those first few days

Fledra coined the title on this post very early on while recognizing that no one or book prepares you for those first few days. No where do they warn you that you won’t be able to sleep because you need to make sure someone has eyes on your precious daughter 24×7. No where do they tell you that the anxiety of driving home from hospital will be nearly debilitating. Maybe that’s because you just need to experience it yourself.

Fledra and I did in fact take turns staying up all night after being discharged from the hospital. We weren’t sure if we’d wake up to sounds of distress, or if Madison would need to eat, or was too cold, or too warm, or too… I took the first shift and spent hours holding her in the glider in the nursery (thank you Mom & Dad). Then it was Fledra’s turn and I now realize that I was either too tired to ask her what she did, or too tired to remember what she said. Ultimately, that first night was really rough.

Close on the heels of not sleeping came a few disagreements over whether it was okay to sleep, or who had more sleep, etc. Clearly, this wasn’t a sustainable way to live but I didn’t call this post ‘every day for the rest of our lives’. We did end up settling in, realizing that we would wake up, understanding that Madison would be able to let us know if she was too hot/cold/hungry/covered in poo. We still had to figure out which of those it was, but it was a starting place.