Raising Rosalie: A week old today

How do you suppose Rosalie celebrated her first week of life? That's right by sleeping, eating, and pooping!

It's only been a week, but it seems like a lot longer than that in some ways and I can't believe just a week ago today, she made her way out from the inside world to the outside world. How our lives have changed.

Adam and I have had a nice quiet week together adjusting to parenthood and learning how to manage our lives in 2 to 3 hour increments that revolve around this tiny human being. A big change from the first four days, was in the feeding department. Initially, we had to supplement Rosalie's feedings with pumped breast milk. The feedings took at least an hour. Here's how it would break down:

Adam would wake Rosalie up by changing her diaper while I prepped the pillows, boppy, burp cloth and nipple shield to be ready for the feeding as well as prepped the bottles for pumping afterwards. (~10 min)
Adam would bring Rosalie to me and I would breast feed her for as long as she would stay awake. Sometimes getting her to latch would take only a minute or two and sometimes 15 min. We would do everything we could to wake her when she fell asleep which seemed to be every other minute. Tactics included tickling her feet, moving her arm in a windmill fashion, tapping her chin and when necessary, putting a cold, wet washcloth to her face. (~15-45 min)
Once done with that we'd feed her the supplement through a feeding tube into the nipple shield that was on my breast. This was definitely a two man operation, with Adam holding and filling the syringe / tube with pumped milk and me holding Rosalie to my chest so she could drink it. This went pretty fast because Rosalie happily welcomed the free flowing milk that she didn't have to work so hard to eat. (~5 - 10 min)
After the feeding was done, Adam would burp her, change her diaper, swaddle her, and wash out the feeding tube, while I started my 15 minutes of pumping, which was followed by cleaning out all of the bottles. (~20 min)

And we did that routine every 3 hours....meaning we had a 2 hour break in between each feeding.

On Monday, we had an awesome lactation consultant come to our house. She helped me with my breastfeeding technique and told us to up our feedings to 10 times a day instead of 8, which enabled us to stop pumping and it also helps Rosalie learn how to better latch on and breastfeed. We've tried this new routine for the past 2 days and it has been working well. Even though we have more feedings, the time it takes is only between 15-30 min as opposed to an hour.

We also took her to the doctor again to check on her birth weight. She was 5 pounds, 8 ounces on Saturday and on Monday was back up to 5 pounds 11.8 ounces. So only about 2 ounces to go until she's back at birth weight! The doc says she's looking good and we don't have to go back until her one month check-up.

Below are some photos from her first week. Most of them are of her sleeping, but this first one is of the many funny faces she makes. I did not include any photos of her pooping...but Adam can tell you all about it. We've separated tasks so that I'm in charge of all input and he's in charge of all output. He's been peed and pooped on several times now!