Babies Part 3: Returning Home
Now What
Did they really just let you leave the hospital with a baby? Our delivery nurse with our oldest made the joke "no returns, and no refunds".
Getting home with the baby was such a relief, but it's also now all on you to figure things out. To say those first few days are overwhelming is a massive understatement, but it's magical.
There are no right or wrong decisions as to how you want to handle these first few days, just know you can ask for as much or as little help as you'd like. Again family and friends can be a great help here if that's what you want.
Food for Baby
Breast Feeding
Every 2 to 3 hrs
Nurse each side for 10 min, and should be able to let kiddo sleep or play for 1hr and a half, or 2hr.
Formula
If I remember correctly it said every 3 to 4 hrs, I'll have to come back to this since it wasn't needed for us.
Tracking
Surprise I still love knowing things. Now that your little one is born, it can be good to keep an eye on frequency of diapers / feeds / naps / etc. Especially for the first few days at home, the hospital will send you home with a paper tracker to make sure that baby is going through enough diapers. We decided that we wanted to keep tracking and using the app really helped.
Here you can see a ton of data, the purple bars are sleep times, yellow are feeding times, and next to those are diaper changes. Early days this looks insane, but as they get a bit older the chart looks a bit more calm.
Having this data recorded, while it does take some work upfront to jot it all down, has been great as we discuss changes to things like nap frequency, bedtime, or mealtimes. Especially if we notice that our little one is being weird, we can quickly reference things like when they last ate, or napped as well as identify how much time asleep they had today.