In a few hours after the labor you will be located to another room where you will spend from one to several nights depending on your health condition. Your husband or any other person can stay with you there also. Different hospitals have different rules, so ask them about how many visitors can come per one time and for how long. Ask them whether they allow visitors with children under 12 years old.
Your stay in that room will be much different from that fist room where you had a baby. Prepare do not have rest not only in the day time, but in the night time as well. Nurses and other med personal come to your room all 24 hours. They have a few shifts of nurses and doctors who come to your room all the time. They come to give you necessary medicine, check frequently yours and child’s body temperature and your blood pressure. In addition, they check also quite often child’s heartbeats. If you had gestational diabetes during the pregnancy they will take blood tests from your child every three hours for the first 24 hours of life. Next day they will check your blood sugar. If the results will be normal then they will stop doing that. They concern that the child’s blood sugar didn’t go lower than 50 during entire 24 hours and yours not supposed to go higher than 90 in the morning. Nurses also come to change child’s clothes and diapers. Few times they can take away your child from you to bath him/her or take his/her weight. If your baby starts losing some weight don’t worry too much, all kids do. It is normal for a child to lose up to 10% of his/her birth weight.
If you plan to breast feed, in your room will come a lactation consultant. She will teach you how to latch your child for breastfeeding, how long and how often you need to feed you baby. For some mothers this process relatively easy, but for others especially for new mothers it can be quite challenging and require lots of patience. Actually to start breast feeding is difficult not only for mothers but for children also. Both first time mother and her child should go through the learning process. Fist 3-4 days mothers don’t have actual milk, they have a little bit of colostrum. Since mothers produce the colostrum in very small amounts, child might not get enough at first. However, even if mothers’ breasts secret very small amount of colostrum, but babies’ stomachs are very small as well. So, if you plan to breast feed further don’t give your child bottle with formula or let other to feed him/her from the bottle because then your baby might refuse to suck your breast. In addition, pediatrician, doctor or midwife also will come to you every day of your stay in the hospital.
While in the hospital make sure that you will ask nurses to give you some lesson of feeding, bathing, changing, calming your baby. If you don’t ask they will assume that you know all of that. Even though you might do, but it is a big difference to know that in theory and do it in practice.
Medical Disclaimer
The author is not a doctor and the information in the article is general in nature with no medical advises given or imply. Talk to your doctor, nurse or medical advisor how to treat health related problems.