Week 8 Postpartum: Better sleep and visit from the Health Center

Monday, August 26th~Sunday, September 1st

This week my husband had his last week at work and he would come home at 8 pm every day, which made it very hard for me to do things like taking a shower at night or brushing my teeth. I was looking forward for him being back home again from next week.

The best thing to note this week was that she was finally getting continuous longer stretches of sleep at night. She started to get into a pattern of going to bed at 9pm and sleeping through until 3am. After that she would wake up again at 6am. I would stay upstairs with her until 8 or 9 am. Sometimes she would fall asleep again, but mostly she was awake by then.
Daytime sleep was still pretty inconsistent. Some days she would take a long 2~3 hour nap, but mostly she would do short 30 minute naps only. I tried to keep her wake window between 45~90 minutes, but it was most of the time very hard to put her to sleep.
I was glad that the weather was getting better, as I was able to go for walks with her in the morning as well as the evening. She would easily fall asleep once we went outside. In the beginning of the week we had some rain because of a typhoon, but I was able to go outside while it was not raining.

All in all it was very exhausting to do everything on my own. Especially cooking dinner for my husband every day. I tried to prepare dinner while the baby was asleep, but often times I had to carry her in the carrier for her to fall and stay asleep, which mad doing any household chores difficult.
She also had a huge crying fit again Tuesday evening, which I had hoped would have subsided by now, but apparently not. I hoped that phase would be over soon. Every time she cried I would doubt my milk supply. I was really scared that she was hungry because I didn't produce enough, no matter how many times I told myself that wasn't the reason.

On Friday we had a visit from the Health Center to check on the baby. The midwife cane and weighed her at 5290 grams. I was relieved to see that she was gaining weight appropriately. The midwife also gave me some pamphlets with activities for parents and kids nearby which I planned to attend.

Other than going to the convenience store the only time I went somewhere was on Sunday. We needed a bigger kitchen table so we headed to Nitori with my father in law. We found a nice table with chairs, but we decided to also go to Ikea to see if they have something even better. Ikea was super crowded and we couldn't find anything better than the Nitori table, so we went with that one in the end.
On the way home Emma started to get a bit cranky. She had slept most of the time so far, but she got hungry now.
I had brought 120ml of milk to Nitori out of which she had 80ml as soon as we arrived. After we finished at Ikea she had the remaining 40ml, but that was not enough to hold her over until we were home.
I ended up having to feed her in the car while driving. I know that this was very dangerous and I definitely don't want to do this again.
Next time I will bring more milk or feed her before getting into the car.

Next week my husband would be home again, so hopefully things would get even easier.