DS is nearly 1 month old and arrived after an extremely traumatic unplanned homeborth which involved 2 lots of paramedics and a horrific experience at the hospital afterwards during which 2 midwives tried to stitch up my third degree tear with no pain relief and I screamed the place down.
Because of all this, when I got home 48 hours later I was in a very bad way. I was so weak from the 4 hours of pushing (!!) at the homebirth that I couldn't get myself up off the sofa, I was shaking like a leaf as I had post traumatic stress disorder, wanted to throw up 24/7, had a dodgy stomach and was in agony with back pain, afterpains and a nasty infection in my stitches.
4 weeks later and thank god, the physical side of things has got 90% better. Also I've managed to conquer my horror quite a bit over the birth because my ds is beautiful and I adore him.
However, as I'm sure most new parents do, me and dh are finding all this so, so hard. Ds quite often doesn't go down to sleep well at all (we can hear little griping noises which make us really tense as all we want is a wee bit of sleep, and then ds starts howling), and we are utterly confused about how much feed to give him. He has 120ml at an average feed but we find it impossible to know/ agree on whether he wants more soon after or wants something else. We end up getting ratty with each other or I end up in tears. I don't want to overfeed him but I also don't want to leave him hungry; the health visitor says his weight gain is good but I still don't know at each feed how much to give him (he's on formula- birth so traumatic and was so ill afterwards that I couldn't get breastfeeding to work).
We also don't know or are confused about some things. For example, he's on Aptamil cartons at the mo for ease of use- can we make up sterilised bottles of this in advance, or do we take the empty sterilised bottle out with us and the Aptamil carton to fill it with? And how long can bottles 'live' outside the steriliser?! Plus, we're using Colief drops in his feed, but the leaflet says you have to put them in his feed 30 mins before letting him have it, during which time he bawls his eyes out. Surely there must be another way to pre-prepare the feed with the drops in?!
I so, so want to be a good mother but I feel devastated that I might be failing. I adore ds and hug him/ sing to him all the time but I have no idea if I'm doing wrong or what. I get so frightened because he's so tiny and I don't want anything to happen to him. Whenever I put him down to sleep I find it hard to relax incase he's suffocating or something- at the moment he's sleeping in his pram top with rolled up towels as cushioning around his body- otherwise he senses he's not in my arms anymore and goes nuts.
I hope someone can help me/ give me some advice with all this. I'm utterly bewildered.