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Welcome to motherhood! It's been 10 days since our little bundle was born and I am only just now finding a few free moments to post to the blog!

Here are the stats: Derek Oliver Burger was born at 5:04 a.m. Nov. 4 (four minutes after polls opened on the east coast on election day). It certainly was a day of new hope! He came 17 days before his due date, weighed 6 lbs 12 oz and was 18.5 inches long. Labor lasted just seven hours. Not even time to even think about an epidural!

He is the sweetest, cutest, most perfect baby ever. (I know, every mother says that about her baby!)

Complications so far:

Short frenium made sucking difficult. Pediatrician clipped under his tongue and multiple visits with lactation consultants has helped us train him to breast feed, but it still takes four hands to help him latch correctly.

Less than adequate fluids due to the breast feeding issue elevated his bilirubin level and created a very yellow few days of jaundice. In-home phototherapy and two days of formula from the bottle brought the level back down. Of course, the bottle set us back on breastfeeding again, but we are overcoming it.

We made quite the mess with black ink when trying to do his handprints and footprints for the baby book. No advice on making this easier.

Successes so far:

Baby's first manicure included nail clipping and light filing. It's hard to clip those tiny nails, but my mom's suggestion of using the nail file worked very well.

His umbilical stump already fell off two days ago! He likes to be early for everything, it seems. Except mealtime. We usually have to wake him up to eat, and often he falls asleep at the bar. But boobs make such nice pillows!

My mom had the great idea of doing a little "autumn" photo shoot for the birth announcements. We took about 100 photos of Derek in a basket surrounded with leaves. Priceless!

I will write more as I have the time. I just wanted to get something up on this blog!