Three-week Newbie Parents FAQ

We've survived the first 3 weeks!  We're super thankful for the help we've received from family in the area, particularly S's mom, who's been living with us since little D's birth.  It really does take a village to raise a child.  We've also been encouraged by the visits, emails, phone calls, and gifts from friends at the hospital and at home.  In lieu of the lack of sleep we're experiencing, here's an FAQ update on how things are going, what's happened the first three weeks of our dear son's life, and how our lives are changing, based on the most frequent questions we've been getting.  I originally intended this to be a short update in the first week, but it ended up being rather long and covering the last 3 weeks.

Labor and Birth

1. 38 hours?!
1. Yup, Shally slogged through 38 hours of contractions before finally giving birth to little Duncan. 
2. The contractions started around 4:30 am early Thursday, 7/7,  and slowly progressed during the day to 4-1-1 (4 minutes apart, lasting 1 minute each, for 1 hour) at about 7 pm, at which point we went to the hospital and found out she hadn't even begun dilating yet.  This was rather despairing because we weren't sure whether the length of the labor would take too much out of Shally to do the natural birth that we had planned.  Being at the hospital was kind of stressful, so after a few more hours we drove back home to try and get some rest.  (This short and unproductive stay ended up costing quite a bit of money anyway).
3. Shally still didn't get any sleep that night, but compared to the previous day when we were trying all the tricks we knew to help progress the contractions (bouncing on an exercise ball, walking, etc.), this time we just relaxed and listened to music.  By the next morning's checkup, to our surprise she was already at 4 cm without our doing anything!  Lesson learned - don't try so hard, the body can tell when you're stressed.  We went straight to the hospital, dealt with the hardest parts of labor without getting an epidural, and welcomed Duncan into our arms in the evening.  By the end, Shally was so ready for it to be all over that when it came time to finally push (which takes, on average, 45 minutes to 2 hours), she got him out in 13 minutes - an unofficial record for the hospital, according to the awesome nursing staff.
2. What was the most memorable part of the labor/birth experience?
1. Well, we won't forget about 38 hours, that's for sure.  But seeing our son being born increased my admiration for and amazement at Shally's toughness and perseverance.  Plus, the first time he opened his eyes, looked at us, and grabbed my finger - that's probably my favorite memory.
3. How'd you get the name?
1. Probably doesn't take a genius to look at our little guy's name and connect the dots to my favorite NBA player of the last 15 years, Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs.  However, it was actually Shally who first proposed it as the name.  We were bouncing names off each other by naming off important/influential people from our histories - people we knew, authors, fictional characters (she shot down Aragorn pretty quickly), activists, and the like, and when I started throwing out my favorite athletes, we landed on Duncan as a name we both liked that had personal meaning for me.  An awesome leader, teammate, competitor, and classy guy, he has a pretty good namesake to live up to.
2. That wasn't the only Spurs-related story related to our son, though.  A while ago I explained the team's "pounding the rock" mantra to her and ended up quoting the phrase several times during labor when encouraging her to keep her spirits up - that even when it seemed like nothing productive was happening during the contractions, each one was in fact helping to move him out. 

Home/Family(!) Life

1. What have you learned about Duncan so far?
1. He can be a handful at times, but we love him.
2. He's a great sleeper.  He's already sleeping up to 4-4.5 hours at a stretch, and we've had one night where he's only woken up once.  It seems that he's still been gaining weight at a pretty good rate, so we're not too worried yet about a lower frequency of feeding.
3. On the minus side, when we were trying to wake him up every 3 hours or less to feed, his stubborn desire to continue sleeping sometimes caused us to get frustrated.  We'd try everything - tickling, changing diapers, wet washcloth, even an ice pack - and he'd cry for a bit and then go comatose again.  Strong-willed little fella.
4. He's starting to learn to breastfeed a little bit, but it will still be a while before he can get the majority of his food directly from Mom.  He can also be rather impatient when trying anything and will start to lose his temper when things take too long - getting milk ready, diaper changes, etc.  This has also been a source of frustration at times but we keep reminding ourselves that every child develops differently, and we're already lucky that he sleeps well and had no problems with jaundice or some other common newborn maladies.
5. He's gaining weight at a pretty good rate - in one stretch gained over a pound in 8 days.  Shally wants him cute and chubby and he seems like he wants to oblige.
6. He has really strong lungs and vocal cords.  He can cry pretty loudly - he caused quite a bit of emotional distress to his grandma until we reassured her that it was perfectly normal.
7. During the times when he's really fussy, he has a characteristic way of screaming for a few minutes and then going completely limp.  It makes us question whether the adage that "you can't spoil a newborn" is really accurate, because if it was an older child that was doing that, it would really look like a temper tantrum, and we're tempted to discipline rather than to coddle and soothe.  Still working out the best way to handle things.
2. How have things been going so far?
1. First week: very tough getting used to the grind.
1. We were pretty well prepared for labor and delivery - we took a Bradley course, did research, and knew what to expect.  What we probably should have done was take a course in what to expect after we got home.  As it was, when we got home we ended up needing to reconfigure the house in order to handle the daily routines since we didn't anticipate them beforehand.
2. Biggest lesson: make sure that multiple people know where things are (clothes, diapers and accessories, etc.) so that when one person is resting, the others aren't frantically searching for something while the baby wails in the background.
3. We're trying to breastfeed and it's been quite the ongoing challenge.  As it turns out, his first few attempts looked like feeding but he wasn't in fact getting anything, so the poor little guy ended up starving for the first 3 days of his life until we met with a lactation consultant (a good one is definitely worth the money, taking a breastfeeding class before the birth doesn't really help at all) who told us that until he got bigger, we'd need to pump and feed via syringe and feeding tube.
4. One bright side of the manual feeding is that I've had the chance to participate.  Feeling my son suck sustenance from the tube off my finger has helped remind me tangibly that I have a responsibility to provide feed to this guy for quite a while.
5. While you hear about the lack of sleep involved with parenting, I don't think it really hits you until your first few days when you're lucky if you can get 2-3 hours cumulative over a 24 hr period.  I distinctly remember being woken up from one nap and doubling over in a haze, not being able to move for a few minutes.  I suspect it might be something like what I hear medical school is like - going long periods of time without sleep and then trying to do/remember complex things.
6. Had some recurrence of RSI in my wrists and forearms, last experienced during my startup days.  Fortunately, some massage and strength training has helped reduce that.  We've been learning basic physical forms like keeping our backs/wrists straight and shoulders relaxed to prevent muscle pains.  You need to be quite fit/flexible to be able to do all the squatting, lifting, and everything else!
2. Second week: hitting a rhythm
1. By week 2, we had gotten used to the routine and the mechanics of feeding, burping, diapering, swaddling, etc.  We began getting more sleep just as our bodies adjusted to the smaller amount, so we weren't quite as exhausted all the time.  
2. That said, the pee shield has worked 3/14 times for me so far, just barely above the Mendoza line.
3. This is probably the week when we really started to appreciate his awake and alert times.  When his eyes are open and focusing on you, you really appreciate that this isn't just an eating/pooping/sleeping machine but a real live human being.  Love just looking at him when he's looking back.  I guess it's ironic in that as I understand it, later in the year we'll be sick of him being awake and want him to go to sleep as much as possible.
3. Third week: what's happening??
1. As Duncan hit a few growth spurts, we had some steps forward and steps back.  Steps forward included a good amount of weight gain, longer sleep times and starting to breastfeed a little.  Some steps back included a higher incidence of tantrums and fussiness leading to 2-3 hour long feeding times, cranky baby, and cranky parents.
2. I also began working from home this week after taking the first 2 weeks off.  It's been kind of refreshing personally having a new and different challenge during my days, so I'm hoping to be able to provide some times for Shally and my mom-in-law to be able to get away from childcare and do other things.
3.  Are you learning anything about being parents?
1. The biggest lesson I've been learning is that parenting is super humbling.  As a non-parent, it's easy to look at the research and think, "Oh, these are the best things to do / things we want to do for our kid, so we should do them."  Breastfeed. No TV.  Cloth diapering (which we haven't started yet).  Some parents try potty training or sleep training right off the bat.  Conversely, it could become easy to listen to new parents with a judgmental attitude, like "Why aren't you doing xyz?  All the studies say that... or this is what I've done..."  What actually having a child has shown me is that these choices take a lot of work.  They're not easy, and sometimes, for our own sanity, we need to make tradeoffs on things that we thought were "so important" but become less so once you're facing a screaming child at 4 in the morning on 30 minutes of sleep.
2. I guess the way to sum up the previous point is a lesson I've been learning the past few months.  I read a comment from a parent and social worker who works with orphans and dysfunctional families who said that if parents love their child and do the best they can, they're awesome parents.  What they actually end up doing or accomplishing isn't nearly as important as love and effort.
3. Another area we've been growing is in showing grace towards others and their opinions.  It seems that everyone has an opinion one way or another about everything in childcare, which adds to the stress level when baby is crying and there are many voices "helpfully suggesting" a long list of things, many of which conflict with each other, and making it difficult to determine what Shally and I actually want.  We're learning to show grace in order to tamp down annoyed reactions to simply try and listen to suggestions, then either gratefully try them out or respectfully decline them, all in an effort to learn.

We're looking forward to rejoining "real life" more fully over the next few weeks.  Hopefully we'll see some of you then!