Easing into "routine"

Woody's still a very monitored baby, considering that he's home from the hospital. We get calls on a daily basis from the hospital, the school district (they have early childhood development people), the health care supply company, and from Child Protective Services* (kidding) about how we're handling the peanut. At the end of last week, Maggie got a call from one of the followup NICU nurses asking how Woody was doing. It had been a very difficult couple of days, so Maggie went into a rant about how he won't sleep very well and he spits up after many meals and is generally a pain in the ass, and then the nurse said something along the lines of "is that all? I've been dreading making this call all day!"

See, Woody is mostly just being a normal little kid, as opposed to being a holy terror or having lingering health issues that make his existence difficult, I guess. The nurse told Maggie that most of the 23 week preemies don't have a very good time when they are released, and some sizable proportion of them wind up back in the hospital within a week or two. Which makes us feel a little better.

In the meantime, we've been slowly getting into a routine, where Woody has been sleeping, more or less consistently, from around 11 at night to 2 or 3 in the morning, and then asleep until 6 after that. This is really tough for the sucker who has to do the 2 or 3 shift (the hell shift, I call it), but for the other one of us it means that we can usually count on 6 hours of sleep or so. Which ought to be good enough, except that it never is considering the sleep deficit we're both running. I know it's a total cliche about new parents' sleep deprivation, and it is not one that I was ever very sympathetic to, but it is not an exaggeration to say that it can be just devastating to your thinking and productivity.

Fortunately, we're looking forward to some great visitors over the next couple of weeks, and we're going to be using their lack of familiarity with Woody to our advantage. Grammie, for instance, just wants to get her hands on "that baby" and because of that I'm sure she will not mind holding him and feeding him and burping him and changing him while we, say, pass out for a few hours.

We're still having a great time with him, though, and despite my complaints we really love having him here.

*Our latest joke with no taste, a la the blood pressure of "180 over preeclampsia", is that they're going to call CPS on us if Woody, say, doesn't gain weight over a week, or cries too much during a visit from the home health nurse. Yeah, pretty funny stuff.