to 'accidently' wake up DP during every night feed.

[jellybelly701]

Or just whenever I feel like waking him up actually.

Sorry it is so long.
DS is now almost 9 months old and the boy just doesn't sleep. All he wants to do is play and stand up, I can get him to have two, one hour naps a day but he often refuses to go to sleep at night. His bedtime is 7pm but for the past month he still hasn't been asleep my 10pm he will wake up at 3am every morning without fail and sometimes he just won't go back to sleep for two hours. Then he's awake and ready to start the day by 7am.

He is breastfed so I have always been the one to wake in the night and since he has been born I've been getting on average 5-6 hours of sleep a night and never more than 3 hours at a time. DP works FT, he does need a good nights sleep so I just get on with it on my own.

However the sheer lack of consideration from DP is making my blood boil. Weekends are supposed to be my lie in days. DS is eating solids and finger foods now so DP can give him breakfast and entertain him so I can get a few hours sleep. DP hasn't woken up until 11-1 every weekend and I have been up since 7 on my 'lie in' days.

DP always decides at about 11pm that he wants a shower before bed. Ds room is directly next to bathroom and the bath and shower are in the same place as his cot, just on the other side of the wall. The shower wakes him up because it sounds like a bloody jumbo jet and once showered DP gets into bed and goes to sleep, so I am left trying to stay awake feeding DS in a warm, dark and silent room when all I want to do is sleep.

DP wakes ds every single morning, if his two-minutely alarms going off from 5:30-7 (he just sleeps through them all even with a sonic boom alarm clock) doesn't do the trick then the banging around and shouting up the stairs certainly does.

This morning he must have actually woken up to his alarms for once because at 7am both me and ds was still both asleep, until DP couldn't find something for work and somehow thought I would know where it was. I didn't of course so a lot of banging around and him being as loud as possible has woken DS.

I'm getting fed up of it. So, WIBU to wake DP during the night and make sure he gets no more than 6 hours a night and 3 hours at a stretch so he can see how I feel?

Or failing that,

WIBU to kill him?

Try saying: 'this isn't working for me'
-Lay out the issues - a written list (keeps the emotions lower and less wriggle room)
-Ask him to come up with the solutions
-Try the solutions
-Repeat as needed 'this isn't working for me'
Until it is.

treadsoftly

Haha, MILS culinary skills are about as good as mine so there is no chance of a roast or crumble unless it is Christmas. If I specifically told her to leave him to look after ds by himself, she would.

Email him this thread. He should be ashamed of himself. What a pitiful excuse for a husband and father :(

Can you put him in the baby's room and take ds in with you?
Before ds goton the move he barely slept in the day. 20 minutes all day. Once he crawled and started walking he suddenly developed a 2 hour nap :) You might have to put up with a hellish few days while you try and reset him.
As a heavy sleeping owl I have a tiny bit of sympathy with your dh. But only a tiny bit. Mostly he's being an arse. I don't like getting up but I do. I get the dc to school on time. I am a grown up. I did a year of night feeds but DH helped out in other ways.

The shower thing is just selfish and there is no excuse.

If he was mine he might have had the alarm clock bashed on his head by now.

Op please try cc/sleep training.

Once you are less knackered you may see the wood for the trees here.

Plus even if you are breast feeding he can help. My dad doesn't wake up to an alarm, a fire alarm, a huge bell, or being smacked over the head
However a baby crying and he's up like a shot, and would always (when I was a baby obviously!) take me to my mum to feed, and then put me back down. Apparently he used to wake up and say "great, goodas slept right though" and not remember picking me up
Working doesn't excuse him. I work FT, granted I don't have any children but if he was single he would have to do all his own cooking/cleaning/house stuff

babies room is tiny, there is a cot, a wardrobe and about a square metre of floor space. so sleeping in there is not an option. We don't have a spare room either.

May I just say, OP - and I don't want to be patronising because you sound very together - that you are doing brilliantly with your DS. How fantastic that you have breastfed him on demand since birth for nine months and done all the nights, the vast majority of mornings, are cooking his meals and doing all the nappy changes and, I suspect, all the laundry and housework. You are supermum.

You need some support and respect, as lots of posters have pointed out. I went back to work when my DS was 6 months old, and my DH took over at home FT for a few more months. It was so much EASIER to be at work. They had a coffee machine - you didn't even have to boil a kettle and I could have as much as I liked all day long! My colleagues (almost) never cried at me, they took themselves off to the bathroom, prepared their own food and even brought me back stuff from the shops if I was pushed. I never felt responsible - every minute - for keeping them safe and alive. If I left my colleagues sitting in a chair at their desks, I felt confident they wouldn't roll off and bash their heads.

And when I got home, I changed nappies and took over with DS to give my DH a break, just as he had done for me when he was working.

Obviously every job is different. But you need your sleep as much as he needs his. Never mind "some men", I think most men manage to work a FT job and still take much more responsibility for family life.

jelly, are you taking this advise on board?

jelly Oh, right, I just reread that. :) Glad that they weren't calling you names, but yes then, what a patronising name for a group! Are they trying to 'cute up' teenage pregnancies? They might as well hand out T-shirts with a pregnant Little Miss on it...

The strangest thing just happened, the stack of extremely heavy hard back books that was on the windowsill and I have been asking him to move for the past 6 weeks have just mysteriously fell from the windowsill onto the bedside table landing right on top of his alarm, completely smashing it.

Now isn't that a Shame.

puts hammer back in the toolbox

I like your idea, haunted . There will be more space in the baby's room once you take the cot out and put it in your room, jelly , so your dh would be able to fit a little mattress in there for himself.

The alarm is dead!!

Firstly, OP may I say I am really impressed by how committed you are to breastfeeding, please don't let your DH's behaviour scupper what is a very, very good thing - and I categorically do not think you should be trying night weaning or controlled crying as suggested up-thread.

I can completely relate to how you feel, we moved DD into her room at 6 months and as my DH works in construction, I was really worried about how interrupted sleep would affect his concentration and for safety's sake (not being a martyr, just didn't really want him falling off a scaffold!) I fed DD in her room, through the night on demand, dozing in the nursery chair or on the nursing stool for several months. But after I went back to work at 10 months I became completely exhausted so I gave up, relaxed into co-sleeping and life improved for all of us. It meant DH slept in the spare room on work nights for a few months but in the scheme of things, that was a very small price to pay.

Suggest that your DH sleep in the spare room if you have one (this might also help with the ridiculously juvenile alarm behaviour - I'd just turn it off, he is actually ruining his own night's sleep as well as yours!), or alternately if your spare room has a double bed that you and your DS can sleep in, that might be a solution. If you don't have a spare room, perhaps if your DS's could accommodate a single bed then DH could sleep in there? This is only temporary, so not something to be worried about, just a little flexibility might help everyone, as the current situation clearly is not working. If you can co-sleep with your DS (including any naps you can get him to take), you will have easier and less disruptive night feeds and you will all get a better night's sleep.

Sleep deprivation wears on everyone's nerves, it is a form of torture after all, so perhaps try it for a week and then hopefully everyone will be in a better mood. Then start talking through fair distribution of lie-ins and that sort of thing. The late showering sounds particularly inconsiderate, I'd definitely call him on that, him showering earlier in the evening before your DS is due to go to bed would be a very small accommodation on his behalf. Each of you getting one lay-in at the weekend is only fair, after all you both have full-time jobs! Good luck, and just try to keep talking, you are still only in the very early stages of adjusting as a couple to parenting so try not to give yourself too hard a time. From about a year, your DH may also engage a lot more with your DS and want to spend more time with him on the weekends, which might solve the long lay-in problem too. My DH is an amazing dad, but as I breastfed on demand to 18 months he admits to feeling a bit like a spare wheel a lot of the time. However, after she started eating, walking and communicating, he felt a lot more necessary and his participation level increased exponentially from there. Has your DH indicated how involved he would like to be? Has he adjusted to/ is he enjoying being a dad?

Eddie I am, we will be having a serious discussion later tonight. The alarm clock has just died in a freak accident and DP will be left alone for at least 6 hours to care for ds while we are at MILS.

If once we return things haven't dramatically improved then I will refuse to do any washing etc for him and will only do the bare minimum of cleaning.

I bet the 'some women' who are able to look after baby and the home don't have a twat of a husband waking them and the baby at 11pm and 5:30am for no good reason whatsoever. They probably also have an easy baby who sleeps, or help from family and friends.

He sounds like a sexist dick, with 1950s views of motherhood and his role in the family. Next time he asks why he should change your child's nappy, reply 'because some men manage to work full time and be a proper parent to their child when they get home'

Well if MIL isn't going to show you up by being frigging SuperMum, and supportive of you I'd definitely bring her up to speed and ask that she ensures that her son has the full ft parental experience including taking his son with him to the loo while he visits

freshstart he's is starting to enjoy him more now he is a little older and wanting less milk feeds. He interacts with and plays with him a lot more now. I think like your DP he feels a bit like a spare part.

DP own dad was not very involved with him when he was a child and he resents him for it. He doesn't want that for our son so he wants to be super involved and hands on. But what he's saying and what he is doing doesn't match up.

treadsoftly I will tell her to leave all her cleaning and washing up for him to do too and we can go for some lunch and a coffee

I think that by far the most likely explanation for your DP's behaviour is that he is an arse.

However, apart from adolescence, there have been two periods in my life when I have found it difficult to wake up on work mornings and slept really late at the weekends. Once it was due to an underactive thyroid and the other time I had fairly severe anaemia. Both problems were easily treated. You'll know better than any of us what his general energy levels are and whether these or similar conditions are worth excluding by a visit to your GP. Because of the nature of these conditions they do kind of creep up on you.

The recipe for housework sharing that works for my nephew and is wife is that they both work when he is at his place of employment and evening /weekend chores are shared.

jelly sorry for the horrid x-posting essay! Was rambling, bit sleep deprived myself tonight (completely self-inflicted though).

Love your work with the alarm clock, btw. :)

This thread has given me flashbacks. Especially the alarm thing - my DH was exactly the same. Infuriating! You are perfectly entitled to wake him up by clobbering him over the head with the damn thing. Alarm clock no more, husband awake - problem solved.

*tonight???? Sheesh... Today, clearly. Self-proving point right there!

forthright

I don't think it is anything health related. But it could be motivation related. His boss is a bit of a knob who has been trying his hardest to make his work life a misery. He has been unhappy at work for over a year now because of this. He is switching jobs in two months though so if it is because of that then hopefully his job change should help.

But saying that, we have been together for 6 years and he has always always been rubbish at waking up to his alarms. So I suppose it could be just a bad habit that after years and years is very difficult to break.