Hey Mama, welcome back to parently and congratulations on your little bundle of joy. Dr. Boyd just talk to you about the delivery the journey of your birth. So baby is on your chest, skin to skin. Enjoy that moment. Pay attention to baby, look at baby hold baby kiss baby and try to ignore everything else that is going on in the room because there's a lot going on. So you have skin to skin.

Doctor or midwife is at the bottom of the bed, possibly repairing in a PC Atomy or a tear. You've got nurse over here giving you pitocin IV helping your uterus contract. Nurse might be massaging the top of your uterus that is going to be painful, but it's very important. So just remember that this is important. She's trying to stop the bleeding. So enjoy, baby Baby on your chest.

After you've held baby for just a minute, you're going to have a nurse a baby nurse. Take your baby into the other room to do some things. If you want your partner or husband to go with baby I recommend that that way baby's never out of sight. So babies in the other room right now, this is the time for you if you've had a vaginal delivery with no epidural to get up, get out of bed, go pee, change your gown, clean your pair, kneel area just get kind of moving you feel like a new woman and so enjoy that. If you've had an epidural, then your nurse is going to help you stay in bed your legs might still be pretty numb and the nurse is going to clean your perinatal area for you change your gown get you all cleaned up. Now baby is about to come back to you.

All bundled up clean. Enjoy this moment. So let's talk about what happened to baby while you were going to the bathroom and cleaning up. A nurse was In this other room with baby in a warmer trying to get baby warm, it's very important for baby to not get chilled upon delivery. They don't have a lot of body fat and they can get cold very quickly. So nurses keeping baby warm, weighing baby taking measurements of the head and how long baby is.

Nurse is doing an app bar score making sure that baby is breathing, heart rate reflux, everything's normal. Also, the nurse is making sure that the umbilical cord is clamped and getting it cleaned up. Nurses also putting ointment on baby's eyes. It's an antibiotic cream that prevents infection. If mom has any form of STI, such as chlamydia, or gonorrhea, this can cause an infection in baby's eyes. So we put an antibiotic ointment on baby's eyes to prevent an infection from happening.

The baby is also going to possibly get to shot and this is important for you to know before you deliver so that you can make decisions First is a vitamin K shot. Vitamin K helps the baby's blood clot. When babies are born, their blood does not have normal clotting mechanism until about day eight. So this vitamin K shot that goes in the thigh helps baby's blood clot Now, the second injection is a Hepatitis B vaccination. And this is your choice mom. If you do not want baby to get the vaccination, then you have to sign a form before baby delivers so that they do not give that vaccination to baby Hepatitis B vaccination is a series of three shots so baby within the first 24 hours of life will get that first shot.

So that's your decision be informed and let the nurse know if you want to opt out of that. So after baby's all taken care of in the other room and all swaddled baby's going to come back to Mom, this is a time to hold baby look at baby really bond and this is also a time to start breastfeeding this first hour. baby's life is when baby is very alert. So after the first hour, baby's gonna want to sleep a lot. So this is the time for you to start breastfeeding. Your first milk is called colostrum.

And it's very nutritious for baby. It's thick yellow milk. And it's very important that baby get this. Even if you don't choose to breastfeed in the future, maybe decide now that you're going to let baby have this first nutritious milk. Baby has just had a long journey through the birth canal and baby worked hard. And baby needs food just like you're gonna be hungry after delivery.

So his baby so this first milk the colostrum is very important. So after you're all cleaned up, baby's cleaned up all bundled up, now is the time for the postpartum period. Now, there's some hospitals where you have a labor delivery postpartum room so you stay in the same room. The hospital that I delivered at, I went to a different postpartum room. So the nurse put me in a wheelchair, put baby in the bassinet, and we scooted off to the postpartum room. When we got to the postpartum room, my labor and delivery nurse went over everything that happened with my new postpartum nurse.

After everything was covered that happened during the delivery process, my postpartum nurse took over. Here's where she did some things with me that I wasn't really fond of. She massage my uterus. Again, it was painful. But I had to remember how important it was bleeding in the postpartum period can be very serious and it can happen very quickly. So the nurse is going to do some education as well.

She's going to inform you that you need to pay attention to how much you're bleeding, how many clots you're passing, how big the clots are, and to make sure that you tell her when this happens. While the nurses in the room, she's going to take your blood pressure, take your temperature again, and she's going to assess baby to kind of see Okay, get her bearings. How do you all look I have a baseline now, so that in the two days following or three days however long you were there, she will know where you started and if you're improving, or if you're declining and health, so she wants to get all of her bases covered. While the nurses there, don't be afraid to ask her for some pain medicine, ask her for some juice. When is food gonna get here? Can my husband go out and get me food?

And she will say yes, you're tired, you're sore and you're hungry. Here's some pain medicine. Here's some food Get some rest. Do you want me to take baby to the nursery babies are now rooming in with moms that means that they stay in the room with you. They don't necessarily have to go to the nursery anymore. But the nurse will offer it to you if you would like to just back out and sleep.

She will take baby for you. For me. I was on an adrenaline high. I did not want to sleep I did not want my baby leaving the room. I just wanted to hold him and spend time with him. So baby stayed in the room with me.

The other thing that nurse is going to talk to you about is making sure that you are recording on a piece of paper. How many times your feeding baby how long you fed baby for how many peas has baby had how many poops has baby had because the nurse isn't going to stay in the room with you the whole day. So she wants you to be keeping track of this. And getting in the mindset also because when you go home, she will want you to keep track of this so that you can talk to your pediatrician about it. So you're in your postpartum room. If you delivered vaginally planned to be in that room for about two days.

If you delivered by C section and there weren't any complications, your average is going to be around three days. And a lot is going to happen in that time period. The nurse is going to be in and out of the room. She's going to be talking to you about the cord care how to take care of the cord stump for the baby. She's going to be talking to you about circumcision. When are you planning on having babies circumcised?

If you do, what is the care how does it work? What do you do when you get home? You're going to have a pediatrician come into the room. and assess baby. How are the reflexes? How is baby's weight?

How are the hips looking? How is the hearing sounding on and on and on, you're going to have a tech come in and draw your blood. You're going to have a nurse come in and hook the baby up to some electrodes that are going to stimulate baby's hearing to make sure that baby hears correctly. This does not cause baby any pain and it's very important for you to know. Does my baby have hearing problems? The nurse is going to do a heel stick on baby to check for metabolic disorders.

There are a myriad of metabolic disorders and we want to know just baby have any of them. You're gonna have somebody come in from the birth certificate office and ask you what is baby's name? How do you spell baby's name? Make sure at this point that there are no distractions in the room. When you look at the spelling and sign off on it makes sure it's correct. I didn't do that.

I had a lot of distractions in the room and I signed off it Turns out that when I went to go get the birth certificate, it was spelled incorrectly and I had to go through this long process to get my baby's name spelled correctly. So as you can see, there's a lot going on, and you are excited, but you're tired, and people are in and out and in and out. And in and out. Make sure that you have a journal to be writing down your questions and information. Also, make sure that whoever's in the room with you, your spouse, your partner, your family member, that they're doing a good job of answering questions for you to make sure that information is not missed. If you have to then ask people to leave the room.

So there's no distractions when you're trying to get information. If you had an epidural and you're now in your postpartum room, your nurse is going to be assessing how your legs are moving. Within the day of delivery. She's going to take your Foley catheter out. This is what was helping you urinate when you didn't have feeling and your perinatal area. She's going to help you get out of bed and walk.

She will be doing this and she'll say Don't do it without me because she doesn't want you to fall in hurt yourself. I know when I got to my postpartum room, I wanted to take a shower. Now I didn't have an epidural, but I did have an IV in my arm. And so my nurse helped me wrap the IV so it wouldn't get wet. And then she said to my husband, you need to make sure that you help her when she gets in the shower. fainting is very common after delivery, you've lost a lot of blood, your fluid is shifting and you can get very lightheaded.

So make sure that you don't try to shower without someone helping you. So I set that I still had an IV in my arm, it's important to know that your nurse will leave your IV in place. This is important because this is where they're going to draw blood. The nurse and the doctor want to know are you losing blood so they're going to check your hemoglobin and your ematic crit while you're in the hospital to make sure that you're not bleeding. The nurse might still massage your uterus if you report to her that you are still bleeding. When you go home, you will still bleed a little bit I bled up to two weeks.

After my delivery, but it was like a normal period, it was just a little bit of spotting. I also bled from the site where I tore, and I had sutures. So you just have to be very careful when you go to the bathroom. The hospital should give you a little water bottle to clean your perinatal area with so that when you go to the bathroom, you don't wipe hard, you just clean the area with some warm water. The nurse should educate you on all these things. It's an exciting time, but there's a lot going on.

And so my wish to you is that you enjoy baby and have someone with you that can pay attention to all the other little stuff that's going on so that you can just remember that moment as being magical you and baby, my bundle of joy that I just worked nine months to carry and deliver into this world. I wish you the best in your postpartum period at the hospital.