Life with a newborn during the coronavirus pandemic

Voices of the pandemic features people in the Seattle area who are on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak.

Melissa Santos is a Seattle journalist and a new mom. She gave birth as the coronavirus began to spread in Washington state.

I gave birth on March 3 to my little baby Eli. That was right when the virus was starting to take hold. At the time I wasn't worried about it yet. It wasn't on my mind when I went to the hospital.

But once we came home from the hospital, things started getting progressively weirder. By the time Eli was two weeks old, I couldn't go see my health care providers in person anymore. It was hard because he was low weight and we were really worried about him gaining weight, and it was really hard to figure this out on our own.

Week three especially was really hard for me. At one point, after getting off the phone with a nurse practitioner who was trying to help, but who gave me advice that was completely contradictory to what I'd been doing, I just lost it. And my mom wanted to come help, but she couldn't because we have these stay-at-home orders.

So there have been some low points, but things are getting better now that he's almost … you lose track of what day it is. I know everyone is with the coronavirus, but with the baby too, I don't know what day of the week it is.

It's Tuesday. Is it Tuesday? It’s Wednesday. My husband says it's Wednesday. So yeah, he's 7 weeks old as of yesterday, and things have gotten better this last week.

Before I gave birth, I was really worried more about balancing professional life and mom life. Once the virus took hold, my worries became much more immediate, like, how do I keep my baby safe? How do I keep him from getting sick?

Before I had the baby, I also kind of had a different idea that I would start earlier sharing the whole world, our whole world, with the baby. And we haven't quite gotten the chance to do that yet.

Some of my closest family members haven't seen the baby, which is kind of hard. And my husband's mother hasn't seen the baby. But we send videos. We're hoping that everyone can see the baby at some point before he's a year old.

Hopefully by the time he's six months old, we can actually do some of the things we were planning. It's hard to know what things will look like in September at this point.

So we're trying to just take one day at a time a little bit, and that's our strategy for now.

We're collecting short, first person stories for our series Voices of the Pandemic. We'd love to hear about a moment or decision you faced recently, maybe something that shows how you're experiencing this crisis. Reach reporter Kate Walters via email at kateo@kuow.org.

Producer Alec Cowan composed music for this story.