The first 24 hours with all our children involved…lots of staring at them, phone calls and various hospital rigmarole.
As @dubsrayboo mentions-the first 24 hours can be spent having the nurses and doctors monitoring your baby and/or the parent who has given birth (and this can be scary/frustrating)..this happened in various amounts with 2 of our babies.
The most recent birth we had was better about this—they sent him up to NICU and NICU said: “send him back – he’s too healthy!”—so the doctors wheeled in 4 pulse-ox machines and a portable x-ray to get chest x-rays..so he stayed in the room with me despite their concerns about his lungs.
This pleased me WAAAAY more than the other hospital we delivered at where they whisked away our 10lb baby to give her a sugar-water bottle in the nursery (when I had already explained to everyone involved I intended to breast feed her immediately after birth) giving us the lame reason that they took her because “she was hungry”. Grrrr.
The first couple of days are strange, sleepless times.. you don’t sleep well no matter what time of day it is..because hospitals are just not quiet. That and nurses come in and out of the room with no regard to the time of day to poke, prod and check on you (and some are better than others..unless you get really lucky and both shifts are wonderful nurses).
Most parents do “rooming in” where they keep the baby in a bassinet on wheels in the room, and both parents can stay in the room (the one who hasn’t delivered the baby gets a sort of pull-out bed/chair thingy)..so you’re getting up to feed/change the baby constantly (they eat like every 2–3 hours at this point, ‘round the clock) but not getting any decent rest in between.
While you’re in the hospital they typically make you write down everything you do.. “Baby nursed for 15 minutes from 3:15am to 3:30am, changed a wet nappy at 3:31am” on a chart attached to the bassinet. The feeling I had after both times we left the hospital was: “You’re letting me leave with this baby?” Because seriously, you start to get used to all these professionals demanding all these details and supervising how often your new baby poops.. and then suddenly they just release you into the wild. It’s an abrupt change from overly supervised to: “bye! good luck!”
And the first drive home is a bit white-knuckled. Seems like you creep home under the speed limit—they should really have a sign you can put up in the car window that says: “Don’t flip me off—we are cautiously driving the baby home from the hospital!!”
If you have any way to send pre-made or pre-paid meals (e.g. a meal service, or someone who will come and put a bunch of pre-cooked meals in their fridge and stock their pantry) that is the VERY best gift you can give a family with a newborn.