Mom and baby class

So I did what I said and went to the mom and baby class at the hospital I gave birth at. In typical me fashion I thought about it days ahead, planned, thought about what could go wrong and tried to solve it. I fed little man at 6:30am and then packed my diaper bag right away so I would have plenty of time. He was due to be fed right when we got there so I fed him before we left. I was right on time to leave the house when I realized that I still had to make myself a little presentable. I was ten minutes or so late leaving, which made me nervous but since it was during the day there wasn’t much traffic and I got there just as they were introducing themselves.

I knew what area of rooms the meeting would be in but it was hard to figure out which room it was in because they were all labeled parent ed. I asked someone and followed the crying and found it. There were a lot of new mom’s there. I got there after the first group of people were introducing themselves and their babies. As I signed in and sat down five more moms came in. I think there were a total of 12 mom’s at least in there. The leader of the group started by asking a question and a new mom who’s baby was only like two weeks old shared her bit of how she was having a hard time with breastfeeding. A lot of people tried to make her feel better and listened to her talk. After that everyone basically just started talking to the people they were next to and it wasn’t very structured. Eventually people moved around the room from where they were sitting and went to talk to other people, but it was just chit chatting with other mom’s that you walked up too. A lot of the conversation was about breastfeeding and how the first couple of weeks are really rough, but it got better for them. That got me to wondering if I had stuck with it if it would have gotten better for me and I wouldn’t have to buy all this formula. However, they weren’t dealing with pcos and I feel like I am enjoying him more and glad to not be chained to the pump so I guess I’ll never know for sure. I don’t think it would have gotten much better though with my low supply.

I am bad with small talk so the chit chat was kinda hard for me. I would say hi this is my baby little man, he’s five weeks old, ask them a question or two, and then in my head I’m like ok now what do I say. I ended up listening to a lot of peoples conversations and learning stuff from the questions other people asked. I did ask a few of my own which was helpful. I learned that little man drinking cold formula is just fine, that since he was born three weeks early his milestones might be slightly delayed (though he hasn’t had any issues yet), and that his gas is probably lower intestinal and he will probably grow out of it and the drops may not work. I haven’t used them yet since he seems to pass the gas and is able to go back to sleep.

Almost all of the mom’s took their babies out of their strollers/car seats and were holding them/feeding them/changing them. I was nervous at first to take him out because then he might wake up and want to eat or need to be changed or whatever. However, as the class went on I took him out and even changed his diaper in the room. At the end of the class time people just stayed in the room and fed/changed their babies and chit chatted. I was ready to go so I packed up little man and we went and visited my co-workers since our office is very close by. The people that were there were happy to see him and said nice things. He got hungry so I fed him while sitting in my boss’s office. I felt stupid though because I started feeding him and couldn’t figure out why there was so little in the bottle. Then after I had fed him a tiny bit I realized I hadn’t added the water to the formula. I was like crap!! I hope that drinking the formula without adding the water won’t hurt him too much. My boss said it’s probably like having a big shot of it, but probably won’t hurt him. When I started to feed him I said, “oh I forgot to get your bib on you” and my boss was like oh let me get it for you. She was really helpful, but it made me feel like a bit of a doof that I screwed up the formula thing and then don’t have myself together with getting his bib and such. It also made me a little nervous because again I suck at small talk. We talked about the cuteness of little man and such, and work, and how things were going with her and my other co-worker, but then I was like what do I say next? I brought up how I have been nervous to get out of the house, but I’m doing it now, and how it’s kinda boring at home and it’s really nice to talk to people again. I think I brought it up too much. She said oh so it sounds like you will be ready to come back to work at the end. I said yes. I guess that’s not such a bad thing for her to know, means that I will be ready to come back to work and get good things done.

So all in all it went well. It wasn’t 100% perfect in that I needed a little help to get a few things and because I forgot to add water to the formula. My boss also helped to straighten out the straps on his car seat. I keep telling myself that for my first big outing I kicked ass and that no one is perfect and everything went pretty well. I just have it in my mind that I want people to think I’m doing a good job and not that I screwed something up or that I didn’t do a good job or whatever. Dumb I know. I’m not 100% if I am going to go again next week. It was nice to get out of the house, see how other mom’s interact with their babies and do things, and listen to their stories of how they are going through the same things and what they did to solve them, but I feel like I didn’t really make a connection with any of them. I am sure I could have done a little bit more to work on that, but yea. We did get a copy of the sign in sheet with everyone’s information on it so that is nice.

After I left my office I went through the driveway at Mcd.onald’s and then went home. Little man was starting to get a little cranky though the movement of the car and the stroller puts him right to sleep. Now I’m at home and pretty proud of myself though I keep thinking of the stuff that went wrong. Gotta cut that out. The small things that didn’t go perfect were tiny tiny and nothing major. This past saturday I also went to the little playground in my neighborhood and sat down and talked to two mom’s who live in my development. They have older kids but it was nice to meet them. I plan to do that again.

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