As on previous nights, Hazel made it to about 11 before dissolving into inconsolable crying. I began the nightly feeding, diaper change, dance routine, but an hour later, it was obvious that something else was wrong. Exhausted and dejected, I handed Hazel off to Steven and went downstairs to make a bottle of formula. Not having planned for this possibility, I had yet to open the pack of baby bottles I had brought back after Christmas and found that once I did, I couldn't figure out how to put them together. The bottles had a body, top and a nipple, but the plastic ring that is supposed to hold the nipple on was missing from the first bottle. I opened the second - no plastic ring. The third one had no ring either. I was at a loss. How was I supposed to feed our baby with no bottles and no milk? I brought the bottles up to Steven and finally between our two sleep deprived brains we figured out that the ring was under the cap and came out when you turned the top a certain way.
Bottles fixed, I went back downstairs to mix the formula. Five minutes later, I was back upstairs to Steven and our crying baby, with a formula container all in Vietnamese. I had no idea how much water to mix with how much formula. In the hospital, I was so adamant against giving her formula, I had never found out what they were giving her. Steven joined me in the kitchen with Hazel and together, we boiled the bottles, heated the water, mixed what we thought was the correct water to formula ratio and watched as our now pacified daughter guzzled two ounces of formula - and then another ounce - before falling asleep. I was as bad as the nurses. But at least out daughter wasn't starving - or screaming - and we could get some sleep.
A few hours later she was up again, this time with a wet diaper - a relatively easy fix, when you have a fresh diaper, but we were out. Steven and I planned to use cloth diapers and had stocked up on both econobum diapers and diaper covers from home and a stack of "cloth nappies" that we'd picked from a family leaving Saigon, but we'd never quite learned how to fold them. Knowing this, I'd asked Steven to pick up an extra pack of diapers while we were at the hospital, but we'd worked our way through that one and Steven's two successive trips to the store for diapers had increased our stock of diaper liners to put in cloth diapers, while doing nothing for our supply of actual disposable diapers. As with the formula, all of the diaper packages are in Vietnamese except for the size and the word "nappies," British-English for diaper. Steven figured, logically, that a package that said "newborn nappies" would be just that, but apparently that isn't the case, leading to his two frustrating trips to the store. So for the next 10 minute, without a disposable option, Steven and I tried futility to wrap our squirming daughter in a two-foot square of cloth and pin it up without stabbing her. Once we had the diaper on and the cover pulled up over it, it was pretty obvious that it wouldn't be holding anything in, and that Hazel didn't seem to like it much either. But once we'd finally resolved the feeding and diaper issues, we settled down for what I hoped would be at least a good three hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Some unknown amount of time later, I woke with a start to the sound of Hazel screaming from outside on the patio. Torn from a deep sleep, my brain didn't question how she could have gotten outside, but simply registered sheer terror when I reached for where I thought Hazel was sleeping and found she wasn't there. I screamed for Steven, who startled awake, jumped out of bed, half asleep, eyes wide open, poised for action. It only took us a few more seconds to realize that Hazel was sound asleep right where we'd left her and the screaming outside was just two cats fighting on the roof, but it took us a bit longer to get back to sleep for the remaining precious minutes of our first night at home with our baby.
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