I have spent a longer-than-usual time in tears in the last week, but if you asked me how things are going with our new baby, I would tell you things are great! Because they are. The tears were due to a combination of hormones – the 4 day blues were quite brutal and lasted a few days – extreme pain from my milk coming in, and exhaustion from dealing with Chanbe’s response to Quinn’s arrival.

Now, not much can be done about the hormones, so I just went with it and let myself bawl my eyes out for hours on end if I needed it. It was therapeutic. I wasn’t crying over anything in particular, and I wasn’t actually particularly sad, but I was in pain.

When my milk comes in, my milk. comes. in. (You don’t mind me talking about this, do you? Good. 🙂 ) I had the same problem with feeding Chanbe. My milk came in and it had nowhere to go. It was painful for a couple of days and I got some excellent help and advice from the lactation clinic in Wang, and all was well very quickly. Not so much this time around. My milk came in Sunday night, and it wasn’t until yesterday that things started to regulate. By Tuesday night I was fully engorged (yes, that’s as bad as it sounds) with a rack that would rival Pamela Anderson. I can’t remember the last time I was in that much pain, and I had just given birth a few days before!! That was until Wednesday, which was even worse. All I could do was take pain killers, lie on the couch with ice packs and cry. It was truly painful. The thing is, it’s a blessing to have such a great milk supply, so it’s not a bad problem to have, except for in those first few days. But with some help from lactation consultants up here, (and the pain killers) I’m feeling much more human now.

And then there’s Chanbe. My beautiful boy whose world has been turned upside-down. Not only is he dealing with another house move, moving into his “big boy bed”, and being introduced (very very slowly) to the “big boy toilet”, he now has to share his Mama and Dadda, as well as his Gran, Grumpy, Ouma and Poppy with this tiny little squirmy baby that can’t even play with him. 90% of the time, he is brilliant with her. He loves to give her cuddles, he knows not to touch her when she is feeding, and he knows to be gentle with her. Then there’s the rest of the time. The time that all the textbooks warned me of. This, combined with him not wanting to go to sleep without me in his bedroom has made for a tough week.

We have a few strategies in place for when he gets a little, um, shall we say “over excited” with Quinn, but we don’t yet have a plan to get his going to sleep habits back in check. But we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. In the mean time, we’ll be enjoying a lot of this: