The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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I've kind of mentioned it. But she's very "what do you mean", and I'm struggling to express all the ways that her anxious parenting is stressing us all out.
It's stuff like
Remember though your first child is the most stressful, it's common overreacting to stuff because you've not experienced it before. Second is easier and by the third you'll be almost leaving your kid with strangers (I exaggerate a little, but only a little!). Her overprotectiveness sounds pretty normal at this stage. Though the dog thing sounds pretty ok, dogs and babies is a risk I wouldn't take even now after raising 3 kids to adulthood. People routinely underestimate how unpredictable dogs can be with babies and kids in my direct experience.
But boundaries are not just for kids! It is ok if she wants to do x but that doesn't mean you have to. You have to agree on the big things but your day to day parenting can and maybe even should be different. You don't have to have the same reactions. Ferber is basically what we did and it worked fine, but the chances are whatever method you use won't have any long term impact on your baby. This is more for the parents. The baby will learn to sleep at some point regardless.
Negotiate you taking over the putting to sleep duties perhaps if she is finding it too difficult. Her relationship with your baby and her relationship with your baby are different. You taking different duties is entirely ok.
My top tip is starting to teach your baby sign language from pretty much right now. They can learn very basic signs pretty quickly and just knowing milk, more, done is very useful. For my three kids anecdotally they also seemed to be less stressed when they could communicate even very basic things. They won't be able to make the signs themselves probably for another couple of months but they will start to understand. So when you sign sleep or bed, after a month or two they will know what is happening, and my experience is that made things easier. That is probably the thing I was most skeptical about when one of my wife's friends suggested it, but was blown away by useful it was (and to be fair) how cute it is for your child to be able to make tiny hand signs and actually begin to communicate into the world before they can speak more than a few words.
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