Introducing Ronan

[Lindsey]

For anyone who is not on Facebook, I'm sorry I have been slacking on the updates My baby boy, Ronan Taylor Alexander, was born March 1 (11 days early) at 3:11 pm. It was a grueling 47 hours of labor, and 40 minutes of pushing but I finally delivered the 9lb 8oz bundle of joy!

Things were tough at first. Our first nurses in the hospital were AMAZING but the daytime nurse the day after Ronan was born was just awful and made us feel like bad parents so we were ready to leave. I should have had more help with breastfeeding in the hospital but was not given the option by the nurse. I ended up struggling a lot at home. We have a program called Healthy and Home for families of newborns where a health nurse will visit us at home and make sure everything is going okay. Well I had 3 or 4 of them come out, in addition to driving to the city to see lactation consultants, and I was honestly just becoming so depressed over the whole situation that I stopped trying to breastfeed and pump after 3-4 weeks. Latching was extremely painful and I was quite damaged from it, and pumping took so much time when I could be bonding with my baby instead. We had to supplement with formula anyway starting at 3 days because he had lost so much weight. I felt a million times better but it's still hard to not feel a little bit guilty about it. Actually, just a few nights ago I noticed I still had some milk so I tried latching him again, thinking maybe now that I'm totally healed and he is bigger, maybe it would work a little better. NOPE! Just a 5 minute latch had me hurting for days! I know I made the right decision for us.

Other than that, things have gone very well with Ronan! He usually sleeps well at night, for 3-4 hour stretches. Formula is great because Scott does his overnight feeds on Fridays and Saturdays. He is growing like crazy!!! He is now seven weeks old and he is already outgrowing 3 month clothing! He was 23 inches long at birth, so he barely fit in newborn sleepers at the beginning!

I am doing well too. I had second degree tears and got quite a few stitches but at my check-up this past week, everything has healed and life can go back to somewhat normal! My hips still feel very weird, like they are almost out of place, but I know they are still shrinking. I got back on the treadmill this morning and started doing some ab exercises. I still have 20 lbs to lose (it really doesn't look like 20 lbs but that's what the scale says!) but I'm going to try to lose it gradually. I told Scott this morning to not let me step on the scale for another 2 weeks. I don't want to get back into the habit of weighing myself daily and letting that dictate how I feel about myself!

In the first few weeks after Ronan was born I told Scott I am NEVER doing this again. Now I think I can lol. I still need to forget a lot of it, but the pain seemed to never end after delivery and now it seems like it didn't last that long lol! Oh goodness I can't believe I'm saying that already! I think there will be more children in our future though Just not anytime soon!!!!