Fitness & Fatherhood Part 2: The First Days
Expect the unexpected. That is the best advice I can give a first time father about the first few days of having your child. Everything is not going to go as planned, and that of course includes your workouts if you can even fit those in. I didn’t work out for the first week my daughter was born. I also didn’t eat or sleep. When I did eat it was usually fast food, and when I slept it was usually for a short period of time on a hospital pull out chair. Once we got home we really didn’t sleep at all for a couple days. At most maybe an hour or two of sleep a night. So needless to say workouts and fitness goals were out the door. I had much bigger priorities.
My first priority of course was to take care of my daughter, and my wife who had to undergo a c-section after 20 hours of labor. We had to stay a couple of extra days in the hospital because of my wife’s surgery. And even though we were staying at a nice modern hospital I have to believe we had the world’s smallest postpartum room. The computer the nurses used to log in vitals would fold down from the wall. When it was in the down position you would literally be stuck on whichever side of the room you were on at that time because there wasn’t enough room to fit between it and the bed. The sink was in the back of the room, so if you wanted to get to it you had to roll the baby’s bassinet out so you could squeeze between a closet and the bed. Although, we didn’t really care because we had the three of us together in that room.
If we were lucky we would eat twice a day, but sometimes just once. It was usually fast food, until we got bored with that and began to eat more hospital food. I guess the good thing about fast food is you can usually satisfy half your daily caloric needs with just one meal, so that was pretty convenient. In the mornings I would have to leave to run home to feed our dog. Our little dog is older and really just sleeps all day, so fortunately she didn’t mind too much that we weren’t home. I would also use this time to take a shower and chug a protein shake. Leaving my wife and daughter behind at the hospital was a nerve racking experience for me. I always let the nurses know that I would be gone so they would check in on them a little more often. And even though I knew the nurses were just a press of a button away it was still nerve racking. I always felt a little guilty too because I was able to escape from that tiny room and my wife was still stuck there.
Once we got home it didn’t get any easier. We were exhausted, but we still didn’t have a chance to sleep. Also, the house created some new challenges for us. It was nice to have some space after being in that cramped hospital room, but my wife was immobile so getting her from one room to another or up and down the stairs was a challenge. Although, eventually my wife’s mobility returned and our daughter started to sleep a little more, so we were finally able to get a little sleep.
In terms of fitness during this period, there was none. To be honest I never really thought about anything fitness related until about a week after my daughter was born. It was at that point that I realized I had lost several pounds due to stress, lack of sleep, and obviously lack of food. So with the first week behind us we were beginning to get settled in. My wife and I also had the support of our parents, who came over to help out. I finally could start to think about getting back to working out. Now I had a new challenge of figuring out how to manage fitting in a workout with a new baby. More on that in the next blog. Thanks for reading, see you next time.
