In the first six weeks Aurore's mom showed her how to become a new parent.

Transcript

Because my mom actually stayed with us, and so she was here for the first six weeks to help with just becoming a new parent, and adapting to him, and learning, and, you know, getting into some kind of routine with him, as much as there can be a routine at six weeks, eight weeks. So she was really helpful. But then, it… it’s like it’s… I don’t know, there’s this… it seems like there’s this thing that happens where it’s like, you’re supposed to move on, you’re supposed to figure it out, and then I think that’s… what’s also been really curious to me, is there can be… there was a lot of really immediate support, which I do not begrudge at all, and I’m really grateful for, but I still need that support.

Interviewer: So once the baby arrived, what were things like then?

Every day was new… just the learning curve of diaper-changing, feeding, responding to his cries, and figuring out what… was there a difference between his cries? Because we would always respond to his cries, but it was like we would go through the checklist. Okay, so he’s crying now. He was just fed, so it can’t be that he’s hungry. So check the diaper. Does he need to be burped? Is he too hot? So it’s just going through these checklists. And when we figured that out, that was helpful, but if we’d gone through the checklist, and we resolved all of those, then it’s like, well, why is he crying? So what can we do to comfort him? And we’ve discovered – we had also set in place a doula, which is where I think got more of that emotional support, and was able to ask a lot of these questions as well. And she was fabulous. She was available by text, before and after the birth, with all sorts of… any question we could ask. She helped us to figure out that he probably had some digestive troubles, which is, I guess, not uncommon, especially in that kind of fourth trimester, for babies. And so that was helpful. We changed some of his sleeping orientation, changed some of the ways that we would do feeding, and things, just to help with his digestion. Yes.

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