Baby Hallucinations
I had crazy hallucinations about Aidan during the first two weeks we were home with the little man. Since the first night at home, we had him sleeping in his crib in his own room with his door closed. We had a monitor set up so we could hear him cry when he was ready for a change and a feeding–but we decided early on in my pregnancy that we did not want him sleeping in our room. And I am so glad we made that decision.
I had a hard time sleeping with him in my hospital room. All the baby noises he made kept me up for hours and thank goodness for my nighttime nurse, she insisted that I have him brought to the nursery so I could rest and that’s exactly what I got–much needed rest. The nurse on duty would wheel Aidan into my room every 4 hours during the night to feed and then he spent the daylight hours with me, but having him sleep in another room at night was great. I was less anxious and felt a thousand times more capable as a new mommy all because I had gotten decent sleep.
Well, the relaxed feeling I got those first two nights in the hospital stayed with me when we got home because he was still sleeping in his own room. However, I was a bit sleep deprived because instead of just being able to nurse and go back to bed, we had to get up, change him, change his clothes because he was peeing all over them, feed him, burp him and then rock him to sleep. All of which takes about an hour. The very first night at home, Aidan was feeding for only 20 minutes every 2 hours, so when you factor in that it takes an hour to get him totally situated (changed/fed/burped/rocked) that only left an hour for me to sleep before he was up again.
And because I was only getting a couple hours of sleep each night, I started hallucinating at odd-non-feeding hours of the night that the baby was wrapped up in the sheets of our bed. One instance, I thought I was caressing Aidan’s head in bed, when really it was Cali. And another time I yelled at Ryan that he was going to roll over and crush the baby–when in fact the baby wasn’t even in the bed at all. But the feeling that he was in the bed was so real that it took me a few minutes to convince myself that it was just a dream, while fishing in the sheets for a baby that wasn’t there.
Now I am getting more sleep than that first night. Aidan has a pretty good schedule established where he feeds for 30 minutes and sleeps soundly from 4-5 hours at a time between feedings. Because Ryan is still working, he helps out with the diaper & clothing changes up until 3am. After that time, any wake-up cries I handle on my own. This will definitely change when I return to work in September, but at the moment I am able to nap during the day…Ryan is not.
It amazes me just how much Ryan loves our baby boy. He is not hesitant to get up and help out whenever Aidan cries and he is very interested in how my day goes with the baby–he wants to know if he is fussy or how well he is napping. We even discuss his feeding-napping-bathing schedule every night to see if there is something we should alter to improve his life and ours. I have read how having a baby can strain a relationship, but our baby has definitely brought us closer. We take care of Aidan together because we are a team. I just love our new family.
