Getting any sleep?

"Feed me, Seymour. Feed me all night long!" - Audrey II

Probably the most common question I've been asked since Lily was born has been, "Are you getting any sleep?"

My answer ...
While we were in the hospital: "Yeah, I can pretty much sleep anywhere, and the fold-out chair is OK."
After a week at home: "I'm used to weird sleep schedules from my work; I can handle sleeping two hours, waking up for an hour and sleeping again. It's cumulative, it's cool."
After last night: "mmmmmrph. No."

Jess and I usually (meaning over the past two weeks of our parenthood) have had to wake Lily for her night feedings; she'd otherwise just keep on sleeping. That arrangement has made things easy on us, and has lulled us into a false sense of security.

Last night, Lily woke up at 10 p.m on her own, and refused to sleep again until 6 a.m. She just wanted to eat and eat and eat...and also to eat. Consuming was a high priority for her, as well. It went down like this: Jess fed Lily and put her down as usual. She lay there making quiet noises for a little while, escalating quickly into full-blown crying. I would get up, check/change her diaper (she had some pretty good ones, actually), and walk around rocking her, trying to soothe her to sleep. She would just cry and root, looking for Mom's diner (so to speak). I always ended up having to hand her to her increasingly bleary-eyed mother, who would feed her for another hour or so. And then it repeated, with no sleep in between. To keep ourselves going, we watched Stranger than Fiction (which I just snagged from Amazon for like $3 - totally worth it, if only for the motion graphics), Superbad, and a variety of shitty TV.

This was our first experience with the "up-all-night-with-baby" thing. It was also the longest stretch of time Lily has been awake since she's been out-utero (or is it ex-utero? you know what I'm saying). We're not sure if it was due to her being overstimulated by my family's weekend visit including her first trip to a restaurant (Biagio's in Clifton) and meeting her cousins Eli and Abi.

Maybe she wanted to see how Stranger than Fiction would end.

She pooped today!

I used to think of poop as just an opportunity for some satisfying reading time. I often enjoyed it as a comedy prop as well. Today, I celebrated it as an event as I heard it from 5 feet away: a loud, wet "splorp" in my daughter Lily's diaper. And some leaking out the back, onto her onesie.

Upon our discharge from the hospital, Jess and I had received a paper listing the conditions under which we should call the pediatrician. According to the list, Lily should be makin' fudge at least 3 times per day. This morning marked the beginning of the third day since her last dookie.

So we called the pediatrician yesterday who told us that, as long as Lily was eating, making wet diapers, and was in good spirits there's nothing to worry about.

So today she pooped, and we cheered. I guess they were right when they said my life would change with the birth of my daughter.

hehehe.. splorp.