To ask what keeps you so busy with a newborn?

[Floraleigh]

Apologies if this seems daft but I'm a first time mum and no idea what to expect from my NB. I've seen the stories that I can't have a hot cuppa for months, but why? If babies sleep 14-18 hours per day, what am I doing whilst baby is sleeping? What keeps you so busy and knackered?

Trying to prepare myself and DH as he seems to think he'll have time to keep up hobbies at the same pace when the baby is here. This isn't meant to be goady, really haven't the slightest what to expect from a tiny baby!

I remember the pie chart they showed us at NCT showing how much a newborn sleeps...what an utter load of rubbish! I don't know what fictional baby they were talking about!
I'm sure in some people's experience this is true but my baby has FOMO so never slept loads
It also depends how much help you will have. On days when I was alone, it could be 3pm before I knew it and in the early days it was difficult to keep myself properly fed (ie. not just eating toast or other easy stuff!).
I was lucky as my DH had lots of time off work for the first 3 months and my DM was around a lot too.

Well my babies slept for two hours then cry/wake /feed /nappy / cry that’s 24/7. My third cried for the whole day apart from the 30 mins he slept !! ( that might be an exaggeration but that’s how it felt)
It’s relentless tbh
One thing I found useful is to try and get yourself showered and dressed as soon as possible in the morning
Otherwise it’s 3pm and you’re still in Pyjamas
You can still drink tea - it’s just a new normal

The first 6/7 months is my favourite baby time! I loved it!
It's a different way of life - I went from being able to do whatever I wanted to having a timetable!
DC were FF so the routine was easy. When they were tiny the day was broken up into time slots : A 15 min feed & wind , change of nappy every few hrs & we were good to go.

I was tired during the new born days due to the amount of night time waking/feeding involved. But I was never really one to sleep during the day when she did and I had enough time on my hands for cups of tea, meeting up with friends and the regular household duties. I actually found the stage when they start crawling/walking much more demanding, but by then I was less tired and able to deal with it.

The newborn days are not always enjoyable. It's tiring and full on but try and remember that life goes on. It's may not always go to plan and it's very easy to get stuck in a baby bubble but make time to do things that you enjoy - I went for lots of walks, tried to loosely structure the day and made lots of new friends. Looking back they were such happy days and I want to do it all again!

Ps. Your DH needs to prioritise your well-being, your home and your baby before even considering his hobbies.

Babies sleep 3-4 hours so you try and sleep when they do. You no engery for anything till you get sleep. Saying that ive a toddler now and baby stage is the easiest so far but i had a good sleeper which makes the difference. If youve no sleep its hell

DS fed regularly and took clockwork naps, once I got over the initial baby fog then I had time for the occasional cup of tea whilst he slept.

DD - nope, cluster fed from the get go and never took a nap unless it was on me. She's 4 and still doesn't sleep. Ever. If she has one five minute nap in the car then she's awake til 11pm. I had to carry her in a sling to get her to sleep so I could do housework. Don't drink hot tea with a baby in a sling on your chest. Not a good plan.

Tbh if you only have one newborn baby (with no health issues), you may have plenty of time to drink tea and relax after the first few weeks. It takes that long to get into a routine and get your head around being woken up repeatedly.

Looking back I feel everyone over-prepared me for the worst. The newborn phase wasn't that bad, and I'd say the first 6 months were the easiest (except for the first couple of weeks).

Obviously it would be different if you had a newborn, a 2 year old and a 4 year old all needing your attention. No idea how that works!

Hahaha! This is exactly the sort of thing I'd have written before DD arrived.

She woke up every 45 mins to 1.5hrs for weeks. I thought, "It can't be that difficult." It's not, but it can be purely relentless. Over and over and over.

I got lucky with my first. On the difficulty scale of newborns, he was right at the easy end.
He slept well, hardly ever sick, settled into a neat routine from 6 weeks which meant I could get stuff done. I did feel rather overwhelmed, but he was a contented little chap who smiled a lot.
As for ds2 though, he was much closer to the other end. Fed little and very often. Hated sleep. Hated being put down. Sicked up multiple times a day. Cried constantly.
The sleep deprivation was a killer. Even if ds2 was having a good day, I was too sleep deprived to take any advantage of it.
Add to that ds1 had gone from adorable toddler to total threenager just before ds2 arrived.
Ds2 is 4 now and I still feel I'm catching up on missed sleep from the first 3 years of his life.

I had an easy newborn. Slept fantastically well and was in his own little routine from a couple of sdekz. The two weeks paternity leave my partner took were amazing we did so many fun things and got out and about. When my son was 5 weeks old I was on my arse tired, burst into tears because I couldn't function. I lived with my mum for the first three months and she took him in her room overnight for me and just bought him in for a quick breastfeed then took him back in her room. You don't sleep properly even when they're sleeping, you only stay in stage 2 of sleep so don't get a deep sleep. That is why you're exhausted. I found the newborn stage quite boring if I'm honest. And drank lots of hot tea. Now my son is 11 months, not so much

I had quite a clingy baby, and breastfeeding takes ages sometimes. I invested in a good quality flask for hot drinks.

So as per previous posters it depends on your baby, but I loved snuggling anyway while he slept and I watched the TV a lot as I was tired from the night feeds, he used to do a nice stretch from about 7-11 so I used to go to bed at 8 so yours days are much more condensed anyway.

As everyone has said, it depends on the baby...and on you. If you've had a difficult birth, a c-section etc, everyday tasks are going to be harder and take much longer.

But there's also the unknown of how you'll feel mentally. I had PND and was extremely anxious, so I spent a lot of time worrying when DS was asleep, rather than doing something productive or enjoyable or catching up on sleep. So while DS was a fairly easy baby, I found the newborn stage the hardest by far and parenting has become easier for me as he's got older. Others have different perspectives as your mental state has a big impact as well as your child's temperament.

Oh bless you.

I use to say its a bad day when you microwaved your tea for the third time!

DD had reflux so could not sleep/cried/threw up if laid flat. I had to hold her almost all the time. (She refused the sling.) And because it's dangerous to sleep holding a baby, DH and I took turns sleeping at night while the other held DD. We did that for about three months.

When your baby doesn't sleep, your days are spent in a haze of sleep deprivation but you still have to change nappies, feed the baby, in my case give her reflux medication (which has to be made with fresh cooled boiled water) before each feed, change their clothes when they throw up, try to eat something, maybe grab a nap if the baby sleeps more than ten minutes at a time... I only ate things you could grab, prepare and eat with one hand.

Hopefully you won't have a baby with reflux!

Every baby is different, some feed continuously, some dont, some cry when put down, some dont, it dosent matter how relaxed you are in your parenting style, its all down to baby. I have 4dc, dc1 was easy, lucky me! Dc2 was easy, lucky me! Dc3 was so easy it never felt like i had a newborn, lucky me! Dc4 was a disaster, he hated being put down, not very helpful with older dc. It was a real shock to the system as i hadnt changed my parenting style, he spent a lot of time in a sling.

It was 16 years ago when I had my first. Dh was away a lot with work so he would only be home weekends. I remember being very organised. Also we had no internet so I didn’t waste my days 🙈

Before I had him I batch cooked meals for me to have during the week. I portioned them in to single meals so I would take one out the night before as I was locking up. If I hadn’t if done it I know I wouldn’t have eaten properly. Pasta bakes had just come in and I used to make one on a Monday and it would be my lunch throughout the week.

One of the big things was we didn’t get up in a morning until about 10.30. Ds would wake throughout the night obviously and I would feed him and keep him in my bed (before attatchment parenting and consleeping was a thing) when he dozed back off so did I. He would go in to a bouncy chair at the side of the bath so I could wash (we had no shower)

I would make a point of getting dressed and taking him for a walk each day. As I was on my own mainly it would have been very easy to have seen no one and not spoke to anyone all week. That is if I could. The growth spurt days I had my arse glued to the sofa where he fed constantly.

I’m naturally quite an organised person so we didn’t have much clutter. There wasn’t a lot of housework to do as I didn’t make a mess and I would put a load of washing on every other day.

When Dh came home on a weekend he really stepped up and did deeper cleaning and did as much for ds as he could. It was just so exhausting though. I used to go to bed at 7pm and fall asleep watching Corrie. I was very lucky I didn’t have a baby with colic or who minded being put down. The tiredness is like a fog and when they do finally sleep through you’re constantly checking them to see if they are okay.

I agree - depends on the baby.

My babies would not sleep without being held for more than 10 minutes for the first few months.

I realise all babies are different.

I think the key thing I didn't really understand was that when the day baby feeds every 2 hours, they don't mean for 5 minutes! It's at least 45 mins of that 2 hours and could be longer! Then when they are done they don't want to be put down so you end up holding them or sitting with them next to you on the sofa so you daren't move!

Trying to prepare myself and DH as he seems to think he'll have time to keep up hobbies at the same pace when the baby is here

Oh bless him.

I can’t tell you what it’s like with one but I had twins and it felt like I literally never stopped. I also don’t know what the first couple of months at home are like because one was still in hospital and we spent most of our waking time there.

If you’re breastfeeding you’ll spend most time doing that. If you’re bottle feeding you’ll spend eternity making bottles, feeding and washing them. If you’re pumping, as I did for 7 months, you’ll come to resent your phone alarm and at all times you’ll be either feeding, pumping or washing up. Changing nappies, insane amounts of scrubbing poo out of clothes, laundry, actually interacting with your baby etc.

I found an old schedule I wrote out when they were about 8 months and it was absolutely insane. I don’t know how I got through it now looking back!

My baby only slept upright on me and only for 45 minutes at a time. She refused to be put down at all.

Days were spent changing, feeding (which she'd do for hours), winding, more changing and wondering when it ended really.

Turns out it does.

It’s important to add the emotional upheaval to the mix.

It’s not so much the difficulty or ‘too much’ of the baby tasks that is hard, it is trying to do even simple tasks while being buffeted by bloody feelings!

If you’ve ever gone through intense grief (over a death, injury, sudden job or relationship loss) you’ll get it. The waves of feelings in the background of everything you do. It’s not all negative emotion with a newborn, but it is a bit paralysing. Then add hormones, recovery from birth (swelling, cs wound, stitching, muscular aches). Then add everyone else’s emotions around you- your partner’s, your family, your mates, your baby. It affects you.

It all adds up to form quite an emotion storm, through which there is no let up, or time to process or recover. You just put your head down and keep ploughing forward with the tasks. The tasks aren’t hard in themselves, but they can be hard to do, and slower than you think they’ll be.

There’s no way I’d have believed ‘feeding the baby’ could possibly take soooooo many hours in the day. Even as I did it, I wasn’t believing it! A lot of it is surreal and like normal time & space have ceased to play by the rules!

Because you'll make the tea and forget to drink it ...

You start off destroyed as you are already exhausted from not sleeping at the end of pregnancy and then there's the actual birth. You don't get time to recover, from what is basically a major assault on your body. In any other medical circumstance, you would get to rest and recover, but instead you have a tiny human who cries a lot at all hours of the day and night who needs constant feeding,nappy changing and comfort. Take the opportunity to nap when the baby dies when they are first born, you'll need to! Of course you get time to make a cup of tea, but you will feel too exhausted to do much.