The baby has finally fallen asleep. It’s been over five hours since her previous nap. Unfortunately she’s sleeping on my lap which means she will wake up if I move her. So I stay where I am and try to rest a bit until she is up again.

She wakes up two minutes later so we feed again for a couple of minutes and she dozes for another minute or so and then we do it all over again. This only happens every few days so far. I think it must be a growth spurt because she’s growing a lot. She’s in the 98th percentile for weight gain for girls.

I am starting to be a little too proud about her size and I forget that all the eating to get her bigger is pretty tiring. The constant feeding didn’t help last weekend when I became a little poorly. Fatigued would have been putting it lightly and I missed a couple of blog posts and didn’t even catch up with Come Dine With Me.

I thought I was discovering what everyone was talking about with newborns and exhaustion. That was certainly part of it but I also had a slight fever and have acquired a rash over a lot of my body.

The doctor wasn’t too worried and told me to come back if it got worse. So far, so itchy but not necessarily worse. The good news, however, is that my iron levels are back to normal. He told me yesterday when I went to see him and luckily he didn’t get drowned out by the baby’s screams. She was hungry and there was no immediately comfortable place for me to feed her so we headed home.

By the time we got back she was frantic with hunger, poor baby. I would hate to put her through that again so I bought a breast pump and am now setting about trying to use it. It’s not meant to be complicated but something isn’t quite working. Getting there though.

The two things I have found very useful during the hours of endless feeding are the rss reader on my phone and the Kindle app. I had little energy to communicate while I was feeling poorly so I skipped Twitter and caught up on reading instead. I went through lots of blogs and a couple of books. The best one was Blood, sweat and tea which luckily has a counterpart blog for my indulgence.

It’s about a medical professional and his day job. The stories and the writing are great especially at three and four and five o’clock at night when reading about his late shifts. He writes about saving lives and I’m comfy in my own bed so it puts things in perspective.

I’m not dismissing my tiredness, it would have been an awful time without my housemate around and my sister who visited for the weekend. Feeling much better now though and just facing the next adventure of trying to find time to express milk while she’s crying.