20 Days of Harrison

Today is Harrison’s 20th day out of the womb. There’s no real point to this post other than describing what it’s like to have a three week old baby.

As I said in my other post, the first few days are surreal; we’d look at him every so often and say to ourselves “holy shit, we have a son now“.

The next week or two are lived in 2-3 hour stretches between feeds.

The ideal scenario is he’s fully fed, freshly changed, and just fell asleep. Then the clock starts ticking until his next feed. We have about 2 hours to do whatever we need to do. A lot of the time that answer is to nap. Some of the time it’s get stuff done around the house or make a trip to the grocery store. Most of the time it’s sit there and watch a movie or show because we don’t feel like doing much else.

The non-ideal scenario is he’s fully fed and freshly changed, but just spit up and starts crying a bunch and needs to be fed again. And also just had a huge blow-out shit so we have to change him again, and while we’re changing him he pees all over himself so we have to change everything. And once he’s fixed up he won’t stop crying unless we feed him again. I realize that although there are plenty of stretches of peace, I have to be ready at a moments notice to do something for the baby, which makes playing online chess increasingly difficult.

Unsurprisingly, sleep has been the biggest change, as I’m sure it is for everyone. There’s no “let’s go to bed early” to catch up on sleep. Last night for example was as good of a night as we could hope for, but it’s still challenging with interruptions:

• Bed at 10:30pm.
• Up from 2:00am – 3:00am for a feed.
• Sleep from 3:00am – 5:30am.
• Up from 5:30am – 6:30am for a feed.
• Sleep from 6:30am – 8:30am.

The question I naturally ask myself is “has this been easier or harder than I expected?“. My shameful answer is it’s been easier than I expected, and most of that is it’s just easier for the guy since I don’t have to feed the baby. It’s undoubtedly been harder for Meg and she’s been doing a great job. I try to help out where I can, but I think most guys feel some sense of guilt when the baby cries at 4am and realistically, they can’t do much to help.

Overall though, we’re doing well, and most importantly, he’s doing well. I plan to do another post on parent appreciation, but until then, this is a mini check-in post.