Being told horror stories with a newborn/baby, did anyone find it fine and pretty easyish?! (Partner works away 6 days a week!!)

[Tarree]

Just that really. All I am hearing is how hard it will be, how I won’t have time to shit let alone talk on the phone, won’t have money, will be horribly lonely, will feel trapped and exhausted and never look the same again and my bath days are over as I won’t be able to even wee on my own.

I feel miserable just thinking about it!

@Comedycook agree with you completely. I always think when people have dcs close together and say their second is so much easier, it’s because they have a toddler and in comparison babies are soooooo much easier.

I have to say I didn't have one of these babies where you can spend hours in a coffee shop or out for lunch so don't feel too disappointed if you can't. Not all babies can do this... however he loves going out and about with me but he needed/still needs lots of attention and things to revolve around him! So baby groups are great but coffee shops where he has to sit on me or in a buggy not so much!

Just try and go with the flow with what baby can cope with (we went through a phase where I could barely walk around a shop as he would scream but now will happily look about so things do change!) but I tried not to stress and force myself to take a crying baby round the shops I tried to accept that for a little while a different activity was more suitable.

I think it’s because everyone already knows that toddlers are difficult - to such an extent that there’s a specific name for it, ‘Terrible Twos’, so people know full well to expect it to be tricky. Many people don’t know to expect that pregnancy/labour/recovery/newborn stage can also be very, very difficult for some people. They’re sold a myth of a fairytale (same with the ‘instant rush of love’ which happens for so many people but also doesn’t happen for many people!) and then they struggle when it doesn’t work out that way.

@Tarree I had baths all the time , I had baths when I had 3 dcs close together and I was alone with dh away.
I agree with the sleep thing though , I absolutely love sleeping and two of my dcs didn’t sleep for years and years ( did all the consistent, strict , routine blah blah) and that was such a shock as ppl always say it’s only for the first 6 months that babies wake , it really , really isn’t for some and you can’t stop a child waking, sleep training doesn’t always work etc so the sleep stuff that ppl went on about was true unfortunately but for many it’s fine too!

Feeding yourself is the trickiest part IME - I was always immensely grateful in hospital that meals were just delivered magically to my bed!

If I knew I would be at home without partner support I would get one of those supermarket delivery passes and order deliveries every 2-3 days with whatever convenience foods I felt like eating. Ready made sandwiches, cake, microwave ready meals, cut up fruit. You'll get a feel for whether you need to eat one handed with the baby on your lap (avoid anything drippy or needing cut up) or whether they're happy put down in a swing/moses basket/bouncer/sleepyhead etc while you eat.

Also some kind of tea/coffee you can make one handed and doesn't need any complicated cleaning is a huge help if you enjoy that kind of thing. I love our Tassimo machine, I know the pods aren't that eco friendly.

If you want to breastfeed, suss out your nearest drop in group (they are not always the easiest thing to find) as this is super helpful for support and questions in the early days. To assist getting out of the house easily, a car seat you can put on your buggy is helpful, and so is a stretchy wrap sling - you can practice putting this on before baby is born.

If you have friends/family members who you don't mind seeing your house in a tip and you in a state of undress get them to visit on a rota once a day - it just helps you get a shower without guilt (though by DC3 I was showering while leaving newborn DC3 in the next room no problem) and if they are good they will notice that the dishwasher needs to go on or the washing folded or whatever and do it for you which is a lifesaver - just one thing every day makes a big difference. As you go on you'll need this less and less.

Interesting - as I think it's the total opposite. People are always talking about how hard the newborn stage is, about getting support in place, people bring over meals etc but parents of toddlers are just expected to get on with it.

What's really hard about toddlers, I find, is that you can never just be in your own head. With a baby, you can go for a walk with them in the sling or pram and just not have to actively entertain them, I can't leave my 2 year old alone for 5 mins and if we go for a walk, I have to engage with him the whole time

I found the newborn stage bloody hard but wonderful all at once. The sleep deprivation was definitely the worst bit, and dd was a very poor sleeper, but once I just accepted it, I was able to really enjoy that special period.

@NiqueNique , I think it’s that I constantly heard the opposite ; that it’s sooo hard with a newborn , that you can’t do anything , same things as the op hears and I found it to be fine . Whereas no one , in my experience, told me that older dcs can sleep crap, that the days are so much more full on as once mine were moving that’s when I struggled to do anything. I see it with all my friends and babies , to me the babies ( who are all different obvs) are way easier to be around than their toddlers, I can meet for coffee and have a conversation and we can stay a while , we absolutely can’t if the toddler is there so that to me is already harder in terms of living life as a adult. But I guess I’m just someone who finds the toddler stage hard. Maybe it’s also all of mine were so , so physical and head strong too so the downtime that I had with a newborn was completely gone.

It depends not just on the baby, but on what you find personally difficult. I'd take a toddler over a newborn (I currently have both) any day because I personally cope really really badly with lack of sleep. Every day for the last week I've ended up sobbing with exhaustion at 4am because I'm not getting any sleep. I feel physically ill. I can deal with anything else much better if I've had more than 2/3 hours sleep the night before, even toddler tantrums.

@Classicblunder i think it’s really variable depending on friendship circle/families/prior experience with babies & toddlers/and again, the individual parent(s) and also the individual child. My eldest was a perfect toddler. She was talking fluently by 18 months so never had the frustrating stage where she couldn’t make herself understood, and I think because of that she felt much more in control of her environment and didn’t find life as a toddler stressful, which meant I didn’t find it particularly challenging. She was also very independent with a stoic personality right from babyhood - easy to wean off the breast, then later, easy to wean off bedtime bottle, easy in every way really. If I hadn’t already known so much about babies and toddlers by that stage I might have felt very smug indeed as a parent.

Depends on the person but no it's really not that hard

Exactly @Classicblunder , I used to be up every 3 hours with my 18 month old and maybe that’s crazy and extremely rare but he had severe reflux and nothing we did worked , by then though people assumed everything was easier when actually I was struggling far more than when I had him as a newborn. The days were far more challenging too with occupying toddlers as mine didn’t really play with toys properly until 3 but wanted to just climb and Run constantly…..but we did go out a lot to try and tire them out and I’m fitter than pre kids as had no choice so silver lining !!

I still remember the first full, unbroken night’s sleep I had when my younger one was 2 1/2, so about 5 years of not ever properly sleeping through the night (as I became a terribly light sleeper when pregnant with my first so used to wake up at every snuffle, sniffle, shuffle and so on...it was BLISS and I felt like a completely different person. I remember thinking WOW - I’d completely forgotten what it felt to wake up properly refreshed in the morning. It takes a lot out of you and sleep deprivation is absolutely brutal if you’re the type of person to need 8-9 hours of good sleep to feel vaguely human. And as I said, my pregnancies/deliveries/babies were easy. If they had been difficult it would have felt 100 times worse.

Argh, dropped a parenthesis there. 🙄

TBH, mine were both OK. Generally slept in 2-3 hour chunks in the night rather than waking constantly. I had some challenges feeding both - BF never worked with DD, made it work after 3 weeks or so of pain with DS!

Even so, first 12 weeks are always pretty chaotic - honestly do whatever it takes to get through them, be that switching to bottle, co-sleeping, putting the baby in another room at night, playing white noise when putting them down at night etc.

I also think it's hugely individual. I massively prefer toddlers to newborns (and I have a 3 year old and a 16 month old so I'm not being rose-tinted about toddlers!). I found having a newborn, especially my first, just so claustrophobic and a horrible mixture of being boring but also not getting much headspace. I find toddlers so much more rewarding and fun - maybe not easier, as such, but 'better'. But as I said I think it's very about your own personality - I'm always astonished when people wax lyrical about how it's great sitting and feeding and watching Netflix all day, for me being stuck under a newborn all day was like being under house arrest.

I’ll also agree with a few others on here that as the “ages and stages” go, I found the newborn stage the easiest so far (if you take away the sleep deprivation!).
Theres 16 months between my DCs 1&2, then 2 years between DCs 2&3, so the toddlers years for me were relentless. Literally cannot switch your brain off for a second because they’ll get up to some sort of fuckery in an impressively small space of time - and I had 2 at once, so double the fuckery. I don’t know how parents of twins do it 🤯
Life has got easier in some ways now they are a little older (eldest and middle ones are 7 and 5) and can be trusted to play without constant supervision, potty trained, can brush their own teeth, get themselves dressed etc, but so much harder in other ways. Like how the 7 year old can now form a logical argument, and feels the needs to argue with every word that leaves my lips 🤨👍🏻 And the constant sibling fighting between DCs 1&2 makes me want to shove a screwdriver into my own ears to dull the sound of it most days 🙃🙃

As others have said, I think it depends what sort of baby you have.

I have what I think is a 'high needs' 11wo who seemed to decide around the 2 week mark that he was far too interested in the world to be a baby. He gets bored easily so I have to change things up often before he gets irritable, and he battles sleep. I either have to feed to sleep or rock him, and then he only sleeps on me or DP (except at night) so 'sleep when the baby sleeps' doesn't really work.

My biggest bit of advice would be not to get sucked into the rabbit hole of self-proclaimed 'baby experts' on social media. They'll have you believing that your baby is broken, and only their £99.99 sleep schedule (or whatever is it they're peddling) will help fix them.

I have been guilty of spending hours online torturing myself about optimal wake windows, sleep cycles, etc. After a brief, stressful phase of spending pretty much every day trying (and failing) to get my baby to nap I've decided to ease up a bit and just get on with things. Having DP to support me on evenings and weekends massively helps with this, so I would recommend getting support from your friends and family to avoid feeling isolated.

Good luck OP c

The thing is, for a lot of us, our toddlers slept worse than when they were newborns, so there also deprivation is worse later on top of the tantrums!

My second woke roughly 2hrly as a newborn, about 5 wake ups a night. A year later, I'd be delighted with that as were often in double figures.

I think 'high needs' often is also open to interpretation sometimes. My second also had quite a bit of colic, and feed to sleep until 2.5. But to be sure was just 'average' not particularly high needs. Some people might think of her as an easy baby, others as high needs. It depends what your expectations are to an extent.

The thing is, for a lot of us, our toddlers slept worse than when they were newborns, so there also deprivation is worse later on top of the tantrums!

Exactly, so it depends on the baby/toddler, and the parent. It's not a universal "newborns are harder" or "toddlers are harder" or "teenagers are harder" which I've also read on here.