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Notes -
Nearly 4 months in with our first so I’m far from an expert but this is very relevant to me right now. Some thoughts:
We limited visitors to just my mother in law (whom we live with) and my husband’s siblings for the first 2 weeks. I cannot recommend this enough. Everyone and their neighbor wanted to meet our baby but entertaining guests while I was bleeding, in pain, and could barely get out of bed was the last thing I wanted to do newly postpartum.
Hopefully your wife will have an easy pregnancy and delivery but be mentally prepared for things to go off plan. My labor and delivery was basically exactly the opposite of what I wanted and postpartum recovery has been waaaay more difficult than I could’ve anticipated. Pelvic floor therapy is a thing and your wife doesn’t have to “just live with it” if she has issues. Try to be supportive and understanding and do as much as possible with housework and the baby.
One thing I wish I would’ve done while pregnant was the whole freezer meal prep thing. Having healthy food to eat while breastfeeding and recovering from delivery is really helpful to me physically and mentally but can be hard to prepare when I’m home alone with baby all day.
Every baby is different. Try not to compare your baby to your friends’ babies too much, especially when it comes to sleep. Our baby is not a good sleeper and my husband and I are still taking it in shifts every night 4 months out because our little one is up every 1-2 hrs. I’ve had people tell me that he’s probably cold, hungry, sleeping too much during the day etc., and no, he is not, he’s just a crap sleeper.
Newborns will basically sleep anywhere but around 6-8 weeks they will “wake up” to the world and you’ll need to actively start trying to put them to sleep. This seems like a no-brainer but babies change and develop so quickly that sometimes it can be hard to catch up with their changing needs. Now that hubby is back to work at the end of the week he comes home and says it’s like trying to relearn the baby all over again because the baby is so different and doing different things.
This might not apply to you and your wife but postpartum hormones are no joke and in my experience it was really hard for me to not be overprotective of the baby, especially in the first couple months. It was really difficult for me to hear him cry and not “take over”. The best thing I did was let my husband learn to soothe the baby in his own way because now he can actually help but it was hard to give him that space.
If your wife plans on breastfeeding it might be a good idea to introduce a bottle of expressed milk once or twice a week. We did not do this and now our baby won’t take a bottle so when we have a sitter we’re limited to 3-4 hrs away.
Breastfeeding can be really hard even when everything is going well.
Facebook marketplace is a goldmine for used/secondhand baby items. Some things you need to buy new (car seat) but most can be bought used super cheap and are in really good shape because babies grow out of things so quickly.
You have my sympathy.
Our first kid was a crap sleeper for 2 years and it almost killed me.
Someone asked me once what I wanted for Christmas and I just said "... 3 nights in a row where I can sleep 8 hours a night" and I had to leave the room in case I started lolsobbing.
The second kid? No problem.
Thanks. I keep hoping we get lucky with the next one because the chronic sleep deprivation is a killer. Every night I hope is the night he’ll sleep 4 hrs uninterrupted but unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But I keep reminding myself it will happen one day…even if it’s in 2 years(!) :/
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I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but why can't you just ignore a crying baby at night? Call it ferberizing, call it self-preservation, whatever.
Looking up this term has convinced me that any research related to child rearing is absolutely insane. This should be the easiest thing to test. Instead, every article I saw was either unabashedly pro- or anti-Ferber, and bent over backwards to explain why the lack of clinical evidence supports their position. Then they go back to evo-psych.
(For what it’s worth, it probably works, so the pro-side actually has studies to cite.)
This is like reverse Gell-Mann amnesia. Maybe every field looks like this.
Yes. Fucking everyone in the world has opinions on parenting. It's worse than politics.
Re: Ferberizing
I think if I knew we were looking at 2 years of that shit we would have been much more hard about it. Something about being in the midst of it made it unthinkable.
We were all set to do it with the second kid but she barely put up a fuss.
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It’s a minefield. Just this weekend I saw a couple of relatives, they have a baby, and they have looked completely exhausted for the better part of two years now. The light has gone out of their eyes. When I suggested the same thing as above, that maybe they should ignore him at night and wean him off, a grandmother rudely told me that as a childless man I had no right to an opinion. Fine, it's not my business, but if I'm right, who is going to tell them? I'm sure that the father too would be told off because it's seen as the mother's domain and her prerogative, and it would be 'selfish' for him to complain when she likely does a bigger share of the (useless) night work. There is no debate, and so they keep suffering.
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Mom and I are were too bleeding heart to do that.
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I second this and if you can get the grandparents involved in cooking for you then that can be really helpful. My mother really wanted to help out but was cognizant of that visiting too often could be a more of a burden than help so she got to cook and freeze meals for us that she could drop off once a week or so the first couple of months.
She got to be involved and help out and we got a really valuable help. The alternative had probably been a lot more takeout and very simple meals, and m frankly much more stress.
All parents are different but if someone has a strong desire to be helpful then this is something valuable they can do.
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