A few days after being born, William started making little breathy laughs/giggles in his sleep (like “hee hee hee”), with his whole tummy shaking. Again, though, these seemed to be reflexive in nature.

June 5 - June 9

Sandra & Jerry came to stay with us and help us look after William and help with household chores. Actually, they drove down with their trailer and stayed in a campground in Shorter, spending the days with us. Darryl also had the week off work, so the three of us got a lot of time to begin bonding as a family. Nursing, though, was very time-consuming since William would eat a bit, sleep a bit, eat a little more, sleep some more, etc. A feeding could take an hour and a half or more, after which it was almost time to start feeding him again! So, we didn’t get much sleep (unfortunately, books had led me to believe that babies work in 3-hour cycles, during which you could actually get sleep while the baby slept. For some reason, I imagined they would feed more quickly).

June 7th, we had an appointment with the lactation consultant, just to make sure things were going well. I had noticed a bit of yellowing of William’s eyes and suspected he might have jaundice. The nurse used a little device and the measurement came back that, indeed, he did. She weighed him on the scale and he weighed 6 lbs, 3 oz. Because he had gained some weight (she said the hospital record showed he had weighed 6 lbs even upon leaving for home), Loretta wasn’t very worried about the jaundice. She said that as long as he was eating well (and based on the number of wet & dirty diapers he’d been having, it looked like he was eating well) and gaining weight, there was no need to worry. But, of course, I worried anyway. The nurse told us to come back on Sunday. We tried to nurse William in the office there, but he was just very unhappy, crying and fussy. Which may have been why he ate very well the rest of the day. Loretta suggested we keep William in indirect sunlight to help break up the bilirubin; some internet websites, though, seemed to indicate that that was not an effective treatment. Still, we tried to keep him in sunnier rooms.