24 hours is a long time

A lot can change in 24 hours when you have a newborn. This time yesterday I was riding home (I spend most of my time at the mother’s care hospital) thinking what I could write on this blog. Everything was going well. Joshua was eating and sleeping regularly, Kelly was recovering from pregnancy and delivery better than we expected. I was on a high. But during the night things took a dreadful turn for the worst.
I guess it started with Joshua being unsettled. We had some visitors during the day, The Odendaals and Melissa, and that seemed to throw Joshua out of his schedule. It took us some time to get him to go to sleep. But then the pain set in, Kelly started to feel the painful effects of a blocked duct. It was painful to touch and we did not know what to do. We tried massaging the areas, but it didn’t seem to bring any relief. We called the nurses (another good thing about staying in the mother’s care hospital) at about 3am and they said to leave it till the next time we expressed milk and see how it goes. So we get up at 7am for the next time and the pain is worse. The nurse comes up and helps Kelly out. After massaging and expressing milk for 3 hours, the result is that we need to express milk every 2 hours. So adding massage and expressing for an hour out of every two hours onto attending to Joshua makes a very demanding schedule. The lack of sleep frays nerves and decreases patience, but like the dark clouds that have encircled Tainan for the past week or so, the skies cleared in the afternoon and the smiling faces returned.
Joshua has been growing stronger and more alert as the days go by. Now he lies in his bed and does a set of exercises he seems to have been practicing ever since he was in the womb. Left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg. If I didn’t know better, I would say they are Kung Fu exercises. I don’t know whether to be happy or scared.