ve seen at around 44″ x 34″ or so. I used the leftover fabric to make some burp cloths, too. I am like the Eskimos, I waste no part of the yardage! 😉

My trusty old Kenmore sewing machine has a small selection of embroidery stitches, so I got a little fancy with some of the edgings.

I guess I should be grateful that Griffin taking his good old time means that I’ve had the opportunity to make all this stuff for him, but there are limits to how long I want to waddle around like this!

Nothing really new or exciting at my 39-week OB appointment today. As usual, my blood pressure, iron levels and etc are just spiffy, my tummy measures as it should, and the Griffin heartbeat does a happy 140bpm whoosha-whoosha on the doppler. Unfortunately, between the very nasty (untreatable by NyQuil) cold I’ve picked up, the semi-related insomnia, and the normal 39-weeks-prego fatigue, I feel like a wet dishrag this week.

On the plus side, it turns out that my OB practice has a hands-off policy on interventions through week 41, so Griffin has at least a week and a half to make a break for it before we start doing fetal Non Stress Tests and talking induction. I’ve heard that some practices require inductions by week 40 (!?!?!) so I’m glad I won’t have to deal with that pressure for a little while, if at all.

Today I had some intriguing backaches and stomach cramps, but nothing that stuck around for more than a few hours. Given how awful I’m feeling right now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d like to be a little more rested than this before labor starts, and it sure would be nice to be able to breathe.

I think this is my favorite Griffin project so far.

This is the Area 51 Baby Hat, pattern by Sugar Lane on Etsy. (She has some other very cute patterns as well.) I used some of my thick and thin merino handspun (with some bits of black and white Cascade 220 for the eyeballs), and I think it was a great choice. It’s very soft and cushy. This is a bigger hat than the others I’ve made, so I have hopes that it’ll still fit the little one in the fall.

The cats were, once again, singularly ungrateful for the opportunity to model my creation. (Miranda was having none of it, and I didn’t even try with Shastes.)

Ada:

Perl:

Thumper:

It’s been a fairly busy but good weekend so far. Despite being woken up at 5:30am on Saturday morning by a pointless work-related phone call (not my work), we managed to get pretty much all of the finishing touches done on the nursery. We (well, mostly Jag) put together the glider and ottoman set we had ordered online (yay Amazon Prime!), and it turned out to be comfy and a very good value for the money. It was a good $100 less than anything we found at BabiesRUs, Buy Buy Baby, etc. We also hung up an IKEA crescent moon wall light that I had bought for myself years ago (all of my incredibly juvenile decorating purchases over the years have suddenly come in handy!), and we put up all the pirate wall decals. (There’s now a “Yo Ho Ho!” sticker on the nursery door.) We have a couple mobiles to hang up, but we are pretty much done.

Afterwards, we headed to Wake Forest for my family birthday gathering. We had a yummy dinner and I got lots of cool loot, including some Guinness for, um, medicinal purposes after the baby’s here. Robin had also done some more Griffin shopping and we were presented with some very cute onesies and with Captain Calamari, who fits in great with the pirate theme.

(Jag has since noted that squids have 10 arms and not 8, so he’s really an octopus. We may rename him “Admiral Ackbar”.)

On the knitting front, I finished the last wool diaper cover I was working on and washed and lanolized all three of the wool wraps/soakers I’ve made so far. We’ll see how those work out in terms of leakproofness and fit once Griffin arrives to use them.

My next project is this “Area 51” alien eyeball hat.

I’m making mine in a thick and thin merino single-ply I spun up this summer as an attempt at a faux Malabrigo. It’s not machine washable, but it should be nice and soft on Griffin’s little head and it’s a hat, so he’s unlikely to poop or barf on it and make me wash it frequently. I hope.

It was a really nice day today, so me and Jag stopped at West Point on the Eno on the way to the grocery store and took a little walk to try and shake the baby loose. 😉

Tomorrow we’ll be at 38 weeks, 2 weeks out from the “official” due date. I’m trying to be as patient as I can. I’m very uncomfortable and I’m really dragging due to insomnia and generally crappy sleep, but I’m not miserable, in pain, or suffering from any pregnancy-related health conditions. So it’s time to just suck it up and deal, use the time to make cute baby stuff, and wait for the little one to pick his day to arrive.

Despite my waking up at 4:30am and not being able to get back to sleep (not due to anything in particular, it was just one of those mornings), this was a really good birthday.

I took a half day from work and headed over to Jag’s office in the afternoon, where his wonderful coworker Debbie had made this simply amazing cake to celebrate the February birthdays in the office, as well as the impending arrival of little Griffin. Check out all that basketweave, and the slightly raised patterning on the “blanket” that makes it look like a quilted coverlet. And the duckies! And the shoes!

We have been blown away by the generosity of all of our family, friends and coworkers in helping us prepare to welcome the Grifflet. This kid is going to be the best-dressed, best-equipped baby in the Triangle. Thanks again to everyone for all their well-wishes and gifts! We are just so grateful for everyone’s kindness, and I feel really lucky to have had such a well-supported and trouble-free pregnancy (despite my “advanced maternal age”, which just got even more “advanced”. Ha!).

Me and Jag had a great birthday dinner at Watts Grocery. Even our shared dessert was happy and chipper! (At least, the ice cream was.)

This weekend we put a few more finishing touches on Griffin’s room. I sewed up a window valance from the same fabric that I used for the crib skirt, and I’m very happy with how it turned out. The animal print fabric was on clearance at fabric.com and it works really well with our vague jungle-animal-and-pirate theme. I still have a bunch left, and I’m planning on making a few more decorative things with it.

Here’s how the room is looking, viewed from the door. We had a great time putting up the jungle animal wall decals this past week, and we’re expecting the pirate decals to arrive this week. The room definitely is a little sparse right now, but there’s plenty of wall space for adding a dresser, bookshelves, etc later on. We also want to add a glider before the baby arrives.

Here’s the other corner of the room. We decided that the cool giant bird kite that Greg gave me as a gift some years back would be great in here as a decoration. (Mom, your afghan’s not on hanging the crib any more because it’s packed in the overnight bag to keep the Grifflet warm on the ride home.) That storage unit currently holds all of the baby clothes, diapers and diaper covers, extra blankets, swaddling wraps, etc. We figure we’ll end up buying a dresser eventually, and Griffin can use the cloth bins to hold his toys and things later on.

We found these crib sheets with jungle animals on clearance at Target, and they fit in great.

And lastly, here’s me at 9 months pregnant. 36 weeks, 6 days. I am HUUUUUGE. I have never weighed this much in my entire life. You don’t really realize how big you are until you see a side-on picture of yourself. Yikes.

One thing I’m finding as I’m making things for Griffin is that there’s a severe lack of knitting and sewing patterns for boys’ clothes. If we were having a girl, there would be more adorable patterns for skirts, dresses, pantaloons, tunics, pinafores, leggings, etc etc than I could possibly make in a lifetime. There is diddly squat out there for boys. 🙁 I may just have to concentrate on stuff like sewn/knitted toys and play costumes for him as he gets older.