The Postpartum Adventure

Brianna is now three weeks old. She's lost her wrinkly newborn look, and just looks like a tiny baby now (well, as tiny as you can look when you're roughly 10 pounds). She holds her head up on her own sometimes and loves to watch a toy that dangles from the arm of her car seat, which is where she goes half the time because she sleeps so well in there. Occasionally she'll give us smiles, though I'm pretty sure they're not happy smiles yet, just more of a "hey, I have muscles in my face, I wonder how to use them" expression, kind of like when she lifts her eyebrows and pouts her lips out after she finishes nursing. But while my mom would be happy to have me write about Brianna until my fingers fall off, I'm here to share what it's been like for me these past three weeks with all the gory details. Fair warning: it's not always gonna be pretty.

When I was still in the hospital, the biggest thing I had to face was how unbelievably tired I was. So tired I couldn't reposition myself in bed at first, and I pretty much slept if I wasn't nursing or cuddling with Brianna. Which made going to the bathroom all kinds of fun at first, since certain areas were understandably SORE. (Percocet is such a wonderful drug when you've just pushed something the size of a small cantaloupe out of your hoo-ha! Did I mention her head was 14.5 inches around? Oy-vay.) It was also slightly disturbing to have so much bleeding afterwards. Nine months without a period, and then it seems like my body wants to make up for lost time, with the added bonus of having to use pads. It's like being back in junior high, but instead of an egg baby to care for, I have an incredibly cute but demanding newborn. After a mere 36 hours, I am sent home with a sitz bath, water jug, and squirt bottle as parting gifts. We could have stayed longer, but I would probably have been going stir crazy, and the fold out bed Andy was in was not designed for fathers over 6 feet tall.

Since coming home, I'm still incredibly tired, but it's more because I only get 5 hours of sleep in little chunks, rather than the utter exhaustion of pushing out a baby in only 20 minutes. The first full day home, we had to take Brianna to the pediatrician, and I had never regretted having stairs so much as I did after dragging myself up and down and out and about, and repeat the next day because Brianna needed to be monitored for weight after loosing too much after birth before my milk came in. (What a way to feel like a parenting failure!) Gradually the stairs got easier, and by now I'm running back and forth without any issues. I've started up walking again too, though they're kind of pathetic, slow little strolls that leave me tired when it's warm out like it has been. Everyday I go further though, and I know eventually I'll get back up to a good pace and distance.

I had planned on using a walking routine to lose any baby weight that remained after Brianna was born, but thanks to a minimal weight gain throughout the pregnancy and the crazy metabolism brought on by breastfeeding, I've already lost it all. Plus an additional 17 pounds. I have no idea how I lost that much so quickly, but I won't complain. I'm not as swollen as I had been, so a lot of it was probably water. I'm not necessarily thinner than I was before getting pregnant, but I am back into my normal clothes, which feels fantastic but is a little frustrating at times because everything is shifted around from where it was before.

My belly has quite a bit of pooch with extra skin hanging around. It's gotten better than it was right after the birth, when it felt like a big soft sponge, but I'd like to at least have some chance of wearing a cute swimsuit this summer. The other big change is that my boobs are huge. Andy certainly has nothing but smiles when the subject comes up, but dear Lord, did I really need to gain three cup sizes? It seems to have been taken from my ass to fuel breastfeeding, which honestly, I'm kind of sad about. It was the one body part that stayed normal through the pregnancy, and I was generally pretty happy with the way it looked before. It helped balance out my figure and now I just look (quite literally) slightly deflated. I'm hoping things continue to reconfigure over the next few weeks, because this isn't exactly the body I imagined having as a new mom. Better in some ways, but disappointing in others.

You know what's not disappointing? Having my hair stop growing so much! Unfortunately it didn't happen overnight. In fact, those lovely postpartum hormones gave a sudden boost to my hair and nails. Nature isn't exactly selective about which hair gets the MiracleGro treatment, so any hairs that were already present starting growing like weeds, including my facial hair. After coming home from the hospital and having barely enough energy to shower, personal grooming was pretty low on my to-do list. Until I noticed that my hairs were longer than Andy's stubble. Yes, I had finally grown more hair than my husband and had gone past the title of Bearded Lady. I had starting looking like a college sophomore who tries to grow a goatee so his fake ID is more believable. The only reason I wasn't a completely lost cause is that I had waxed my upper lip recently enough that there weren't too many hairs trying to do a Chia Pet imitation. Otherwise Andy probably would have looked at me funny when I tried to kiss him. Needless to say, I promptly waxed and plucked my way back to delicate femininity, or as close as I could come to it in this hormone-addled state, and things have been much slower growing back in.

So even with all those hormones going crazy (and who knows what PCOS will do to keep things...unpredictable), I'm doing quite well physically for being halfway through the 6 weeks that it's supposed to take to feel back to "normal".

Emotional recovery is a whole other story though.

Baby blues have given way to something more. It's not something I'm ready to get into in much detail at the moment, but I am getting treatment. Some days are harder than others, but it's starting to get easier and I'm able to enjoy more of my time with Brianna, which wasn't happening much at first.