Emotional rollercoaster anyone?

Mabel is a week old today - can't quite get my head round where that time has gone. We are holding our breath but so far we seem to be doing o.k. The nights are hard work, she has clearly got confused with night and day and feeds loads between 11pm and 5am. I know I need to get better at napping during the day. We actually had a good routine last night with G Kisby keeping her downstairs (he was watching some football thing) whilst I grabbed a couple of hours before the night feeds started. In the middle of the night I was completely planning how we'd turn this routine around but G Kisby has reined me back in reminding me she is still too little and new. She was weighed by the midwife yesterday and had only lost 2% of her body weight, our little Mabel is now around 7.5lbs.

Following her first bath on Friday, which Gaz described as 'traumatic', we tried again tonight and it was better. She still wasn't a huge fan but slightly more tolerant of her novice parents.

We went on our first trip over to Manchester yesterday where she met her new mates Ted and Oscar for the first time. This was indeed the best of a number of attempted photos, you can't keep 3 newborn babies still and a second afterwards Ted fell off the cushion and Mabel was fully squashed by Oscar.

We also had a visit from the Miltons on Sunday which was lovely and helped us to feel normal again. Just a couple of hours not talking about babies and labour was great. When discussing the question of whether you should taste breast milk (you have to just give it a try, surely?) Paul Milton came up with a great game of milk roulette. He named it, "Jug it, jug it, jug it....jugs' - love it!

Talking of jugs, my God my boobs are huge, hard and tender. Someone should invent something to protect your nipples in the shower, ow.
Fee described them as a pair or ripe melons. Couldn't say it better myself. And I have had a couple of incidents of baby blues, luckily short lived moments so far and I am able to identify that they are just a reaction to the huge amount of hormonal change going on. We have named them wave one (ecstatic about the change) and wave two (no one likes change) - with the aim of achieving a wave 1 sandwich wherever possible. In talking to my very supportive sister about these moments I described them as, "weirdly feeling a bit like you've had a bereavement". She later added, "you have, your grieving having lost your life' - luckily the use of humour is always encouraged and acceptable in our family, no matter how inappropriate the timing!