Week 7 Postpartum: Sleep Tracking and single mum life

Monday, August 19th~Sunday, August 25th

From this Monday on my husband had to get back to work, which meant that my life as a single mum started. My husband usually would come back home from work at around 8pm, so most of the day I would be on my own.

For my own sake and also for the baby I decided to start some kind of routine. We would stay upstairs in bed until 9am and then slowly go downstairs where we would stay the rest of the day. I was hoping this would teach her the difference between night and day.
Once we went downstairs we did a little playtime every day and then I put her down for a nap. Then we would repeat the circle.
Unfortunately this did not work out the way I hoped. Baby wouldn't sleep until I held her, so most of the time I was walking around the house with her in the baby carrier trying to get her to sleep.
I also started tracking sleep. I aimed for around 15 hours a day as I hoped that this would reduce her nighttime fussiness.
I assumed that her fussiness came from being overly tired or exhausted at night.

She didn't have any major crying this week, so I assumed it had worked. It was just very difficult to get her to sleep. Usually she would only sleep around 13 to 14 hours a day. The only day we reached 15 hours was Thursday.

The reason was probably that on Thursday we had to go to the dermatologist again to check up on her strawberry mark. There wasn't any problem, so the appointment ended in a minute. We could stop using the steroid cream at night, so that was one less task for us in the evening.
Baby was sleeping the whole time we were at the appointment.

Regarding feeding there was not much progress this week. I still could not space the feedings out to more than 2 hours.
We had a good day with only 10 feeds on Monday, but the feeds itself were so long that I fed almost 3 hours that day.

For her play time we did a lot of tummy time and I noticed her neck getting stronger every day. When I out her on my stomach she could hold it up for a few seconds.
We also went for a 20 minute walk every day in the evening.
I really enjoyed the walks. It was quiet time for me as the baby would usually fall asleep.
Unfortunately it was still very hot this week, which meant 30 minutes was the maximum we could go outside.

On the weekend my husband was at home, but he was busy having interviews with real estate agency to get some extra money and attending seminars, so not much was different to the weekdays.

With the end of this week only one week was left in the newborn stage.