You just can't imagine what you've gotten yourself into

As anyone who reads this blog may have noticed, the detailed blog of the labor and birth was put in kind of late. So late in fact that I began to see the sunrise before I finally went down. Woog, it's been quite a while since I've seen two sunrises in one waking period. The important factoid there though is that neither Alison nor myself slept in over 25 hours. It was brutal. And now what do we get for our trouble? A kid, that eats, cries and sleeps... and personifies cuteness but that's beside the point.

The thing is, for all those of you that haven't had babies, that you want to get out of the hospital as soon as you can and cut visits to a minimum. If you don't, you'll be sorry. As you come up to the due date, people will always tell you, " Sleep when the baby sleeps." The reasoning is that you shouldn't try to force the baby to get on your schedule until 3 or 4 months and during those first months, you should get on the baby's schedule (as much as possible). Follow this and good times will be had by all. A newborn actually sleeps a ton, it's just at weird times. And this is where the visitation time comes in.

Sure grandmom and peepaw love to love on new baby. But lord have mercy folks kick em out at some point. Not just them though. Everyone altogether! You should be spending significant portions of time sleeping while the baby's sleeping and taking care of baby while it's awake. It may seem like the right thing to do to let the friends and relatives that brought you into the world and support you in it to coddle and coo over baby for hours... but it isn't. Look out for yourself and look out for your kid. Listen... Don't start a life long feud over this though. Our parents were very understanding about it when we realized it late in the game and brought it up... yours might not be. But believe me, if and when my sweet wife goes through this again, she will not have the same circus going on around her afterward.

It was a hard lesson to learn. One that has netted me an 'Alison beating' 2 and 1/2 hours of sleep in the past day or so. Everyday life became like this psycho trip to Vegas where you always lose track of what time it is, night becomes day and day becomes night. Problem is instead of fun gambling and watching shows, your bouncing up and down and shushing at an angry 10 lb ball of noodles. Needless to say, no matter how much you love baby, the euphoria wears off pretty quick.

So now after hanging in the hospital and allowing baby and wife to get poked and prodded every couple hours of the day, we're heading for the house. The car seat is here and the bags are all packed. We're excited to go home and face no more distractions, no more circus, no more needles or bed that doubles as a trendy sofa. At the same time however, we're pretty nervous about not having all the professional help at a ripcord's pull away.... Let's see how good of parents we're really gonna be.

Overheard @ the Hospital

Elevator conversation between my parents and the famous dad of quints (who were the talk of the whole hospital) born on the same day...

Parents: So we did the math and figured out that your 5 news-worthy babies weighed less than our one granddaughter at birth.

Quints' Dad: Your the grandparents of that 10-6 baby?! Awesome!

It seems BR Spur was the 6th most popular baby in the nursery... atta girl.