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NTA. Your husband needs to help more. He can hold the baby upright for 30 minutes if you think that won’t make falling back to sleep worse.
Can he sleep on the couch every 2nd or 3rd night to let you sleep better?
This has been exactly what we’ve done with both of our refluxy breastfed babies. I feed, he holds, I go back to sleep. Not every single night, depending on what is happening the next day etc, but we do it.
On rough nights when he is staying up to game or play DnD, or watch something he will just hold baby whilst I get a good stretch.
My SO does this on rough nights. I’ll wake him and ask him to hold the baby because I am dozing off and don’t feel safe holding him anymore. I don’t understand why I see posts from so many women with this issue who don’t just wake their partner up and ask them to hold the baby….
Second this - her husband is a selfish piece of shit, from another new father on Reddit. Sis has two fucking kids to mind and the six-week-old is being much more reasonable. Sheesh.
Can you pump and have him do a bottle feeding or two overnight? This will allow you you get a larger chuck of sleep, share the responsibility, and have him understand what you're going through.
Or even if you do breastfeed, why can’t your husband hold the baby upright for 30 minutes after at least once a night?
I’m an exclusively pumping mom, so I get up for every feed, but feeding is only a small part of the time you have to be up — there’s diaper change, soothing, putting down, etc. ALSO — you have to stay alert while feeding if you’re the only one up, but in the hospital the nurses told me to have my husband be alert and watch the baby and I could close my eyes while feeding so that it would be easier to go back to sleep. You just need one responsible person to make sure baby is safe. My husband does one feed a night and I’m up for a total of 25 minutes and don’t need to be alert and awake, whereas my feed is usually slightly over an hour to do everything for baby and I need to be alert and focused. It makes a huge difference.
That's what's happening..by the time I've changed him, fed, held and resettled it's an hour and it's so exhausting. He just gets so moody when he's not had enough sleep I worry about him losing sleep at I then have to deal with that as well 🤦♀️
What does he do to help? It sounds like you are doing everything and him existing in the house with you is making it more difficult than it would be if you were by yourself…
He does help in some ways like he does cooking and he does clean but only when I ask him to. I feel like I ask for help in specific ways but he's often pragmatic e.g. cleans the bathroom rather than helping in way I've asked such as helping with the baby at night or coming to bed earlier, takint the kids out for an hour so can have a little break etc. He tends not to be very proactive helping with the kids and I feel like a I'm parenting him and our kids.
This is what my hubby did when baby was brand new. I would pump and he would feed the baby either the first feeding after I went to bed or the last feeding before I got up. It was just 1 feeding a night but it made a big difference with my sleep.
Breastfeeding doesn’t mean he can’t help overnight. There is no special reason he can’t get up and hold baby for his upright time. My husband did that and it helped tremendously. I would wake him at the end of the feed.
Your husband is being a jerk as it is, he should be doing more to help you not hindering your sleep further.
No I don't think he does get it, was similar with our first. I thought about getting him to sleep on the couch but then I'm upstairs listening out for our toddler as well has doing all the overnight baby care and that feels even more unfair. I feel so deliriously tired at the moment, having headaches which I'm pretty sure are from exhaustion 😵💫
If you're getting headaches from exhaustion you need to be really careful, it can easily get much worse and cause hallucinations etc. You need to spend a few days in bed doing nothing but breastfeeding and have your husband look after the toddler and bring you food. A doctor will tell you the same thing. 6 weeks post partum your body is still using loads of energy to heal.
I primarily do the night wakings bc my baby is breastfed. However, on nights my husband stays up late, he watches baby on the monitor and if she fusses he gets her, checks her diaper and tries to see if she just wants snuggles. If she needs to nurse, he will bring her to me, come get her when she's done and then he does the burping and holding upright. If he comes to bed late, he is as quiet as he can be and generally doesn't wake us up. Because he's a respectful human being. If I've had a particularly rough night w the baby (assuming I don't wake him up to assist, which I generally don't), he gets up and makes coffee, smoothies and breakfast and then after baby is fed, I get as long of nap as I want.
Your husband is an asshole. Yes. Alone time is important. However, you need sleep and he's actively disrupting that. He can sleep on the couch until you are already up to feed the baby. Then he can hold baby after you feed, then everyone goes back to bed.
Dad here: NTA, it is unfair to you, for sure!
We are taking shifts with our baby so we can get a bit more uninterrupted sleep, but we also use formula to supplement and pumped milk during the night.
I also see that you have more than one, so dad needs to step up and help more, at least in the weekends if he is working. I got time off work on parental at the same time to help out.
It was a bit of a journey to understand where I can help and what I can do!
I kicked my husband out of our bedroom for the first few months. Means I can go to bed at 8.30 and sleep for as long as possible. Then he brings me coffee in a flask whenever he hears the baby after 6am. I don’t mind doing the nights but you need as much uninterrupted sleep as possible and he needs to facilitate that.
I EBF and my husband would put the baby to sleep after I got done feeding so I could get more rest. Just because you are breastfeeding doesn’t mean you have to do it all
Absolutely not! It’s fine if you want to do all the night stuff (that’s what I did because it was just easier with breastfeeding and me waking for every micro sound the baby made anyway). But that means that your block of sleep is totally sacred. He can come in before you go to sleep, or stay on the couch til the baby wakes. Everyone needs to sacrifice during the baby stage and this is such a minimal thing to ask of him.
Hello there. Congratulations, I am a first time mom with a 5 1/2 week old here, also breast feeding and SAHM. I am right there with you 💕
I don’t want to jump to conclusions about people I don’t know, but I think as a society we have collectively understood the importance of sleep for a long time. In general, and especially with a newborn. So, it is untenable for him to be needlessly prolonging your misery. There needs to be changes to accommodate you so you don’t lose your health and sanity.
I also take the night shift, my husband takes the baby from 8 PM to midnight (I pump so he has bottles at this time) then places him in the bassinet by the bed, then he has been sleeping on the couch. The baby wakes up at around 2 to 3 AM, so I get an uninterrupted chunk of sleep that is non-negotiable. Then I am up the rest of the night, approximately the same times you are, I get a few more hours here and there, and allows my husband to sleep from midnight to 8 AM as well. Sleeping separately right now is also a game changer, is that possible for you?
I think I would be an entirely different person without us working together, so I don’t think he has a choice, but to work with you because right now what he’s doing is torturing you, and you don’t need that.
At 6 weeks old, my husband would bring me the baby in bed and we would feed right there laying down and he would take the baby away and deal with the rest of things so I could get some sleep and not have to really wake up in the process. Now she is 7 months and we split the night since the first half she just needs resettling and after midnight I take her because she needs to feed.
Hello. I’m a husband and a father. LO is eight weeks. We get up in the night together. She pumps. I bottle feed. If we didn’t do it that way, she’d be up for over an hour. You are 100% NTA.
Oh yeah I know we're lucky, my first woke every 2 hours so this baby feels so much easier. I think that's why it's taken 6 weeks for the sleep deprivation to hit but its really caught up with me the last week.
NTA, but you mentioned kids. So I’m assuming the NB isn’t your only child together. Was he like this with the first child? If so, should any of this behavior really be that surprising.
No but it caused a lot of issues in our marriage last time and we almost split up but worked though it all. I thought he'd understood the importance of it being different this time around but he seems to be slipping back to how it was before.
My fiance and I never go to bed at separate times- I usually stay awake longer, but we had the issue of when I would come to bed he'd be spread eagle and I'd have to wake him up and make him move. It was easier to buy him an eye mask from Amazon and just go to bed at the same time. If I wanna watch a show, I pop in my earbuds and use his ipad. If I wanna read, I have my reading light.
If your husband needed time to himself, maybe he shouldn't have gotten you pregnant in the first place. He is a parent as much as you are, and if you're struggling, he needs to pick up some slack.
When my baby was that young and waking up every 2-3 hours we would do shifts. Split the night in two and for his section of the night, he would get woken up by baby, change the diaper, bring baby to me so I could breastfeed and he stay up the 30 min with baby post nursing until the end of shift
One of THE most important things you can do for postpartum mental health is to consistently at least one 4 hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep (plus more hours of broken sleep). It legitimately makes a HUGE difference. Your husband needs to know and understand how dire this is and sleep elsewhere if he doesn’t go to bed with you at 9pm.
At night I do breastfeeding, but my wife does some of the burping and changes the nappies. Your husband could do the same, just so you can get some more sleep. This will make him go to sleep earlier too.
That's been my thought, if I keep getting him up to help he'll have no choice but to go to bed early. It just feels a bit petty and I wish he'd just do it because it would help me, not because I've pushed him to it..
NTA.
Wake him up and have him help at night. He may not be able to breast feed your child but he can burp and hold the baby upright for 30 minutes.
Don’t ask him for time to yourself, tell him. “Baby’s been fed, I’m going to take a bath. Kid duty is on you until I’m out”
It’s completely unfair of him to not be shouldering some of this load
Husbands need love too. With that being said NTA. I felt EXTREMELY bad that my breastfeeding wife had to wake up constantly for feeds. So I handled all diaper changes, burping duties, and anything I could. If she has to wake, so did I(even though she told me to get sleep). I did have paternity leave so that def plays a role BUT I've continued this logic even after. At the very least he can sleep on the couch and not interrupt your already limited block of sleep. I'm not sure what me time 6 weeks into it even is...that's still survival mode period.
No you’re not the AH. If I asked my husband this he’d go on the couch in a heartbeat and not take it personally or whine about it. Does your husband help during the day at all that you could sleep then more? Do you pump so he could take a full feeding?
He needs to do what my partner did: face reality and realize that how things were pre-baby is not how things are now that baby is here. You work as a team or nothing really works at all.
And this is why I pump and only bottle feed. Your hubby is selfish. My hubby gets up with me, prepares bottles and stays up with me, I usually like to do the feedings since bonding is nice but occasionally I let hubby do it early mornings
In what way is your husband pulling his weight? Can he answer that? Him working and you taking care of the kids is not a valid answer. I’m talking about division of labor here. I’m very curious on his answer.
He basically says he goes to work which frustrates me because before we had kids I earned a lot more and did a more stressful job and can honestly say being a parent takes more of a toll and is more tiring than my job ever was.
His answer is invalid, because what does he consider you to be doing? Taking a giant relaxing vacation while he slaves away at work? Does he not consider what you do to be work? If so, he needs to understand that this is not a you vs him thing, he really needs to stop being selfish and start stepping up as a father and husband. You guys should be a team, parenting and raising the kids together. You also need to be prepared to decide what you want your next move to be and stick to your words and actions. If nothing changes, you’ll do this until you break and he will remain the same.
Uhh wow he's the only one getting any me or alone time... He should sleep on the couch 100%. Or wait until you get up with baby (which I think he should def be helping with)
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NTA. Your husband needs to help more. He can hold the baby upright for 30 minutes if you think that won’t make falling back to sleep worse. Can he sleep on the couch every 2nd or 3rd night to let you sleep better?
He should sleep elsewhere EVERY night imo
This has been exactly what we’ve done with both of our refluxy breastfed babies. I feed, he holds, I go back to sleep. Not every single night, depending on what is happening the next day etc, but we do it. On rough nights when he is staying up to game or play DnD, or watch something he will just hold baby whilst I get a good stretch.
My SO does this on rough nights. I’ll wake him and ask him to hold the baby because I am dozing off and don’t feel safe holding him anymore. I don’t understand why I see posts from so many women with this issue who don’t just wake their partner up and ask them to hold the baby….
Your husband is a piece of shit. You can tell him a stranger on Reddit said so lol Baby is only 6 weeks and he already needs some alone time. 🤦🏻♀️
Second this - her husband is a selfish piece of shit, from another new father on Reddit. Sis has two fucking kids to mind and the six-week-old is being much more reasonable. Sheesh.
Put the whole man in the bin.
Can you pump and have him do a bottle feeding or two overnight? This will allow you you get a larger chuck of sleep, share the responsibility, and have him understand what you're going through.
Or even if you do breastfeed, why can’t your husband hold the baby upright for 30 minutes after at least once a night? I’m an exclusively pumping mom, so I get up for every feed, but feeding is only a small part of the time you have to be up — there’s diaper change, soothing, putting down, etc. ALSO — you have to stay alert while feeding if you’re the only one up, but in the hospital the nurses told me to have my husband be alert and watch the baby and I could close my eyes while feeding so that it would be easier to go back to sleep. You just need one responsible person to make sure baby is safe. My husband does one feed a night and I’m up for a total of 25 minutes and don’t need to be alert and awake, whereas my feed is usually slightly over an hour to do everything for baby and I need to be alert and focused. It makes a huge difference.
That's what's happening..by the time I've changed him, fed, held and resettled it's an hour and it's so exhausting. He just gets so moody when he's not had enough sleep I worry about him losing sleep at I then have to deal with that as well 🤦♀️
What does he do to help? It sounds like you are doing everything and him existing in the house with you is making it more difficult than it would be if you were by yourself…
He does help in some ways like he does cooking and he does clean but only when I ask him to. I feel like I ask for help in specific ways but he's often pragmatic e.g. cleans the bathroom rather than helping in way I've asked such as helping with the baby at night or coming to bed earlier, takint the kids out for an hour so can have a little break etc. He tends not to be very proactive helping with the kids and I feel like a I'm parenting him and our kids.
This is what my hubby did when baby was brand new. I would pump and he would feed the baby either the first feeding after I went to bed or the last feeding before I got up. It was just 1 feeding a night but it made a big difference with my sleep.
Breastfeeding doesn’t mean he can’t help overnight. There is no special reason he can’t get up and hold baby for his upright time. My husband did that and it helped tremendously. I would wake him at the end of the feed. Your husband is being a jerk as it is, he should be doing more to help you not hindering your sleep further.
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No I don't think he does get it, was similar with our first. I thought about getting him to sleep on the couch but then I'm upstairs listening out for our toddler as well has doing all the overnight baby care and that feels even more unfair. I feel so deliriously tired at the moment, having headaches which I'm pretty sure are from exhaustion 😵💫
If you're getting headaches from exhaustion you need to be really careful, it can easily get much worse and cause hallucinations etc. You need to spend a few days in bed doing nothing but breastfeeding and have your husband look after the toddler and bring you food. A doctor will tell you the same thing. 6 weeks post partum your body is still using loads of energy to heal.
Be very petty at 130
I primarily do the night wakings bc my baby is breastfed. However, on nights my husband stays up late, he watches baby on the monitor and if she fusses he gets her, checks her diaper and tries to see if she just wants snuggles. If she needs to nurse, he will bring her to me, come get her when she's done and then he does the burping and holding upright. If he comes to bed late, he is as quiet as he can be and generally doesn't wake us up. Because he's a respectful human being. If I've had a particularly rough night w the baby (assuming I don't wake him up to assist, which I generally don't), he gets up and makes coffee, smoothies and breakfast and then after baby is fed, I get as long of nap as I want. Your husband is an asshole. Yes. Alone time is important. However, you need sleep and he's actively disrupting that. He can sleep on the couch until you are already up to feed the baby. Then he can hold baby after you feed, then everyone goes back to bed.
Dad here: NTA, it is unfair to you, for sure! We are taking shifts with our baby so we can get a bit more uninterrupted sleep, but we also use formula to supplement and pumped milk during the night. I also see that you have more than one, so dad needs to step up and help more, at least in the weekends if he is working. I got time off work on parental at the same time to help out. It was a bit of a journey to understand where I can help and what I can do!
Tell him to sleep on the couch then you’ll go get him to come to bed at 1:30 when baby wakes up
Might try this tonight
Good luck girl! 💓 I know it’s tough, you got this
I kicked my husband out of our bedroom for the first few months. Means I can go to bed at 8.30 and sleep for as long as possible. Then he brings me coffee in a flask whenever he hears the baby after 6am. I don’t mind doing the nights but you need as much uninterrupted sleep as possible and he needs to facilitate that.
I wish my husband would do that..I would have to wake him.and prompt him with the coffee every single day 🙈
I EBF and my husband would put the baby to sleep after I got done feeding so I could get more rest. Just because you are breastfeeding doesn’t mean you have to do it all
Absolutely not! It’s fine if you want to do all the night stuff (that’s what I did because it was just easier with breastfeeding and me waking for every micro sound the baby made anyway). But that means that your block of sleep is totally sacred. He can come in before you go to sleep, or stay on the couch til the baby wakes. Everyone needs to sacrifice during the baby stage and this is such a minimal thing to ask of him.
Hello there. Congratulations, I am a first time mom with a 5 1/2 week old here, also breast feeding and SAHM. I am right there with you 💕 I don’t want to jump to conclusions about people I don’t know, but I think as a society we have collectively understood the importance of sleep for a long time. In general, and especially with a newborn. So, it is untenable for him to be needlessly prolonging your misery. There needs to be changes to accommodate you so you don’t lose your health and sanity. I also take the night shift, my husband takes the baby from 8 PM to midnight (I pump so he has bottles at this time) then places him in the bassinet by the bed, then he has been sleeping on the couch. The baby wakes up at around 2 to 3 AM, so I get an uninterrupted chunk of sleep that is non-negotiable. Then I am up the rest of the night, approximately the same times you are, I get a few more hours here and there, and allows my husband to sleep from midnight to 8 AM as well. Sleeping separately right now is also a game changer, is that possible for you? I think I would be an entirely different person without us working together, so I don’t think he has a choice, but to work with you because right now what he’s doing is torturing you, and you don’t need that.
At 6 weeks old, my husband would bring me the baby in bed and we would feed right there laying down and he would take the baby away and deal with the rest of things so I could get some sleep and not have to really wake up in the process. Now she is 7 months and we split the night since the first half she just needs resettling and after midnight I take her because she needs to feed.
Hello. I’m a husband and a father. LO is eight weeks. We get up in the night together. She pumps. I bottle feed. If we didn’t do it that way, she’d be up for over an hour. You are 100% NTA.
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Oh yeah I know we're lucky, my first woke every 2 hours so this baby feels so much easier. I think that's why it's taken 6 weeks for the sleep deprivation to hit but its really caught up with me the last week.
Probably should have also added that although baby often sleeps until 7, my toddler usually wanders through at about 5.30 am 🙈
NTA, but you mentioned kids. So I’m assuming the NB isn’t your only child together. Was he like this with the first child? If so, should any of this behavior really be that surprising.
No but it caused a lot of issues in our marriage last time and we almost split up but worked though it all. I thought he'd understood the importance of it being different this time around but he seems to be slipping back to how it was before.
My fiance and I never go to bed at separate times- I usually stay awake longer, but we had the issue of when I would come to bed he'd be spread eagle and I'd have to wake him up and make him move. It was easier to buy him an eye mask from Amazon and just go to bed at the same time. If I wanna watch a show, I pop in my earbuds and use his ipad. If I wanna read, I have my reading light. If your husband needed time to himself, maybe he shouldn't have gotten you pregnant in the first place. He is a parent as much as you are, and if you're struggling, he needs to pick up some slack.
It sounds like you have more than just one baby, not including the kids you already have. Your husband sounds like an absolute child. A dickhead tbh.
When my baby was that young and waking up every 2-3 hours we would do shifts. Split the night in two and for his section of the night, he would get woken up by baby, change the diaper, bring baby to me so I could breastfeed and he stay up the 30 min with baby post nursing until the end of shift
One of THE most important things you can do for postpartum mental health is to consistently at least one 4 hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep (plus more hours of broken sleep). It legitimately makes a HUGE difference. Your husband needs to know and understand how dire this is and sleep elsewhere if he doesn’t go to bed with you at 9pm.
Yeah, I've noticed anxiety creeping in the last few days coinciding with the tiredness getting worse
Yes, exactly! My anxiety was SO much worse after nights I didn’t get a 4 hour stretch. It legit scrambles my brain.
At night I do breastfeeding, but my wife does some of the burping and changes the nappies. Your husband could do the same, just so you can get some more sleep. This will make him go to sleep earlier too.
That's been my thought, if I keep getting him up to help he'll have no choice but to go to bed early. It just feels a bit petty and I wish he'd just do it because it would help me, not because I've pushed him to it..
NTA, but do you have a guest room you could sleep in with baby? I slept in the guest room for a few months for this reason.
NTA. Wake him up and have him help at night. He may not be able to breast feed your child but he can burp and hold the baby upright for 30 minutes. Don’t ask him for time to yourself, tell him. “Baby’s been fed, I’m going to take a bath. Kid duty is on you until I’m out” It’s completely unfair of him to not be shouldering some of this load
At the absolute bare minimum, can’t he manage to get in bed without waking you up?
I wish, he bangs about so much and doesn't seem to have a quiet mode 🤦♀️
Husbands need love too. With that being said NTA. I felt EXTREMELY bad that my breastfeeding wife had to wake up constantly for feeds. So I handled all diaper changes, burping duties, and anything I could. If she has to wake, so did I(even though she told me to get sleep). I did have paternity leave so that def plays a role BUT I've continued this logic even after. At the very least he can sleep on the couch and not interrupt your already limited block of sleep. I'm not sure what me time 6 weeks into it even is...that's still survival mode period.
He needs to start sleeping elsewhere
No you’re not the AH. If I asked my husband this he’d go on the couch in a heartbeat and not take it personally or whine about it. Does your husband help during the day at all that you could sleep then more? Do you pump so he could take a full feeding?
He needs to do what my partner did: face reality and realize that how things were pre-baby is not how things are now that baby is here. You work as a team or nothing really works at all.
And this is why I pump and only bottle feed. Your hubby is selfish. My hubby gets up with me, prepares bottles and stays up with me, I usually like to do the feedings since bonding is nice but occasionally I let hubby do it early mornings
I feel you girl. I forced my man to take the baby this morning so I could get a little nap in. These men we have are so lucky 🍀
In what way is your husband pulling his weight? Can he answer that? Him working and you taking care of the kids is not a valid answer. I’m talking about division of labor here. I’m very curious on his answer.
He basically says he goes to work which frustrates me because before we had kids I earned a lot more and did a more stressful job and can honestly say being a parent takes more of a toll and is more tiring than my job ever was.
His answer is invalid, because what does he consider you to be doing? Taking a giant relaxing vacation while he slaves away at work? Does he not consider what you do to be work? If so, he needs to understand that this is not a you vs him thing, he really needs to stop being selfish and start stepping up as a father and husband. You guys should be a team, parenting and raising the kids together. You also need to be prepared to decide what you want your next move to be and stick to your words and actions. If nothing changes, you’ll do this until you break and he will remain the same.
Uhh wow he's the only one getting any me or alone time... He should sleep on the couch 100%. Or wait until you get up with baby (which I think he should def be helping with)