Kadiera's Playground Cute but Evil - it averages out

According to the scale yesterday morning (after my first full 24 hours at home), I weigh 195 pounds. That's 10 pounds less than when I got pregnant (and 20 less than when I checked into the hospital...after all the water retention issues, I'd guess close to 30 pounds less than at delivery) - the least I've weighed since early 1997. I keep looking at my legs sticking out from my night gown in the morning and thinking, "who's legs are those? My legs have never been that thin."

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Being home is good. There are actual fruits and vegetables at meals, rather than 6 servings of bread, a half serving of protein, and something resembling over-cooked vegetable mush.

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It's interesting to watch the questions different people ask the nurses about Rowan. My mom wants to know very clearly, with very defined limits, what has to happen for her to be able to touch the baby. Barry keeps trying to logic his way through things that don't necessarily have logic behind them, and wants to know all the parameters of all the machines, but keeps avoiding having a doctor explain them all to him.

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Breast milk appears to be the one thing in this whole mess that works better than expected. Every time I go to ask a question about pumping, their first response is, "oh honey, it's ok, however much you get is good for the baby" and I'm like, no, that's not the problem, we're getting 1-2 ounces per pumping, sometimes more, I just want to know about X....

The response is frequently, "Oh! That's so wonderful! Excellent!"

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My blood pressure is finally showing signs of getting better....more often than not though, I'm confusing the poor blood pressure machine, and it errors out because it can't track my pulse quickly enough to catch the bottom end of the pressure.

The meters on the mother-baby ward were the most bizarre I've ever seen though - rather than pumping up and then releasing air and counting on the way down, they counted on the way up, bottom number first.

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Tomorrow is paperwork and shopping - gotta call and add Rowan to the insurance, gotta drop off my maternity leave forms with Herr Dr M's office...and I need bras. A few of my bras work just fine for pumping, but a couple more nursing bras would make life easier.

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Today was the first day I've laid down for a nap and not slept. By late afternoon, I was definitely wishing I'd had that nap, but I suppose not needing a nap at lunch is a sign of improvement.

In the mornings, I'm only achy from my incision line down; by early afternoon, everything from my belly button down is sore. But I can get in and out of bed without thinking I'm going to die, so this is also an improvement.

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One of the things that makes me sad about this whole situation is that we've missed the whole last third of being pregnant, and I was kinda enjoying the experience.

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I knew I was going to fail the post partum depression screening based on my history alone; the last two weeks by themselves also would have caused me to score high enough for intervention. After discussing with one of my doctors last weekend, I started taking an anti-depressant again (a reasonably breast milk safe drug). It takes this one a few weeks to kick in, but I think I'll be glad when it does (assuming it works on me), because I think I probably need it right now, as scary as that is for me.

Unfortunately, I will also now get pestered by both the post partum social worker and the NICU social worker fairly regularly to make sure I'm "handling this all ok" when what I really want and need right now is to be left alone after two weeks of way too many strange people on not enough sleep so that I have enough reserves left again to handle things better.

I'm taking care of myself and my issues - given that I decided to go back on meds a whole week before the social workers tracked me down, I'd think that counts for something, but apparently not. I also agreed to think about attending one of their support groups. I don't think the regular check-ins are useful to me, but maybe other people need someone to do this for them because their friends and family won't, or because they don't recognize when things are getting out of hand. *shrugs*