So, yesterday we visited the baby clinic for our two week checkup. As those who have been through all this probably know, two weeks is the time at which a baby will normally have regained it's birth weight. Jeyanth, greedy guzzling thing that he is, has regained birthweight plus 180g. He's also grown 3cm longer (taller?), to 54cm, and he seems to be healthy in all respects.
Chris tells me that I must make a blog entry about my own perspective...
"Never before in the field of human endeavour, has so little (~3.5kg) occupied so much time". Well at least _my_ human endeavour.
I can blame my personality and a rigorous scientific training - but looking after a baby seems to me a constant process of data analysis. The data is being generated in real time, and you're constantly sifting it and responding to it, trying to recognise a pattern, trying to come up with a narrative that can explain both what has gone before, what is happening in the present, and have some predictive power. Of course, given the growth rate of babies, the system is changing constantly, so your narrative is always something of a moving average and mostly hopeless at predicting anything!
Don't get me wrong - this isn't ALL what the baby is like. There's plenty of the warm fuzzy side: the incredibly vulnerability and the fragility of the little bundle (which nevertheless is equipped with a pair of lungs entirely dedicated to getting what it wants), the lump in your throat when he looks you in the eye when you feed him, and the amazing trust babies seem to have in parents, so that when you pick up a screaming baby, they actually STOP screaming, for at least 30s.
Last night, Jeyanth lost his record of being the near-perfect, sleeping every night for eight hours with just one feed baby. It gave us just a taste of how lucky we have been for the last two weeks. Crying (except when eating) almost continuously from 8:30 till 2am.
Of course, to put things in perspective, that's a measure of how lucky we still are. Even if he was like that every night it would be a dream compared to the experiences of many of our friends, who have been feeding for an hour every two hours, night and day... We still managed five and a half hours sleep, with just one feed in the middle (which Chris didn't even wake up for).
But at 2am, after four hours of inexplicable crying, I think we had just a taste of what some people go through every day and night for weeks on end. And we're all the more grateful for it...
If there has been one blot on our otherwise close-to-perfect Jeyanth, it has been feeding. We seem now to have concluded that, for whatever reason, he jsut doesn't get enough milk - or quickly enough - when he breast feeds.
Fortunately, Sureka is able to express enough for him, so he can still get the benefit of his Amma's milk, and we're keeping on giving him one or two feeds each day from the breast, in the hope that he will figure it out as time goes by.
If he was a really fussy baby we probably wouldn't have the stamina for the routine of feeding and expressing (it does make each feed take much longer), but fortunately he sleeps well enough at night that we can keep up.
Fortunate also, that we don't have to worry about cooking, washing or cleaning the house :).
Stuart Elliot and Sandra Pengully had a baby girl yesterday - Jordan. They're in the same hospital as Dayan and Jahan, so we were able to visit them briefly this evening.
Three babies within two weeks, and they are all 'J's... Must be the trend.
Dayan and Duncan have had their baby!
Jahan Elijah McLeod, born at 9am 25th July (9 days early)
3.105kg, 49cm.
Photos will follow once we've had the chance to see them...
[edited to correct some details]
Seems strange to say that there hasn't been any major new news for the last few days. But it's mostly been more of the same - sleeping, feeding, bathing, changing nappies, and a few minutes each day just being awake and looking at the world around him.
Feeding is a bit of a mixed bag - he clearly isn't skilled enough at sucking yet, and doesn't get as much as he needs from his Amma, so we're giving his a top up from the bottle at the end of each feed. Mostly we can do this with expressed breast milk, with the occasional feed of formula when he needs it. Hopefully as he gets older he'll get better at feeding and we'll be able to drop the bottles.
The next major event in his life is the visit to the clinic on tuesday afternoon.
This evening Jeyanth went on his first outing. He, and all the stuff that accompanies him, went out to Springwood to Bible Study. I'm not sure how much he took in - especially since we arrived 45 minutes late. Mostly because his ever-so-clever daddy missed the turnoff and we went quite a long way further into the blue mountains than planned.
Still, the experience was basically a success. Sureka and I wanted to prove to ourselves that we were capable of doing something that wasn't 100% baby-centric, and we managed. Just. With a lot of help from Sureka's mum (aka our live-in cook, cleaner, baby minder, dog minder and general help).
So much for all the fuss the dogs were going to make.
Over the last few months we've cuddled a teddy bear (wrapped up in a bunny rug), we've kept the dogs off the sofas, we've brought a bunny rug smelling of Jeyanth home for them to sniff, we've packed them off to the kennel so that Jeyanth would be here when they came back...
Yesterday afternoon I picked Quin and Dibley up, and brought them in, everyone watching them to make sure they didn't get aggressive with Jeyanth. They took one sniff, and then trotted happily over to their beanbags and resumed their usual 'do not disturb' posture as if nothing had changed.
Like I said before, they are not the world's brightest dogs. Fortunately, they aren't the most jealous, either.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet world - a cable modem, a wireless network, a laptop and a USB camcorder - we've been able to link up with the USA (John, Claire, Jack and KT) and the UK (Chris' mum and dad) to show Jeyanth off...
The lesson for the day (well, last night really) - when using a microwave steriliser, it is really important to remember to put the water in. The alternative is a burnt tea towel, a melted steriliser, boiling water at 3am, and an early morning trip to K-Mart to buy a new one...
As I type, Jeyanth is hearing (listening to?) the Tchaikovsky' violin concerto for the first time (if you don't count the in-utero instances). A memorable milestone in his life experiences, I think.
We've assembled a collection of music to play in the nursery during feed times and as lullabyes. The collection has lots of Bach, some Mozart and Beethoven and a random handful of other baroque stuff. We decided that the Tchaikovsky was too 'interesting' to be designated to background music, so hence the special playing session this morning.
We need to get hold of some decent karnatic stuff...
So, Jeyanth is a week old today, and he and Sureka have been home for more than 24 hours. So far, it hasn't been too traumatic... We got a decent amount of sleep last night, since Jeyanth only woke up to feed once between midnight and 8am. It would be nice to think he's getting the idea of the difference between night and day, but it's probably a bit early to be that optimistic :).
They say most babies have one grumpy time of the day, and for Jeyanth it's certainly the evening, between 5 and 9ish he's much more unsettled. So I'm getting in a quick post before he wakes up!
Having Amma staying here means Sureka and I don't have to worry about cleaning the house or about feeding ourselves, which certainly makes life easier. It even meant I was able to get out today to buy a few of the things we discovered we still needed.
Sureka has even found some time today to work on the web site, so sometime soon you can expect a much more organised look to all the photos! A new address as well (http://jeyanth.goringe.net - although http://baby.goringe.net will continue to work). She promises to post something to the blog later today as well...
Of course, you can also email Jeyanth - jeyanth (at) goringe (dot) net :).
In two minutes I'm off to the hospital to bring Sureka and Jeyanth home.
Wish us luck...
I've only uploaded the new videos in MPEG-1, so they are about 10MB per minute. If you're on a slow link and would like some more lower quality stuff, email me (or say so in the comments).
The two new videos are the first bath (12MB) and Kat French with Jeyanth (2MB). Access them from the Jeyanth home page baby.goringe.net.
Finally... a few more photos from earlier this week are online.
Two days old
Three and five days old
More video coming soon.
Jeyanth just doesn't seem to get the idea that feeding is about sucking, not chewing. As a result, our attempts to get him back onto the breast have come to nothing.
So, the plan now is that for the next few days Sureka will continue to express, and we'll feed Jeyanth the expressed milk and then top him up with fomula. Next tuesday we'll go back in and have another go at getting him onto the breast.
He is, however, putting on plenty of weight (100g since day 4), unlike many babies with feeding problems. So he's clearly getting enough to eat. He just can't figure out how to get it direct from the source.
So, I'm back from the dentist, with one fewer tooth (or, to be more accurage, the same number of teeth, just one of them is now in a bag in my pocket not in my mouth).
I'm on a four-hourly regime of pain killing and antibiotic drugs, which combined with Sureka's three-hourly expressing and Jeyanth's moderately random feeding, will make for some interesting sleep patterns in the next week or two...
Current plan is still for Sureka to come home on friday, so the dogs go off to the kennels for a little holiday. They are not going to know what hit them.
I brought home a wrap that Jeyanth had been in so they could have a smell of it, but they seemed confused. Perhaps they thought it was odd that I was cuddling and giving lots of attention to something which they knew was basically a blanket.
Sometime I worry that our dogs are smart enough to think we're stupid. Then I look at them, and remind myself that there is no way that these are smart dogs.
So, Jeyanth has spent most of the day screaming...
As an added bonus, Sureka's glasses broke today - as anyone who knows her will know, she is completely blind without them, and contact lenses aren't a lot of good when you are up every three hours (and more) day and night. That combined with increasing tooth pain for Chris (just 17 hours till they take it out...) led to one of our less happy days with baby.
On the other hand, he did get back onto the breast today, and had at least one decent feed (this evening). And we managed to get Sureka's glasses fixed, thanks to OPSM. So it's not all bad news.
Apologies for the lack of updated pictures... they'll be coming soon, I hope.
Lots of people are asking if it 'feels real' yet. Simple answer - no. Not at all.
The nearest I can get to describing it is that right now, Jeyanth feels, much of the time, like some sort of complex puzzle - a game, where you need to do all the right things at the right time and in the right order to get through to the next stage. Like playing Myst, but smellier.
I'm sure that will change once we get him home. At the moment, we have so much support and advice from the staff at the Hills Hospital (I can't say enough good things about them) that there is no real sense of responsibility, no real sense of crisis. That's probably just as well. We'll try to master the flight simulator before we fly the plane...
This evening we finally figured Sureka was enough off drugs to break open the Moet and Chandon with Dayan, Duncan and Chrishan. So, in a few hours, Jeyanth will (indirectly) have had his first taste of champagne. His last, for a while, too.
More visitors today - I don't know who came during the day, but Rob, Wayne and Kat French (the totally obsessed Katherine) came to meet Jeyanth in the evening.
As for my tooth - well, I have to go under on thursday to have it taken out :(.
I'll put these on the homepage as well.
Visiting is 10-11am, 3:30-4:30pm and 7-8pm.
Birth weight 3490g
Length 51cm
Weight on morning of day 4 - 3210g
Unfortunately, Jeyanth's dad has had to come home from work with a terrible toothache, and will probably be having a wisdom tooth removed in the next 36 hours....
Just back from an evening with Jeyanth and Sureka. Highlight today - the first bath... basically a sequence of very happy relaxed baby alternating with screaming baby. He's hard to please :).
Jeyanth is a lot happier now than he was this morning, having had some feeds of formula (he's on some special newborn formula). Sureka is on the breast pump after every feed, to encourage her milk to come in so that we can get back to breast feeding. At the moment she just gets a fraction of a mL for twenty minutes on the pump, which really doesn't seem fair reward for effort!
I'm just starting to feel as if this is really happening. Most of the time there is still a sort of unreality about it, as if Jeyanth was more a set of puzzles to solve than our son - but then I hold him when he's screaming, and sometimes he stops, and I can kid myself that it's because he knows who I am...
I'll try to get some more recent photos up tomorrow, but for now it's time for me to get some sleep.
Today, we had to decide to supplement Jeyanth's feeding with formula. A combination of the Caesarian and Jeyanth struggling to latch on properly has delayed Sureka's milk coming in, so for a day or two Jeyanth will be having formula (and/or any Colostrum Sureka can express). Sureka will be continuing to express so that, when her milk does come in, we have a good chance of getting Jeyanth back onto the breast. Until then, it's a shame to need a bottle, but, having had his first good feed, he's a much happier baby.
I'm back at work (planning a week off once Sureka is out of hospital), so my only input for the next few hours is by the phone. Though I don't anticipate working late tonight :).
Finishing the catch up...
On sunday, Jeyanth got a bit more fussy about his feeding; whether because he wasn't getting what he wanted, or because Sureka couldn't hold him properly because of the wound to her stomach, or just because it was one of those things, who can say?
The visitors started arriving on Sunday as well. Sureka's amma, and aunt and uncle, some cousins and some close friends dropped by to see the three of us.
Need to do a bit of catching up, right...? Read the whole timeline.
Jeyanth was due on 5th July, and when nothing had happened by 11th, Sureka went into the Hills hospital to start the induction process. A gel was applied to ripen the cervix at around 9pm.
About 2:30am, contractions started, and by 9am they were strong, and about 4 minutes apart. At 11am, Sureka's waters were broken by manual intervention.
Over the next couple of hours little if any dilation occured, and the baby started to show signs of distress (dropping heart rate, and then evidence of meconium). At 2pm it was concluded that we would need an emergency caesarian.
In theatre, Sureka was given a spinal block, and then cut open. We were the other side of a sheet, but once the head was out, I was invited to look over and watch my son being pulled out of a hole sliced in my wife's stomach. Not something you do every day.
After being briefly introduced to Sureka, the (as of yet unnamed) baby was taken off to the special care nursery, where he had to have a tube down his throat to drain the gunk he had swallowed, and an oxygen cage placed over his head, because his breathing wasn't as deep as it needed to be.
By 4pm Sureka was out of the recovery room, but confined to bed, so couldn't come to see Jeyanth. I nipped home to make the phone calls and send the emails, then came back in to hear that the paedatrician had visited and seemed happy. The tube had been removed from his throat, and the oxygen pressure was being gradually reduced. By 6:30pm they were able to get Jeyanth out of the special atmosphere completely, and at 8:30pm he was taken for his first cuddle with his amma.
That first night, Jeyanth stayed under observation in the special care nursery, being brought out to feed when he wanted it, and by sunday morning he was off the monitors, Sureka was off the drips, and something as close to normality as possible had been acheived.
So, to celebrate the birth of our son, Jeyanth Joshua Goringe, I launch this new weblog. Jeyanth was born saturday afternoon (12th July) at 2:35pm, by emergency caesarian. Sureka and Jeyanth now both doing well, almost two days on...