You guys,
There’s one thing I’m completely consumed by in the first months of my baby’s life:
Sleep training.
Some people think sleep training means letting their baby cry it out until they fall asleep, but it simply means putting the baby on a schedule. Choosing to not sleep train is choosing to not sleep through the night and why would anyone in their right mind do that.
Look, when babies are first born they have to eat every 2.5 to 3 hours. That means I’m getting 90-minute stints of sleep. It’s a form of mild torture - cruel and unusual punishment.
I can’t live like this forever.
So I put her on the schedule. 2.5 hour stretches during the day and 3 hours at night. I wake her up when it’s time to eat. I follow the same routine each time: wake, change diaper, feed, try to facilitate some awake time (so she’s not awake between feedings during the night), then swaddle her up to sleep until we do it all over again in an hour.
The routine and schedule is just as much for me as it is for her. According to the Bible, er, I mean, Babywise, “Routine feedings encourage Baby’s hunger metabolism to organize into predictable cycles. Erratic feedings or “clusters of feeding” discourage this.”
Consistency leads to predictability. We’re heading into Week 5 with Layla and she knows what to expect. Since she was born three weeks early we’re a little behind schedule, but soon those three hours stretches during the night will turn into four, and by Week 10 she should be sleeping from 11pm-5am.
Which means I’ll be sleeping from 11pm-5am. And everyone (read: Sam) will be happier because Mama is well rested.
Essay of the Week
This week’s guest post comes from my friend, Bryce Longton. And you guessed it, she’s another Write of Passage alumni! (What I’m trying to say is, I’ve met 95% of my online friends either through or because of Write of Passage.)
Bryce gave birth to her third (and FINAL) baby last summer. The circumstances were scary and her story was unlike any birth story I’ve ever heard.
I asked her to share it.
Follow Bryce on Twitter and check out her website.
Now buckle up. This one’s intense.
A Birth Story
That time I had a baby and a hysterectomy at the same time.
By Bryce Longton
Childbirth is, as I like to say, metal.
For my first, I pushed (and pushed) for three hours before his debut. With my second - they said it would be so much faster, so much easier, and haha it was not. I pushed and pushed (on the squat bar even!) for five hours and THEN had a c-section because she was fairly diagonal and didn’t really want to straighten out to get out. But my third, oh my third - this birth was truly metal.
Here's the story of my third (and final final) baby:
Let’s start this tale by rewinding back to my 20-week anatomy scan. I started getting red flags on my scans for a rare condition called Placenta Accreta (me and Kim Kardashian).
Basically it’s where your placenta grows too deeply into your uterus. There are three levels of “too deep” - bad, pretty bad, and wow this is terrible-bad.
So I start having scans every two weeks and each time it’s flip-flopped. One time yes this is the thing and the next, maybe it’s not. Placenta Accreta is hard to diagnose and to top it off it usually presents with an anterior placenta (mine was posterior- making it very hard to see). Each time the ultrasound tech would make the same confused face - tilting their head like a puppy that’s heard an unfamiliar sound - and always ended up with each doctor proclaiming "hmm this is weird.
This leads up to me having an MRI at 30 weeks pregnant which finally seemed to tilt the tables in Placenta Accreta's favor. BTW the MRI was very uncomfortable 1/10 do not recommend at 30 weeks pregnant. I had to lay flat on my back in a very tiny tube while they played incredibly loud sounds that I could hear plainly even though I had ear plugs in. The baby, to his credit, acted like he was in the clerb in Berlin and danced the entire time. I thought I might pass out and/or vomit for each of the 30 long minutes in there.
So they diagnose me with the “wow this is terrible-bad version,” aka Placenta Percreta and things start moving fast. I’m transferred to the high risk team and start meeting with the various teams - and learn that the rumors are true - I will most very likely have a hysterectomy at the same time as my c-section which they tentatively schedule for five weeks before the baby’s due date. Luckily, the hospital I am at, and have had two previous deliveries at is THE hospital for this rare condition. Apparently there are roughly 20 women in the tri-state area a year that have this, and they all get transferred to my hospital (Columbia Presbyterian in NYC).
I schedule meetings with the various teams that same week, but only manage to meet with the oncologist surgeon (for the hysterectomy part) and the anesthesiologist before things twist into emergency territory…
It’s now 4:30am on the day he was born, a full 8.5 weeks before his due date, and I wake up with a gush of fluid. Now my water has broken each time to start my labors with my older two, and this felt like that… but slightly off.
In the bathroom I see that it’s blood and then there’s just a stream of blood and clots (egg-size clots for those that are curious) and I’m panicking. Wake up my husband, we call the neighbors to come sit in our house with our two sleeping children until my in-laws can arrive 20-minutes later, and get in the car with me in a towel and a T-shirt and my husband tries to obey a red light and I yell something like ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME, and then we speed to the hospital, me texting my OB (who has been with me all three pregnancies).
Get there, husband grabs a wheelchair and I go up to triage where they try to get me to answer insurance questions and ask about the spelling of my name until I say hello? I’m bleeding heavily and am a high risk patient, that seems to move the needle a bit - which moves even more when the attending comes out and says she heard about me in the Placenta Accreta presentation yesterday (!). She gets me on the bed and tries to do an exam but sees all the clots and then things start really moving fast. I get two IVs placed, a shot of steroids (for his lung development), a bag of magnesium (for his brain development - honestly not as bad as I’ve heard) and a urinary catheter (so not fun) meanwhile they are sending the bat signal to the entire team that’s been put on my roster, and they all come running.
Get into the OR and it’s go time. The anesthesiologist puts a line in both wrists, both elbows, my neck (!!!!!) and an epidural/spinal. It was… a lot. The reason for the neck needle is because the big danger of this condition is bleeding to death, and they need instant access to transfuse blood into my system. I end up taking 9 units of blood, which is double my total blood volume.
Baby comes out at 7:38am (we arrived about 5:15am) and then the surgeon steps in to do the hysterectomy. I was awake (but mostly blurred/out of it) the whole time. Everything went very smoothly, and when the placenta/uterus combo came out everyone was taking pictures (#influencer) - apparently this was a true rarity.
I was in the high risk recovery area for 24-hours and then got downgraded (upgraded?) to the regular Labor & Delivery recovery unit, where I remained until I busted out of that joint four days later.
Baby boy spent a total of nine weeks (VERY LONG WEEKS) in the NICU, more than doubling in size from 4 lbs 3 ounces to 9 lbs 8 ounces, and arrived home on his due date.
He’s now 7 months old, clocking in at 16 lbs, eating his weight in bananas, pears and sweet potatoes and desperately trying to push up on his hands and knees so he can start to move around like his big brother and sister.
And me? I’m down one uterus but up one kid, and thrilled (thrilled!) our family is complete and I never ever have to give birth again.
—
Until next week,
Charlie