I know I still owe you all the birth story and the full hospital stay recap, but oh my god.
Day five of having a baby really said, “You thought you were getting a gentle introduction to motherhood? Cute.”
Because today we had our first ER visit.
Let me give you the good news first: she’s fine. Everything was completely normal. We are simply anxious first-time parents who apparently needed to experience our first mini heart attack at home.
So what exactly triggered this unexpected situation?
Her umbilical cord fell off.
Yes. That was it.
But I was NOT prepared.
Everything I had read in the baby books, along with the discharge paperwork we were given at the hospital, made it sound like the umbilical cord would probably take somewhere around 8–10 days, possibly even close to two weeks, to fall off.
We were on day five.
So when it came off, my immediate thought was obviously, Oh my god. I did something wrong.
Because naturally, about an hour before all of this happened, I had given the baby a sponge bath.
I didn’t even touch the umbilical cord, but that did not stop my anxious new-mom brain from immediately putting the two things together.
She just had a bath. Now her umbilical cord fell off. Did I somehow cause an infection? Is something wrong? Did I mess up the baby?!
Apparently, no.
The baby is just an overachiever.
She decided she had places to be and apparently did not feel like waiting another week for her umbilical cord to follow the recommended schedule.
So off to the ER we went, because when you’re a first-time parent, apparently every completely normal newborn thing looks like a potential medical emergency.
And honestly, I think this is one of those moments where you realize just how much anxiety comes with suddenly being responsible for a tiny human. You can know logically that newborns do weird things, but when it’s your newborn, suddenly every tiny thing feels like, THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE THING THAT’S WRONG.
Thankfully, everything checked out and our baby is perfectly fine.
But if this is what day five looks like, I genuinely don’t know how I’m supposed to survive the rest of this.
This baby likes to do things early, apparently.
And I would like to formally request that she stop giving her mother plot twists.
