The logistics of a newborn

Looking after a newborn, especially one with feeding issues like ours, requires almost military organisation.

We were keen to see if all our preps at home before the birth of Zoe would actually be useful for the real thing.

The bassinet we bought seems to be working well. It is on a wooden frame, with a cloth rectangular basket suspended from the sides. She seems to like it, and more importantly, it is light enough to fold up and move around the house.

This proved to be very important in the first days, because Sydney decided to turn on a late spring heatwave for Zoe's first week at home. It was 35 degrees C on Tuesday and the air con in our bedroom at the top of the house just wasn't cutting it. The temp kept rising and hit about 28 degs during the middle of the day, so there was no way she could sleep up there in that heat.

So we decamped her bed to the office, which has a more powerful air-con. She is in with us at night, which is definitely the best way since we live in a 3 storey house and I don't like the idea of running up and down the stairs at night (I do enough of that during the day!).

But 'Zoe's room' is the spare room on the first floor, which is where her change table and chest of drawers is. So during the day, I feed her in the lounge room on the ground floor, change her on the second floor and she sleeps on the top floor. Its fine and I don't mind the exercise (so far!!).

At night, we need everything for a nappy change - nappies, wipes, hand desanitiser, nappy bin and terry nappy to put under her for nappy changes, in our bedroom. Then I just do the nappy change on our bed.

The real issue is the express pumping. I am now just doing this during daylight hours (6am to 9pm), so the pump is in the lounge room with its tubes, and next to the kitchen where we are cleaning and sterilising each set of bottles and funnels before each session.

The routine I started with out of hospital was this:

4 hourly feeds
Express pumping between each feed
Give 30 ml top up (can be formula or expressed breast milk) after each feed

But it wasn't working out so well, because I wasn't getting much milk, and also because it was completely exhausing. So we called in a lactation consultant, who was fantastic.

She recommended not expressing in the night feeds to give me a rest, and expressing before the feed so that we had a good supply of breast milk ready to give Zoe by bottle should she be too tired to suck.

So now the routine is:

Feeds at 6am, 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm, and then whatever she wakes up for during the night
Express 20 mins or so before each feed
Give 30 ml bottle (expressed plus topped up with formula)

The reason for this is that Zoe just doesn't have the strength yet to suck all of the milk she needs. So I let her have a go on both breasts, and if she's too sleepy or can't manage it, it doesn't matter because she gets the 30ml from the bottle anyway. We've bought a small esky cool box to keep any formula in at night in the bedroom so I don't have to come down to the kitchen.

The aim is to tip the balance so that she gets most of her milk from sucking and any extra from the top-up bottle. I'm not yet sure how we will get to this point but for now, the routine is working well.

We are getting more wet nappies (a key sign - need 6-8/day) and she is starting to wake ahead of time for more of her feeds. In her first week, she almost never woke for a feed. She is also more alert at feed times, and is doing more fussing between feeds (more like newborn behaviour!!).

I am coping well so far, falling asleep literally in seconds after the night feeds (as long as she doesn't fuss around too much!), and also catching an hour or two during the day. So far, this seems to be enough. I'm trying to take things just one day at a time and not look to the future, and also to enjoy our beautiful girl. I knew it would be like this, so having that expectation ahead of time has really helped.

After all, it can't be too bad - I'm still managing to blog :-)