We took Baby Beckham home on 9/2/23. He met the kitties, whose reactions were pretty much what we expected: at first, Arlo was terrified and hid for much of the next few days, and Atticus was very curious and slowly approached Beckham to get some sniffs. Eventually, they both became fairly unconcerned with him, which is good, because we don't want them to be too scared or too loving/snuggly. 

After the constant check-ins from nurses at the hospital making sure that Beckham was safe and healthy, it was sort of unnerving to be home unsupervised.  We were immensely grateful for the help from Beckham's grandparents, without whom we would have had no sleep at all.  They assuaged a lot of our anxiety and took turns with the baby during the night when he was awake or when we were too scared to leave him sleeping unsupervised in his bassinet. (Beckham was born with his days and nights backwards.) My dad was very adamant about me not being up and about too much.  The parents helped us even more by going to the store, getting us food, etc.  

Newborn Beckham LOVED to be held.  So I held him pretty much all the time when I was awake, glued to the couch while I snuggled him.  Dallin and I were surprised at how much newborns grunt, and the only time we would hear Beckham's actual voice was when he did a little baby shout right before sneezing.  His cry was also so quiet and tiny!

Beckham had a lot of tension left over from the delivery and for the first while seemed stuck in a fetal position, his knees curled up tightly with a lot of resistance to straightening.  He also could hold his head up surprisingly well. His arms were also really strong and he could bust out of most swaddles to put his hands by his face. From the moment he was born, we noticed he only wanted to lay on his right side, and after seeing this the pediatricians at the hospital and at the clinic told us it would be OK.  The kid refused to sleep on his back, and there wasn't much we could do about it.  

I was told that delivery would leave me ravenous, but instead I struggled a lot with appetite.  It took incredible effort to eat, to the extent that it was hard to consume anything aside from liquids.  Once I got home I also was throwing up a little and experiencing worse and worse pain in my back and ribcage with some slight difficulty breathing, likely from the effort of pushing out a baby. By the night of 9/4 I was feeling so unwell that Dallin called the OB's on-call line, and they recommended I go to the ER. My mom was just walking in the door and took me to the hospital while Dallin watched Beckham.  At the ER I learned that I was still experiencing high blood pressure from pre-eclampsia, as well as anemia leftover from hemorrhaging during delivery. They prescribed blood pressure medication and recommended I take iron supplements. Between the midwifes wanting to monitor my blood pressure and me developing mastitis, I had several visits to the OB office.  I bought a blood pressure cuff, and after 10 days of medication my readings dropped too low and I was taken off the medication.  I was grateful that my appetite finally resumed--I had no clue the blood pressure medication was an appetite suppressant. I had dropped so much of the pregnancy weight so quickly and was relieved that my milk supply hadn't been affected. I felt a lot better around the time Dallin went back to work at 4 weeks postpartum and really started feeling back to normal around 5 or 6 weeks postpartum.