After leaving the postpartum hotel, we experienced the first sleepless week taking care of Ruby on our own. For the first 2.5 months, I was mostly struggling and learning to breastfeed. After I got more confident at breastfeeding, we transitioned from one bottle feed a day to all breastfeeding. Right before she turned 3M, she started sleeping through the night (5+ hours). Later on, I read a lot of articles and books about routines during my parental leave and kept experimenting via trial and error with her. Here I will share my own learning experience to establish a routine after 3M, what worked and did not work for us.

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After my mother-in-law in the US left the hospital giving birth to my husband, she went back home and helped plant trees in the backyard the next day. When we told her we are checking in a postpartum hotel after the hospital, she was surprised. In Taiwan, it is very common to spend about a month either at a postpartum facility or at home with a postpartum care lady. In either case, food and baby care are the main focus to let the mother rest. Since we had a small apartment, we decided to go to a postpartum hotel nearby for 20 days (how we picked the facility and more details about our stay in Mandarin).

Normally I love taking pictures of food and new places, but I was really tired during my stay and only had a few snapshots.

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