Adventures with Caden.....and a Cadaver

Caden is smiling a lot lately! He is also tracking, making eye contact, giggling, cooing, and sleeping 4-5 hours at night! I have to go back to school a week from Monday so we thought we would start trying to feed Caden breast milk out of a bottle to ensure he will take it from our family members when they watch him. Let me just say that Caden had no problem drinking from a bottle....this kid eats like a champ! Justin also enjoyed being able to feed his son:)

Caden and I have been on our own for four weeks now. Originally I was very nervous about not having any help to watch Caden while I showered, help come up with creative ways to comfort him while I continued to recover from the C-section, and cook delicious, healthy meals. In addition, I signed up to develop an online curriculum for my school district that needs to be finished by May 1. I was able to get a lot done before Caden was born, but didn't receive some of the material until two weeks ago. After a little melt down, a lot of support from Justin, and some long hours at the computer I was able to finish the classes. Online teaching is very interesting to me, but I'll save that for another post. We are having a great time and I am not looking forward to the 11 days I will be away from him:(

Justin has been CRAZY busy managing his patients, taking final exams, and working the cadaver labs. He is gone from 6:30 am - 10:30 pm three times a week. We are very grateful for the meals and company that both sets of grandparents have provided Caden and I on many of these nights!

Late night studying with Dad

The past two weeks Justin has had my students in his cadaver labs. The cadaver is an incredible experience for my kids - many students last year said that it was the best event in their entire high school career. It is unknown if the preservative used on the body is passed in breast milk (not many studies on this I guess) and we didn't want to risk it so I scheduled other teachers to chaperone. Caden and I brought Justin dinner each of the four nights since he had to come straight from school and I wanted to see my students.

We had planned on going home once Justin took my students into the morgue. However, on one of the nights we waited around for about 15 minutes and finally I decided to call the chaperone to see where she was........she was not coming. I looked at Justin with what I can only imagine was sheer panic. I had confirmed with each of the chaperones two weeks ago, then again the day before so you can imagine my shock. My students have been looking forward to this all year! In addition they paid a lot of money and drove 40 minutes. For legal reasons I couldn't just leave my students without a teacher chaperone. Justin and I came up with two options: (1) One of our parents could watch Caden and I could go in and just skip a few cycles of breastfeeding or (2) Caden and I could hang out upstairs in the lobby just in case anything happened. Since I hadn't eaten dinner and our reserve breast milk was frozen, I went with option two. Of course it took panicked phone calls to both sets of grandparents who were more than willing to help in any way to reach this decision:)

I went to the car and fed Caden because I swore I would never feed my baby in public - who does that? Well I did three hours later when it was cold and rainy outside and he was hungry. The cadaver lab lasts four hours and I wasn't about to go sit in a cold dark car in a strange parking lot so I found a corner, blocked myself the best I could with the stroller, pulled out the hooter hider and fed my son. In public. Thankfully nobody came by and it really wasn't that big of a deal:)

Caden looking super cute in his Bumbo

Caden has taught us a lot in his seven weeks - not only about how to care for an infant, but about ourselves. I have gained a different confidence with my newly acquired skills to calmly deal with things when they don't go according to plan and knowing that I can function on much less sleep than I had ever imagined:)