Lily's First Week Home

So today is Lily's One-Week birthday! Happy Birthday! Today is actually only our fifth day home, though. We were kept at the hospital until Wednesday night so they could give Lily antibiotics - she came out with a slight temperature, so the antibiotics were just in case she had an infection. I had some too. I decided I hate IV's. Lily didn't like hers either, but she was a good sport. She's generally a very contented and happy baby, it's wonderful. The nights aren't too bad (yet, crossing my fingers), but I suspect a lot of that is because my mom has been here helping us, and she'll take Lily during the night when she's fussy and let Ben and I sleep. She's actually going home today, so tonight will be our first night without a third person to help. It'll be interesting!

So before I gave birth I decided I really wanted to try to have an unmedicated birth, but... that didn't last long! I'd been been having strong contractions about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes apart for awhile when I finally decided to have an epidural. I am SO glad I decided to do it that way, because I think I would have been very upset and disappointed by my experience if I hadn't. After getting the epidural I was so much happier and able to enjoy the experience more. Ben was a lot happier too cuz I was much nicer. :) The whole birth took technically about 14 1/2 hours, because they started the pitocin about 8:00 AM, but it really only felt like 8 hours. The pitocin was giving me contractions and after a few hours they were 3 minutes apart, but I couldn't hardly feel them at all. It wasn't until 2:30 when they checked me again and decided that my water hadn't really broken and so they broke it that things really started happening. When I first came into the hospital I was 4 cm dilated, and I was still 4 cm when they checked me at 2:30. So I took about 7 hours to dilate the rest of the way after my water broke, and at 10 I started pushing. I pushed for about 35 minutes, and then Lily was born! Overall I was really happy with my experience. I liked my nurses a lot, and my doctor as well, and it was nice to have both my mom and Ben there. Ben was super supportive, he did great too!

It was been so much fun getting to know the baby that has been in my tummy for the last 8 1/2 months! She's so perfect, it's amazing. It's very cool to see the attributes she gets from me (blond hair, blue eyes, her nose) and from Ben (the shape of her eyes, her adorable chubby cheeks). We're still getting to know her personality, but she seems pretty easy going. She's not very hard to calm, and she really likes being swaddled.

She doesn't like baths or being undressed. We gave her her first bath at home on Saturday and she screamed the whole time. But she really liked being clean afterwards, and she's very awake afterwards too. She'll look at us and look all around and genereally be really cute. But that's a given, of course! :) She's also doing really well with breastfeeding. It took both of us a little while to get the hang of it, but it's going great now.

We put up more pictures on our home server at https://lemmonlife.homeserver.com/photos/ (Click on Lily week 1)

We had a funny surprise on Sunday - our fish had babies! A few weeks ago we bought Black Mollies, which are live-bearing fish, but we didn't know we got a girl and a boy, though my mom suspected the one fish was pregnant. We didn't think she was because we have had other fish look big like her and not be pregnant. But Ben went into the room to feed the fish yesterday and saw a teeny little black thing swimming around!

We found 9 alive baby fishies, and at least 3-4 dead ones. We had to put them in the net so they were seperated from their parents because the parent fish will eat the babies if you let them. I'm not sure what we'll end up doing with them. I think you can sell them to the fish store, so we'll probably do that at some point, though I would like to keep a couple. I have a feeling this is going to be happening every once in a while from now on though, so it'll be fun to see what breeding fish is like. We just have lots of babies around here now!