Shifts - dealing with lack of sleep with newborn DD2?

[Laurtopsy]

DD2 is five days old and doesn't sleep well at night. She's awake for a feed around every hour and a half to two hours and I find myself irritable and ready to stab someone in the eye if I get broken sleep. DF tries to help by feeding her expressed breast milk and changing nappies in the nights but he is no good with no sleep so I end up leaving him sleep, doing it all myself and then having to get up and do everything with DD when she wakes up at 7am.

I decided tonight we should do shifts. He'd go to bed at 10pm and I would stay awake/cat nap until 4am with DD2 and then we'd switch so we'd both get a block of uninterrupted sleep while still being awake to check on the baby (I'm petrified of SIDS and hate not being able to check on DD2 and seeing her breathe). That way DF will be up with DD in the morning to make breakfast and I'll get up around 9:30am to start the day. This is only for the next two weeks or so until we get into a more established routine because he has to go back to work in January and we need to be in some kind of workable routine for then.

Is this a good idea or should I just suck it up and deal with the broken sleep?

[festivefriedawhingesagain]

Thats what we did with DD who barely slept, think our cut off was 4am as well. I found that having a defined person who was responsible was good, it reduced how resentful I felt.

I did anything before 4, DH did any wakings after. Or sometimes if I did most of the wakings I would go back to bed when he got up for the day, he would wake me to feed her when needed.

Whatever works - this stage is very hard so anything that suits you is fine