Hi D Ho and welcome to my first update on life with Little Lady. We have had a great first week and we are all still on a high from her birth! Little Man is getting on really well with his new little sister. He’s so gentle with her and loves to look at her and give her kisses. It’s strange but all of a sudden Little Man seems so grown up and so heavy – I really struggled to lift him up a few times this week!
Little Lady started to develop some jaundice so my main focus during this first week was keeping her close to me to establish breastfeeding, letting her feed as often as she wants in order to help clear her jaundice and to help her start gaining weight. On her day 3 check by the Public Health Nurse she had just lost 150g – only a 3.7% drop – go boobies! (New born babies lose weight quickly after being born with up to a 10% drop being normal). All her other checks went well too and the PHN happy with how Little Lady was doing!
Sleeping has been going really well, between co-sleeping and breastfeeding we are waking very little during the night and everyone is getting plenty of rest (very unlike when her big brother arrived). At the moment Little Lady spends most of the night curled up to me in our bed. We have a co-sleeper attached too which is great for creating extra space when Little Man tumbles in on top of us in the morning – see my previous post on how we set this up.
In relation to my own post baby update, thanks to my successful VBAC (natural delivery after c-section) I was up and about lots all week and feeling really good and happy. No sign of the baby blues this time around either thankfully. I’m still sore from the delivery but nothing compared to the pain after my c-section. I find the pain is worse some days rather than others, I think I overdo it somedays and pay for it the next 😦
Weight wise I put on a total of 26 Lbs during this pregnancy and at the end of week 1 I’ve lost 20 Lbs! Only 6 Lbs of baby weight left after the first 7 days is pretty good going! My bump has really flattened down very quickly and I’m back in some of my pre-pregnancy clothes already – check out my pre pregnancy jeans below (trust me this did not happen after my first pregnancy)!
At just four days old we ventured out of the house for our first proper family trip for a new born photo shoot with the wonderful Maya Noonan. We wanted to get these done as soon as possible – new born babies are sleepiest during their first two weeks and this is the best time to do a photo shoot like this. With Little Man we left it too late, and he was closer to 3 weeks old when we went for his photoshoot. At this stage he had well woken up and he refused to co-operate for photos, crying and crying – in fact we had to reschedule the photoshoot altogether in the end.
Luckily this time around Little Lady was posing like a professional with Maya – as was Little Man. Maya got some fabulous photos – heres sneak peak of some of my favourite images from the shoot:
After our photoshoot we headed out to lunch in the Huntsman. I had a couple lunches here while I was pregnant and everyone always ordered the toblerone cheesecake for desert – it always looked so good because I couldn’t have any, so I was delighted to dig into a big piece of toblerone cheesecake at lunch. For some strange reason I’d also been craving Guinness since Little Lady was born so I finally got the glass of Guinness that I’d been dying for (thats half a pint I swear in the photo below – don’t you love the cute mini half pint glasses).
On top of satisfying a few cravings I also got to feed Little Lady for the first time while out and about. Its amazing the confidence that comes with your second baby, I did feed Little Man in public but I was a lot more conscious of it at the beginning with him and it seemed a lot harder to do back then. This time around feeding Little Lady out and about seems so easy. I think babies pick up on their mothers feelings on this, if your stressed or anxious about feeding they will be too making the whole process more difficult. Look at the photo above – you’d never realise I’m feeding Little Lady in it!
Finally we rounded off the week with some very special visitors – Grandad and Nana Marie came to meet Little Lady for the very first time along with her soon to be Godfather PJ. Little Lady happily accepted cuddles from everyone and some beautiful gifts while I happily accepted a bottle of champagne :-).
So thats the story of how our first week went with our new Little Lady. Its been a great first week and surprisingly a lot easier than we had expected, heres hoping that trend continues!
Maverick Mammy 