Phew. It’s so hard to fathom that it was only five short days ago that I left here in the pre-dawn light, preceded by a very large belly. I’ve been in something of a purple haze as well as living life stripped of standard “day” and “night’ type markers. So the dreamlike quality of this sunny afternoon, the surreality of it, make a certain sense.
I’m here in my own bed with baby nearby.
We had a rough patch beginning Wednesday night and on into Thursday. On Wednesday night, Elias started this horrible sort of inconsolable screaming, combined with a refusal to nurse. Baffling and stressful for me, of course, and I would assume the same if not more so for HIM. Ben was keeping the home fires burning while I was in the trenches. Meanwhile an array of nurses and I figured it was just gas… or something… I even sent him to the nursery, so desperate for sleep was I. (And in pain, and under the influence of strong pain medication, which only made it all the more impossible to stay awake.) But the nurses there sent him back! He was too disruptive. This is, I hope, not the first of a long career of academic expulsions…
Anyway on Thursday morning (I won’t say I woke up, but the sun rose) he looked incredibly yellow to me. Indeed, he had come down with jaundice. He also had lost more weight than they wanted him to lose, AND to top it off had only one wet diaper in the previous 24 hours. Diagnosis: Not getting enough milk. Our nursing champ was off his game. My milk was barely even in yet. So I was very stressed out and upset (neither good for milk production), to say nothing of in pain and exhausted. But the lactation team got on the case. They said his suck was “disorganized” and said that in fact he has some preemie-type nursing issues! (So disappointing to hear this…) Soon enough we were back on the pump-n-syringe method—déjà vu all over again, just as it had been with Isaac. I pumped and gave him milk in this hair thin tube alongside my breast while he nursed; I let them give him a little bit of formula, seeing as it was sort of an emergency; I drank lactation tea and tons of water.
For a while there I worried that they would not let him come home with me today. All seemed to depend on his bilirubin test this morning. I awaited the results anxiously. But it was fine—his fluid intake yesterday was way better than Wednesday, and his weight loss leveled off too. (Strange how a few ounces and a few hours could suddenly make the whole situation seem so much less bleak.) This morning he seemed again to fully understand the whole point of nursing—and his role, the part about pulling out the milk and swallowing it! His job. He is already burdened by responsibility, but today seems ready to face the challenge. We brought home all the syringes and gear, but already in two nursing sessions here at home, he seems to not need it. So now we’re on the standard infant meal schedule: breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, brunch, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, teatime…. Etc. Just as it should be.
Notes on his name:
I meant to add some comments on his name, but somehow the whole thing escaped my attention the other day. Needless to say the naming process is an arduous one. But we worked through it gradually over the last several months. There were few options in which both of us liked BOTH the sound of the name as well as the meaning/story attached to it. But with Elias, we did have a good compromise. It’s a family name on Ben’s mother’s side. I like the antique quality of it. And I actually do love the Elijah story in the Bible. (Elias is the way Elijah is referred to in the New Testament.) I read the Bible a lot this summer, looking for names, and honestly many of the stories went a long way towards putting me off a name I liked rather than the other way around. I was also up for just naming the kid the more common Elijah directly and skipping the middle man, but amazingly Ben found it to be TOO Biblical.
Anyway… just to clarify if you were wondering. It’s pronounced “eh-LYE-as” as a kindred spirit to Elijah, rather than “EH-lee-as” along with the Elliot and Elian Gonzolez sort of crowd. (Our beloved obstetrician, who saw us through thick and thin, is named Elliot.) We reserve the right to call him Eli for short.
Chaffee, with a long A sound, is my mother’s maiden name. For me it connotes a whole wing of the family that’s very far away from us in Ohio, and a part of the family I wanted to connect Elias to. It’s my great-grandfather who went down on the Titanic (H.F. Chaffee). My grandfather, who for all his many faults was a charismatic and talented man, a dreamer and an inventor. It’s about a colorful eccentricity (the dreamy gene I mentioned before), along with intelligence and much, much artistic talent. If you take just my mother and her siblings, you have John (musician, carpenter, can build/fix anything); my mother (bronze artist, as well as gifted at drawing and painting); my aunt Judy (BFA in ceramics, also can paint); my aunt Barb (BFA in painting); and my aunt Marilyn (clay animation, calligraphy, book arts). Chaffees all…
We toyed with other middle names of course… I was lobbying for Benjamin as a middle name, in fact. And Peter, which was Ben’s first choice first name, I thought a nice middle name. But Ben really wanted a last name as middle name, which is the standard in his family. A late-game contender was Dueber, his grandmother’s maiden name. But in the end we decided that that skewed the whole thing lopsidedly to his family, and we needed something from my side to balance it out.
So there it is! I filled out the birth certificate this morning and felt very good about our boy and his moniker.
We’re home! The pregnancy is all done and the fruits of our labors are here and adorable. I still can’t get over it. It’s so wonderful to have the whole process behind me. Suddenly the term “bundle of joy” seems perfectly apt and not at all sappy.