What was the biggest shock after having a baby?

[Thefaceofboe]

Mine was that babies don’t necessarily go to bed around 7pm. I always presumed bath and bed would be done at 7pm and baby would wake up for the day at 7am. My 3mo does 11pm - 11am

Mine was how tired you get. People tell you but NOTHING prepares you for it

How very painful breastfeeding was... and that they don't feed every 3 hours. It's much more often than that!!

My 3mo does 11pm - 11am

At 3mo I would have been impressed with 12 hours from any time tbh!

Biggest shocks for me:
The size of the blood clots that come out in the days following birth
Farting (the baby, not me) - both the amount and volume

The sleep deprivation. Tiredness so bad that even mundane household chores become mountains to climb. My 1st was such a horrific sleeper that I can't believe I went on to have more.

Not having much time between feeds. In my innocence I thought four hourly feeding meant you had four hours between the feeds.

How lonely the experience is.

At 3mo I would have been impressed with 12 hours from any time tbh!

This is with many night feeds and long periods of trying to re settle baby though

I found the actual looking after a baby a piece of piss tbh, in a routine from 6 weeks, sleeping through the night at 12 weeks.....

It was losing my own life that completely threw me. No social life, no job any more, nothing at all resembled the old life and the old me. That was really hard.

(Its been 19 years since my first btw, and i have 3, so i got used to it all pretty quickly obvs).

Cluster feeding!

But mostly the huge identify shift that comes with being a mum, the enormity of the responsibility and the acceptance that your life is vastly altered. Once you get over that bit, took me about four months, it gets easier, or it did for me.

It was painful for me to pick DC up out of the Moses basket (especially if it involves scooting access the bed) and I had a straightforward vaginal birth.

I remember these shocking moments:

1. realising he is going to die one day

2. realising in the supermarket that people are still just going about their own lives and HELLO, I JUST HAD A BABY!!???

3. you are straight into it, it’s born and boom, this is it, get on with it, no time to recover really (mentally. Staying in bed with a newborn in heaven 😄). Life keeps on coming!

4. people (friends) not as interested as I’d expected

Many things, but one that stands out for me is how little time you have for yourself even when it sometimes looks, from the outside, like you're not doing that much - there just isn't that alone time any more.

That it takes a long time to be you again rather than baby's mum. How you can't ever do what you want when you want anymore. Baby needs always comes first. This sounds like it shouldn't be a surprise but not being able to go to the loo or grab a drink when you need one is a shock to the system

12 hours at 3 months is amazing, I'd have sold a kidney for that!

How boring they are! They cry, sleep (very occasionally), feed and need their nappy changing. After planning a year off, I went back to work 2 days a week when DD was 3 months old. They get much better as they get older.

I think breastfeeding not being easy was a huge shock to me! We had a heap of problems with both babies.

Also agree with not grasping the reality of how relentless the lack of sleep would be. For the first few weeks I was fine - powered through the sleepless nights! But my first dc just didn't like sleep. Especially not at night and I never got a chance to catch up on sleep. Was so exhausting and felt as if it would never end. But it did and mine are fans of sleep these days. I even get a lie in at weekends.

The effort to get them to sleep!! I honestly thought you could put a baby down and they'd fall asleep, especially when people said to me "I'm just putting child down for a nap!" Everyone knows babies sleep a lot after all, too! I just didn't account for the time it takes to help them fall and stay asleep.

Ah cross post there, I did wonder! We got 45 minutes at a time. It was hell on earth!

My first shock was after a really long labour being handed the baby and literally having to look after her immediately. I naively thought the midwife or nurse would help out for the first night!

I have never know tiredness like it…..

Sleep deprivation- because even if you compare it to pre baby tiredness it’s not the same, you don’t realise you never get a chance to catch up on your sleep

Oh yeah the feeds. Change nappy, feed, spend ages trying to burp baby change nappy, lie down and wish for death for 30 minutes, get up, change nappy, spend ages trying to burp baby…. And so on

That its possible to poop up your own back,…. That was fun, I never thought I could talk about poop so much, how much poop, when, what kind of poop, what is the poop telling us….

How boring and lonely it was.

2) realising in the supermarket that people are still just going about their own lives and HELLO, I JUST HAD A BABY!!???

Yep! Feeling like the most important person in the world and then remembering you aren’t the first women to have a baby and won’t be the last

12 hours at 3 months is amazing, I'd have sold a kidney for that!

Definitely more like 9 if I take out the night feeds and trying to get baby back to sleep. But I won’t knock it. It’s only difficult if we have to be out anywhere early

That the expression 'sleeping like a baby' was a lie, mine didn't hardly sleep at all!!!

Black poo - mine after the iron tablets they give you after a c- section

Nobody told me - I thought I was dying!

That they let us walk out of the hospital with our newborn. Honestly, it felt like we were going to be stopped by security and told to take her back because we were clearly out of our depth