Up All Night.

5 weeks old-

It's hard to believe that we have a 5 week old on our hands but somehow the days have been cruising by.  Chris and I have had a hard time distinguishing between them and if you asked me on any given day what the date was I probably couldn't tell you the date nor the day unless I look at my phone.  Autumn's newest development has been an upset tummy that has broken our hearts to hear her cries and broken our sleep schedule to the point that we are operating on zombie mode at times throughout the day.  At least we are trying to catch our winks here and there when we can.  Some of the best advice that we received from friends was to 'sleep when she sleeps'.  While it is hard sometimes to ignore the house chores and the list of things to do that grows daily, we have tried to at least go into relax mode when she is sleeping knowing that if we don't catch zzz's during her naptime we may not get them at nighttime like we are used to.

Our big discovery this week was white noise.  It has been a remarkable tool that we have used to get Autumn to sleep during the night and we can proudly say she has re-adopted her old ways of sleeping in the crib on her back after a brief period of only wanting to sleep on our chests which made for some very long nights that we would like to put behind us.  We downloaded the 'Happiest Baby on The Block' soundtrack of white noise and calming sounds and have been pleased with the results that have put Autumn in a trance during bedtime and naptime.  Needless to say we are forever grateful for stumbling upon these tracks and dare we say so is Autumn!

Workouts have been progressing and at only 5 weeks post-partum I know that continued patience will have to be on my radar.  Chris has been extremely patient with me as well heading out on my 'slogs' with me and getting in some good sprints and lunges when my slow jog turns into a fast walk.  He's been progressing quite amazingly actually tackling Crossfit workouts on his days off from running. Right now I'm doing a 2-3 minute run, 1 minute fast walk for about 3 miles.  My legs remember the 3 miles from when I was running and pregnant with her so I'm sticking to that distance for sometime until I feel a bit more recovered and ready to up the mileage.  I am looking forward to my 6 week follow-up appt. where I anticipate being cleared for all activity but right now I am still being cautious of my stitches as well as the recovery from my kidney infection.  I don't want to re-injure myself and be set back even more.  Talk about being a potential detriment to the self-esteem, I want to be sure not to let that happen.

One project we were proud to complete this week was the addition of a dresser to Autumn's room.  I had purchased the dresser for $89 at a local antique store, found knobs at hobby lobby for $18 and paint at Lowe's for $3.  The make-over ended up being better than I had imagined and while we don't have a before shot, here's a few of progress in the making as well as the finished product!  Soon I will post a full tour of Autumn's nursery once we complete a few more projects that we are working on.  Here's to hoping they get completed sooner than later. (Thanks to Grandpa for sharing some of his photos with us!)

We had a visit from a family advocate nurse from Hurlburt who gave us a plethora of advice on all things Autumn related as well as did a weigh-in for the little sprite.  Can you believe she's weighing in at close to a whopping 9lbs. 15oz.?  Almost a 10lb. baby so far and she's only just over a month old.  We've tried to hold our thumb to her head but it's not working!  She continues to grow and amaze us as she thrives.