Simon spent a rotten night in the Neonatal ICU last night. I went up to spend some quality time with him about 3:30AM, and while I was rubbing his back the poor little guy managed to pull half the tubes out of his nose and set off every alarm in the place. Not how we envisioned his first night (and probably not how Simon envisioned it, either).
Since Jessica can’t effectively breast feed while Simon is in the NICU, we’ve been pumping colostrum and sending it upstairs in feeding syringes. I had my first introduction to this last night at 3:00AM, when the nurse woke me up, told me it was time to pump and then promptly disappeared. I had an extremely frustrating time trying to clean and assemble the pump parts (having never even seen the machine before, let alone put one together), and then when Jessica handed me the colostrum I managed to spill at least half of the 3 cc on the floor. Jessica gets kudos for not biting my head off or crying or something.
We did another pump feeding at around 6:30 AM (5 cc!), and, despite my best efforts, the hospital was just too busy by that time for me to fall back asleep. So I’m off to get some coffee and to get Jessica a decent bagel.