Big Brother

So everyone has been asking about how Paras has reacted to Sahana's arrival. He's taking it fairly well, though of course he is jealous of all the attention she gets. He doesn't take it out on her, though -- he's very sweet with her, actually. Mainly we see the acting out when he gets home from school, when he's already really tired. I have been checking on him at school, though, and they say that he's been great there, no acting out (or at least not more than usual). I think it's helped that he moved to his own room six weeks before the baby arrived, so he didn't feel totally displaced. Plus he gets a lot of individual attention from the au pair, which is not the same as Mommy and Daddy but he's not completely abandoned.

Before it's totally outdated, I thought I would post a short video of Paras' first meeting with Sahana, the day we brought her home from the hospital.

Groundhog Day

It's hard to write updates at this point because every day is pretty much the same. Plus I have no real new poses for Sahana to take pictures in. Basically she's either got a bottle in her mouth, is playing on her play gym, under her mobile, or in her bouncy seat, or she's sleeping. And I have pictures of her doing all of those things. So I'm going to wait until she's doing something more exciting before putting some new pics up.

I am very proud of her, though -- last night I fed her at 10:30 and then she slept till 3:30 a.m. Another feeding and she was set till it was time to wake up at 7 am. I wake her up at 7 am no matter what, as I am following the same book I did with Paras, which is called The Contented Little Baby by Gina Ford. I think Gina Ford is a genius -- she gives a very strict feeding/napping schedule for the first year, and the crazy thing is that it works. She helped me get Paras from complete spaz who was waking up every two hours to sleeping through the night by the time he was 11 weeks old. That is my singular mission right now: to get Sahana to sleep through the night by the time I go back to work in September. This is crucial because I am completely dysfunctional if I don't get a good night's sleep.

Because I'm such a Nazi about the schedule, it's very hard for me to delegate her care to the au pair right now. I like for things to be done in a certain way, and the only person I trust to do it right is Andy. If I tell Andy that she must stay awake till x time, Andy will absolutely make sure she stays awake until then. Or, if I know she needs to have a good feed and should finish the entire bottle, Andy will make sure she finished the bottle, even if it takes an hour (she is a super slow eater). Some of his methods may be questionable, but he gets the job done, which is what is important at this stage. The au pair isn't really used to this -- she wants to run to Sahana and check her diaper if she makes the slightest squawk during a nap, or she'll feed Sahana while she's still swaddled (which just puts Sahana right back to sleep). So right now I have a million instructions written out in black sharpie taped to the refrigerator on when she feeds, when she naps, how to wake her up from a nap, how to feed her, etc. The nice thing about paying someone to help you (as opposed to a family member) is that they kind of have no choice but to do things the way you want them done. And I will say that the au pair has picked up my techniques pretty quickly so I'm able to relax more when I leave Sahana with her.

OK, I know a post is disappointing without new pics so I'll add another video of (surprise) Sahana playing in her crib:

Video Experiment

I'm trying out the iMovie program on my Mac. Here's a short clip of Paras and Sahana:

My First Post

I've decided that this time around I'm going to keep my own blog. I think I was inspired by Andy's characterization of my labor and delivery as "easy"...um, easy for whom? It was easy for Andy -- 3 hours (compared to 11 last time), which left him time to go down to the cafeteria and chow on chicken nuggets while I was being sewn up and manhandled in all sorts of ways that would not be appropriate for me to describe on a family blog.

The REAL story is that childbirth is a horrible, horrible thing. Eve really screwed it up for us women. Andy asked me what a contraction feels like and I referred him to the scene at the end of Braveheart, when Mel Gibson is tied up spread eagle and being disemboweled while he's still alive. That, of course, is completely separate from the actual delivery, which feels about as bad as you can imagine it feeling. Put it this way, in the middle of pushing, I started screaming, "I can't do it! Can you please help me?" to the doctor -- I was hoping she'd whip out a vacuum or forceps or whatever they use to pull the baby out but, being the Yale Health Plan, she said, "No, keep pushing," and left me to my misery.

What about the meds, you ask? Well, I barely got them. The Yale Health Plan tried to trick me into having a natural delivery. I kept asking for relief but they kept putting me off, telling me I wasn't far enough along. Then, when they finally agreed to give it to me, I was almost too far along -- the nurse said, "We might not have time," at which point I think I probably looked like I was going to kill her because the anesthesiologist came in soon after that. Of course, when I finally got the epi, it was time to push, so I was saved from 4, maybe 5 contractions.

So it certainly wasn't "easy." I know it's supposed to be better the second time around, but apart from being faster, I think it was worse. I found out that they had drugged me out on morphine with Paras, which is probably why I don't remember much. Andy is right, though, that the aftermath was much better this time in that I could walk and use the bathroom.

I did have a complication after the delivery, which was that I had a 101-103 degree fever for three days after I got home from the hospital. After running some tests, the doctors told me I had a strep A infection, and not in my throat (though it turned out my delivering doctor had strep throat...I won't go down the road of how I got it). Apparently this was known as "childbed fever" in the 17th and 18th centuries and was the leading cause of maternal death -- the doctors used to do autopsies on the women who had died the day before and would then go and treat other pregnant women and deliver babies, all without changing clothes and washing their hands. Fast forward to 2009: I had the same illness that killed Henry the VIII's third wife. Fortunately, I was being treated by the one doctor at the Yale Health Plan who believes in antibiotics, so I was prescribed about three of them and felt better in another week.

I took the infection -- and the article about breastfeeding that was in April issue of The Atlantic -- as signs from God that I shouldn't put myself through the ordeal of breastfeeding, so I switched to formula...which was the best decision I ever made. Who knew babies could be so much fun when you're not chained to a couch with your boobs hanging out for eight hours a day? I know some people out there really enjoy breastfeeding and I don't mean to denigrate it for those who had a good experience. But I have to say it was a bad experience for me the first time around, so I'm glad to have the freedom to enjoy my maternity leave this time. Plus I'm a control freak so I like knowing how much Sahana is drinking each day.

Speaking of Sahana, let's talk about her. She is very cute, as Andy said, much cuter than Paras was when he was born. She's much calmer, too. It's nice that we know what we're doing this time around, because we were able to structure her feedings from the get-go and she's already able to go from 11pm to 6 am with only one feeding in between. Anyway, here are some photos from Sahana's second week: