skip to main |
skip to sidebar
It was a little difficult to imagine life with a baby in all these months of pregnancy. There was the wonderful moment Owen took his first breath and only minutes later the labour nurse started coaching me on breastfeeding. She gave us a crash course on baby care from 11pm till 3am. It was so overwhelming and I'll admit, I was a little scared with everything all at once. But that maternal instinct kicked in just hours upon his arrival. And with such little sleep in the first week I can't believe how wonderful even his car alarm scream crying and dirty diapers are to me. In other words, every moment I have with Owen is something very special and I can't believe how happy the idea of being this little boy's mom for the rest of my life makes me.
We are very lucky to have been blessed with a great baby. He spends the day napping and when awake being held in my arms. He is not very fussy and loves to make eye contact with everyone who visits. He then sleeps through the night to be awoken for feedings. We installed dimmer lights in our bedroom and the nursery and I feel that that has really helped with Owen waking to feed and immediately going back to sleep. We've chosen to have a co-sleeper for the first few weeks to be able to attend to him in the newborn stage. We get 8-10 hours sleep a night, so I can't complain. Especially since I was getting WAY less sleep while pregnant finding myself frequently getting up at 2 and 3am to watch TV and eat a bowl of cereal. Interupted sleep is just the norm for me so there really isn't any adjustment in the sleep department.
The breastfeeding has been going very well too. It was a bit of a rocky start, but we got through the initial kinks and are full speed ahead. Hopefully we will continue this way because I'm nervous about what I'll do if I need help. There are always lactation consultants working for the Niagara region available to help mothers, but they have all been re-stationed to administering the H1N1 vaccine and have cancelled all breastfeeding clinics.
It's really hard to express how life and love changes once you have a child. I know I had difficulty imagining it when people around me started families, but now I know what they experience, it really is the most wonderful thing I've ever gone and continue to go through.
Talking about a crib to people who aren't expecting or having babies will be boring, so I apologize in advance if this is too baby obsessed. I guess when you are mere days from bringing a new person into the world, it's hard to find too many other things to focus on. For me, I'm super excited about this crib because of what it took to get it.
When deciding on a crib you can go to Ikea and pay a couple hundred dollars or you can go to Oeuf and pay a couple thousand. Then there is everything in between. What choice do you have here in Niagara? Babies R Us and the never ending supply of sleigh style cribs and the typical style cribs - all very nice but pricey and not quite what we were looking for. So Nuno and I thought Ikea was the way to go, but every time we talked about it everyone looked at us as if we were signing our kid up for a guillotine. And, to be perfectly honest, every single thing I've purchased from Ikea has fallen apart. So safety was our most important factor when it came to crib choice. One day we drove to Stoney Creek to a baby furniture store called, Baby World. This is *the* place to go for children's furniture. What an amazing selection of cribs. The more modern style ones were so well crafted and beautiful I honestly considered dropping $700 on a crib. But that would be a temporary loss of sanity. So we went home deflated and decided we wouldn't love our baby's crib - and that was OK.
Well, a couple weeks later I'm surfing Target's website and I stumble upon Dwell Studio's crib. Ikea prices for Baby World look. And the crib is highly rated and recently safety upgraded. But they don't ship to Canada and they've been on back order since spring. I told my parents about how frustrating it was trying to find a nice crib and my dad piped in that one of his golfing buddies' son lives in Amherst NY and he would find out if it was OK for us to ship the crib to his house. Once we checked the dimensions and found out that it would fit in the trunk we jumped on board. Even if the crib was on back order, the baby won't be sleeping in it till a few months down the road anyways. That very week, once we had the OK, we ordered it online and there happened to be a baby sale at Target online with the crib's price reduced! With the way the currency exchange is right now, it didn't drive up the price either. The crib unexpectedly shipped in 4 days since we happened to place the order just as the manufacturer circulated a new supply to the market. My dad picked it up on the way home from North Carolina so he was able to bring it home duty-free.
Once assembled we could not believe how sturdy and well made this crib is. The drawers are a great feature for storing fitted crib sheets and blankets. Although the wall mural was designed to have mother goose nesting inside the crib, it was hard to place furniture in front of it. But we're happy it's this crib that will sit in front of it and no other.
