Here's how we're doing....

Ellowyn is great.  At risk of getting punched in the face by all my friends who have had difficult babies, I'm going to go ahead and say: I think we won the baby lottery again.  She is a great sleeper, a great nurser, and she is generally happy and easy.  She naps a lot during the day and at night she sleeps well, usually one long 4 hour stretch followed by two shorter two hour stretches.  And when she is up at night, she just nurses and goes right back down easily.  I sometimes don't even have to wait for her to fall asleep before I set her down, she'll often drift off on her own.  I freely admit that I must be the luckiest mom alive.

So now for the less good part.  I have been diagnosed with a prolapse of both the uterus and the bladder.  It is every bit as disturbing as it sounds.  Last week is when the problem started and I saw my Ob/Gyn about it immediately.  In addition to prescribing lots of water and frequent Kegel exercises, he put me on bed rest for a month, saying that it's possible that the problem could correct itself given adequate time to recover from pregnancy and delivery.  I'm supposed to stay sitting, reclined or laying down as much as possible and avoid heavy lifting, which means I'm not supposed to pick up Mira.  As you can imagine, this is not the easiest prescription to follow.  Brian was still on paternity leave for the first week of my bed rest and he was wonderful, doing all of my tasks with Mira and all of my chores in addition to his own.  By the time he went back to work, he was so ready for a break.  My family has been a big help ever since Brian went back to work.  My parents are taking family medical leave to help me during the day and my sister is helping on the evenings and weekends when she can (she's still in high school, so daytime assistance is not an option for her).  I don't know how I would manage without them.  Because of my lifting requirements, I can't put Mira in or out of her booster chair, her crib, her carseat.  And the bed rest means that I can't really play with her the way  I normally would.  Mira's actually had a much harder time adjusting to me being on bed rest than she had to being a sister.  I've also had a lot of help from friends in the form of prepared meals.  Which has been really nice because it means less dishes and cooking for Brian.  I'm very lucky to have so many people around willing to help.

I've got 3 more weeks of bed rest, then my doctor wants to see me back to evaluate whether the prolapse is getting better or whether we need to intervene in some way.  Unfortunately, the most effective intervention is surgery, so hopefully this bed rest will pay off and I can avoid a surgery with a long recovery.  Keep your fingers crossed for us!