This past week was a bit of a rough one… We don’t want to go into much detail, but Cindy got into a car accident. She’s fine, but it just felt overwhelming to now add dealing with insurance and fixing the car on top of all the “baby stuff”. It feels like we just don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with it… But we’re dealing with it. Last year, it was Jake who cost us a lot of money with his broken ankle bills. This year, it’s Cindy’s turn to have a major money-sucking accident. Not that we’re keeping tabs lol.

What made the week 1000000x better was seeing Baby R’s first social smile!!! There are no words to describe the joy that comes from seeing that little smile for the first time. We’ve been trying to get her to smile as much as we can now… she’s just so cute when she smiles!

Other highlights of the week:

Jake’s brothers came to visit! One of his brothers visited 2x last week. We love having visitors and it has been so much fun to hang out with actual people and not just a baby…but it has also been a bit tiring. We decided to take it easy on Sunday and just have a family day (the 3 of us). It was a nice change of pace to have nothing on the agenda except eat and binge “Breaking Bad”. We’re almost through with the last season!

All but one of Jake’s caterpillars have cocooned. Jake cut one of the cocoons open to see the pupa. He finds it fascinating. Cindy thinks it’s just gross. We’re both super excited to see beautiful moths emerge!

Postpartum Updates: Week 5

Cindy had her postpartum check up this past week. Things are healing pretty nicely down there, but still not 100% recovered yet. Maybe this is TMI…but apparently when the stitches dissolve, they can let out a really strong odor. Her friend’s doctor said, “A chemical smell is normal and a tan discharge is normal”. Both things that can make someone think they have an infection down there. It feels like they tell you a million and one things at the hospital about the baby and breastfeeding, but not much about your own body and things that might or could happen…

We gave in and purchased the Taking Cara Babies Newborn Sleep Course. Cindy keeps seeing this course pop up on all the pregnancy and mom forums. It’s a course that helps you lay the foundations for sleep training. We’ve only just started the course, but have found the information sooo helpful already. We’re learning about “wake windows” and how babies can get overtired and how you want to prevent that at all costs. We’ve had much easier days now that we can tell when Baby R is starting to get sleepy and needs a nap. We don’t really experience the infamous “witching hour” anymore. And we’re also learning the different noises babies make in their sleep. Apparently…babies make a lot of noises in their sleep. And not all those noises necessarily mean the baby is awake. We were just assuming she was hungry and feeding her every time she made a cry-like noise. Apparently, we’ve been waking her up when we do this! We’ve gotten longer stretches of sleep now that we’re able to ignore the “fake” cries. It’s only been a couple of days, so we’ll see if all this has just been a fluke or if we’re making progress towards better sleep!