When Isabelle was born, we were so tired, our hospital stay was pretty much a blur. Alan has described it as being in a dark cave for days. We were in a tiny recovery room basically trying to sleep. Well, with Nathan it was a lot different. For one thing, we both had more sleep. And we weren’t transferred to a tinier recovery room. They let us stay in the big delivery room because they aren’t as busy as the older hospital. That was totally awesome.

The first night Nathan was born, Alan and Isabelle were thinking of staying the night with me. Alan was worried how I would get around that first night to take care of Nathan. But they ended up going home because Isabelle wanted to sleep in her own bed. She cried when she left saying she would miss me but I guess she missed her bed more.

So, that first night was pretty sleepless, waking up every 3 hours to nurse Nathan. (What am I talking about? I am still doing that.) Again the newer hospital shined in this. A nurse would come in with my medicine and to check on me. They were very organized having me fill out a feeding record and keeping track of when Nathan soiled his diapers. They even scanned in when I took medication. With Isabelle I don’t remember them checking on us so much and we were pretty much clueless first time parents.

That night, I tried putting Nathan in the little bassinet to sleep but that didn’t work. He kept crying whenever I put him down. I ended up holding him or laying down with him to get sleep, which is a no-no in the hospital. They don’t like the baby sleeping in bed with you. So, every time he was in bed with me I would pretend to be wide awake when a nurse walked in, like I hadn’t been sleeping with him but instead had been adoring his precious self. HA!

Well, the next morning I waited impatiently for Alan and Isabelle to show up. They took longer than I would have liked because Alan had gone to get me some flowers and balloons. That was really sweet but I would have been happy with just their company.

We spent the day together, our new expanded family of four. We wandered the halls a little and checked out the photo booth thingy. We took some pictures of Nathan there but didn’t get our complimentary copy because we were too wishy washy and couldn’t decide what we liked.

And that night we had our fancy little in-hospital dinner. I don’t know if I was voracious after giving birth or what because all the hospital food tasted delicious to me.

That second night we tried to get Isabelle to stay the night again. We gave her a shower there and everything. But when it came time to sleeping I was worried the bed was too small and that Isabelle would fall to the floor. So, they went back home again with Isabelle crying that she’d miss me.

The next morning, the day we were to be discharged, there was a hiccup. All this time I’ve been talking about Nathan and calling him Nathan. But honestly, during our stay, he was called “the baby”. That’s because on the day we were to be discharged we still hadn’t picked a name for him.

We had gone into the hospital with a handful of names for him but when he was born none of them seemed to fit. We asked Isabelle what she wanted to call him. She said, “Cookie!”. So, that last morning at the hospital was spent frantically calling some friends for opinions on names. We kicked around a few and couldn’t really decide. Then the clerk called asking what his name was and I just latched onto Nathan and blurted that out. It took a few days for his name to really sink in.

But Isabelle still calls him Cookie.