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!

It really depends what baby you have. My 3 month old is a real struggle and I’m a first time mum. I’m totally on my knees and never knew it would be this awful. This is what I have done since 6pm last night I’ve kept a note on my phone to keep track of his bitty feeds etc (reflux)

7pm-10pm- screaming on and off but mostly on.
10:30 feed 4oz
11pm sleep
12am wake screaming
12:20 feed 3oz
Vomited (projectile!) -Change and clean up
Feed 1oz
1:30am will not settle eyes open fidget constant back rubbing and soothing laying on chest not helping so far.
2am still awake fidgeting loudly.

3am asleep
4am wake crying
Feed 3oz will not go back to sleep at All
Another Bottle made @ 6.15 and drunk 1oz only
6:30am asleep restlessly
7:15 drunk other 3 oz
9am 2 oz + poo
9:30am walk dog and take baby out

My day and night will go on the pretty much like this on bad days which is a lot. That’s the reality of some babies I’m afraid :(

Wbat kept me so busy was basically the fact that there was another person in the house who couldn't do anything on their own. So feeding, cleaning up after That, going to the toilet and cleaning up, dressing, sleeping. Plus babies like being held and cuddled - why wouldn't they, they've just come out of an environment where they were held 24/7.

On top of just having to do everything for the baby, you have more of every day housework to do. Not just washing clothes for the 2 adults any more, due to the amount a baby dribbles, possets and shots on itself you apparently have to wash the equivalent of a tiny 5 aside football team. Every day. Plus nappies (if reusable). Then there's emptying bins due to nappies. And tidying up clothes and toys and general stuff babies attract.

Doing all the baby stuff also feels more difficult when night sleep is broken. And after you've actually given birth too. It's like running a marathon, having a half hour sit down then being asked to run another marathon. You're knackered from the first one but no time to recover.

BUT. After a couple of weeks you get used to it. You start to get the hang of what you are doing with feeding and nappy changing and so on.

Drop your standards - either give up ironing and cleaning windows yourself - or get someone else to do stuff. Reduce the amount of things that "need" to be done so you have less you feel you have to do. Easy. (I don't iron. Never have. It probably saves me lots of time.)

Also: don't underestimate the amount of time you want to so end just sitting cuddling the baby. It's wonderful. Having this tiny wee person in your arms, snoozing or feeding. Ah, lovely. I spent days just holding and cuddling. A sling also helped.

The period of time when you feel like you have no time to shower or brush your hair lasts for a fairly short amount of time. You get through it. You figure out what is and isn't achievable in a day and you figure out what you do and don't want to do (cheerio ironing!).

It'll be fine.

But tell your DH that he has to do his fair share of housework and baby wrangling too. If that means knocking the hobbies on the head for a bit, fine. He knocked you up so he needs to accept his life changes too.

Ha mine didn't sleep for longer than 20 minutes for the first six weeks. I was so sleep deprived I started hallucinating and they sent the mental health crisis team out to assess me.

My stitches didn't heal for 6 months so sitting down was pretty painful. DS had colic and severe reflux. He didn't sleep at night and not much in the day. I was totally exhausted and barely functioning. I switched to formula so stelrizing etc takes time. When I was breastfeeding I literally couldn't move from the sofa as he took an hour plus to feed. Now he's 3.5 and he's a little beaut!

Oh and then when you change them and they fill up their nappy straight away all over the clean babygrow!!

I went to the gym 3-4 times a week before work plus another hobby 1-2 times a week in the evening before the baby. This was obviously unsustainable post baby and I pretty much dropped everything in the weeks leading up to the birth and for the month or two after. I’ve started going back to the gym but just on days off/weekends so I’m straight back after work. We’ve had a pretty easy baby by comparison but it’s not been all easy, the first six weeks were pretty tough.

Whatever you do you should do it as a team

You will have time for a cuppa but you might not finish it before it gets cold. OH still went to football one evening a week which was fine, he worked long hours too but you just get into a routine with it. It gets easier for a bit, then they start walking
Sleep deprivation is the worst part but you get used to it pretty quick. DS (1) was up every half hour last night with teething/windy belly and it hasn't kill me off (2 years ago I'd have died after that little sleep). Dd never did that though, so you might be lucky. She slept 12-13 hours without stirring from as far back as I can remember

Yeah my 2nd didn't sleep much. I cried a lot. My parents took the 1st out for an afternoon to give me a break. Sleep deprivation was horrific.

My first was a terrible sleeper, nodded off on the boob then woke half an hour later hungry. She had awful reflux so would spend ages feeding then it all came back up again and would start feeding again. Lots of time spent washing clothes and bedding and generally wiping up sick while jiggling screaming baby. Got 1000x with weaning at 4 months.

No reflux second time but a frequent feeder and toddler in tow. Was much calmer second time as I knew I would survive!

Still jealous of the parents of good sleepers.

Like everyone else has said, it depends on the baby. I think you possibly get a lopsided view on a parenting forum, because people who are finding things difficult tend to post for suport.
My experience - I've had 3 babies, all 3 of them got into a routine very quickly of feeding 3-4 hours, sleeping in between feeds and sleeping for 5-6 hours at night in one stretch by the time they were 5 weeks old.
Most of the babies I have known have been similar. My Mum said my eldest brother was very difficult to look after, he wouldn't settle and cried continuously. Later on she realised he probably had an allergy to milk, but things like that weren't diagnosed in those days.
A friend of mine also had a very difficult baby, he cried continuously for about 2 years and wouldn't sleep for longer than 20 minutes. My friend's husband was one of those men who refused to do anything round the house, so you can imagine it was very difficult for her.

ds slept for four hours and fed every four hours. we thought there was something wrong with him as dd had fed up to 20 times a day, cried and slept for very little bits of time.

My baby is now 8 weeks old.

In the first few weeks she was cluster feeding every 30 mins/ 1 hour. I was still exhausted from a 48 hour birth and it was in the middle of a heatwave. If you put her down she would wake up, I was also paranoid about leaving the room (still am) and basically wanted to sit and share at her all day (still do). So think feed/ puke/ nappy change and the anxiety of when she will wake up means you can basically get nothing done. I would nearly always choose to nap rather than clean the house. Things have improved now and she feeds less but has colic/ reflux so screams for hours which is mentally exhausting. I do manage to make cups of tea (and have a ridiculous amount of biscuits) though

Also just to add if you have a supportive partner everything is so much easier. I honestly don’t know how single Mums do it.

It depends on the baby I think. DS had colic and reflux and would only sleep in me so my time was spent cleaning up sick, trying to comfort a crying baby or pinned to the sofa watching TV unable to get myself a drink etc and just too tired to care about anything. If you have a baby who wakes, has something to eat, plays nicely for half an hour on a mat and then goes to sleep in a cot then you will probably have time for drinks, showers etc :)

I'd forgotten about all the tea made and mostly not drunk.
Forget the first 6 weeks,you will be crushingly tired but you have just grown and birthed a baby.
After that,babies do sleep.Mine was reasonable at night at 2-4hourly but apart from a couple of short naps was awake all day.Little babies do not entertain themselves and are vocal about it.I could not understand why getting out of the house before 11am was so difficult.
My exhaust asked once what I had done all day and spent a while drying my tears and then taking the baby from me for a few hours.In out house this was known as"woman on the edge".
If your breast feeding this makes you tired too for the first fee weeks.
Remind your OH that it is maternity leave not doing all the housework leave.I gave all the vacuuming to IH too as your back is also vulnerable until your ligaments get back to normal.
But it's wonderful but also your child has a father too.

It just varies so much.

Mine came out of the womb knowing night from day, so whilst she woke for feeding at night (3-4 hourly at birth), she was fed, winded, and we were both back to sleep within 20-30 mins max. And she was bottle fed, so we shared those wake ups. I was easily sleeping 9 hours a night (albeit with the brief wake ups). In the day, we'd pop her in the sling and just get on with stuff. Shopping, cake with friends, the beach, sightseeing etc. There was time for lots of socialising, baking, the house was tidier than ever before. We devoted more time to cooking, not less. She didn't (and still doesn't as a young toddler), sleep through, but she was otherwise a model easy child.

Though even with a very clingy baby I think it's possible to still do stuff. I'm stuck at home today with an ill toddler that is alternating sleeping and crying, and who will scream unless she's on me constantly. So I've got her in a sling, and she gets the cuddles, and I still get to have lunch, get to drink something etc. The only reason to be stuck on the sofa for hours with any baby is because either you aren't feeling upto anything else or you want to be on the sofa (which is fine)

Toddlerhood is much busier from my perspective.

I'm now pregnant with my second, and I'm presuming I'm going to get a nightmare baby to make up for the easy first!

My close friend had the easiest newborn. Slept peacefully in his crib for four hours at a time, 6 at night! No feeding issues, only cried when there was an obvious reason, sailed through teathing. She had another almost straight away (18 months between them) thinking she had it sussed. Second baby was super high needs - wouldn't sleep alone, trouble feeding. Very very fussy etc. At the same time DC1 hit terrible twos early. She said it was the hardest 2 years of her life and she literally thought about having herself committed because she thought she was loosing It.

Like many have said it's not the sleep/not sleep, it's the pattern.

Our DS (now coming up to 12 years old) didn't sleep through the night until he was four years old. He'd wake two or three times in the night. At 9 months old his natural waking time was 4am. Then a nap at 11am. Now, unless I went to bed at 8pm (unlikely but I had to sometimes just to function) I didn't get my quota of sleep. So come 11am I used to stick a washing machine load of washing on and nap with him.

We used to put him down at about 6pm when he was new born. Invariably we'd just start our dinner and he would wake with a soiled nappy or just be grizzly. So that's dinner interrupted. So it's not the fact that he wasn't put down to sleep at a reasonable time, it was that he didn't stay asleep and you can't settle down for your evening if your baby is screaming.

I've never known anyone who had a baby sleeping for 14 hours during the day btw. Our son woke every two - three hours as a new born and even if you ignore the cries you can still hear them.

It's your pattern that will be disrupted, not the actual hours available to you.

I managed to drink hot tea, eat, shower, do my hair and make up, get to happy hour or day 4 with DS1 and generally feel fabulous straight after both of my two. But they were easy babies.

Not so much toddlers - multiple night wakings, a small person shouting at the bathroom door when I'm trying to use the toilet, in and out of bed at bedtime (usually mid-dinner for DH and I)

I found them harder older and just coming out of the fog of it. That combined with full time job... yuck.

Babies look so easy, don't they?

Imagine coming round from emergency surgery, being whisked from your hospital bed and made to go to a nightclub immediately, then a long-haul flight where you're not allowed to sleep and someone keeps shouting in your ear. On landing you're required to take a GCSE in Russian despite never having learnt a word of it before, then your partner, family and friends all tell you they want to relate to you on different terms from now on. On top of this you are also required to run a house full of mischievous puppies. And you have a bed but someone's poured a lot of sick and milk in it.

And that's a fairly easy newborn.

This might be very unfair, as I have a tiny baby so no idea about the later stages, but I do wonder whether some (some - not all) of the people who think their newborns were very easy compared to the current stage of their children are being a bit rose-tinted, or forgetting the advantage of hindsight? I think it's always easier to see what's hard about right now, whereas you forget a bit how you felt in the past. I feel a bit at pregnant women complaining how tired they feel as my current fatigue is such a magnitude beyond my pregnancy tiredness, but that's very unfair - pregnancy insomnia was horrible at the time, and I did feel shit, and it's easy to forget just how bad I felt looking back because I now know worse was to come! (In terms of tiredness. Again, overall having a baby is so much better than being pregnant because you have a baby!)

@LisaSimpsonsbff I think I must have the opposite of rose tinted glasses because all I can remember is weeping on the sofa, not being able to move, no sleep and not going anywhere, when actually I know that I did go out to see friends and family, and even managed a couple of pub lunches!

DS was a normal baby, not too difficult but not easy peasy either. It was certainly difficult and there were days of utter tedium and frustration where I didn't feel like I could do anything - when DS deigned to sleep out of my arms, I did just want to sleep and definitely couldn't face cleaning. I actually used to get really stressed when people came round when he was asleep because it was eating into my sleeping time!

No rose tinting here LisaSimpsonsbff. I simply only slept about 3 hours a night (broken every 30 mins), when pregnant, and about 9 (broken every 3hrs) with a newborn. I was exhausted when pregnant, and fine with a newborn. Newborns vary, and so do pregnancies.

Pregnancy was hell, but my maternity leave was like a holiday in comparison.

Dc2. Oh.my.word.

If there was ever a child sent to try you, then it's them. Turns out he had serious and significant food allergies (I stopped counting at 18 different things) and basically existed off neocate for a loooooooong time. Oh and wouldn't take more than 2oz milk at a time. He was a puker like no other.

Our timetable went something like:

6am. Wake up, strip the cot as it was guaranteed to be covered in puke/shite.
Feed the baby.
Change the baby's clothes and your clothes
Put the baby back down in the cot
Change the baby and the cot bedding again.
Bribe the older dc to pleeeeeeease get dressed like a big girl
Change the baby and the cot again.
Feed the baby
Running late for school.
Cover the baby in a towel because you can't handle stripping the carseat to wash it.
Bribe the older one with Peppa fucking pig on my phone to get in the car.
Somehow make it to school on time.
Pop into the pharmacy to reorder the baby's meds.
Feed the baby
Clear up vom
Get home, scrub the bedsheets (neocate stains bedding an inky purple like nothing else)
Shove the bottles in the dishwasher because you can't handle washing that many bottles by hand.
Feed the baby
Change the baby.

It's 11am and you remember that you haven't yet had a cuppa. Or breakfast.

Suffice to say I don't be having any more kids

Well they often cry when you put them down so you can have tea if somebody makes it for you I suppose. Then there's feeding them, cleaning up their puke (constant changing required) and dirty nappies, pumping, sterilising, if you're formula feeding you'll have to wash bottles before you do anything else at naptime, put on a wash of sicky pooey vests then it's a choice between eating, showering, housework or sleeping. You're tired all the time because your sleep is broken and not in a nice relaxing wake up at 2am and doze back off kind of way. And you're tired because you might spend a bit of time stressing that they might just randomly die if you take your eyes off them and that stops you from sleeping.