Have i overreacted?

[Quiinkong]

I have a 5 month old DS. At 3.5mths old, i had to tell DP that he needs to start helping with night feeds because the exhaustion was unreal. So, he does night shift 2 days a week depending on work schedule, so days aren't fixed. Last week saturday night rolls around and he goes to go to sleep as normal until i tell him he's on night shift (he already knew this because he does night shifts when he doesn't have to get up for work the next day). He tried it with "i thought you were doing it" but i knew he was partly joking and we just laughed. I fed DS around 11.

Now, this boy's feeding habit is erratic. Sometimes he wants to feed again 2hrs later, 1.5hrs later, 3hrs later etc and DP knows this too. In fact, just last week Wednesday, he ate 3x within 3hrs (90ml each time, max he will feed is 120ml at a time). Around 12:20am, he started fussing in bed which is his feeding cue when he's sleeping, so i nudged DP to feed him (we were still awake in bed). DS only eats 60ml and DP is like "he wasn't really hungry" but 5mins later DS starts fussing again. DS has moments where he will eat a little bit and 5-10mins later, wants the rest. So, i said to DP "i think he wants the rest now" and DP said "no, he's not hungry", i left it and said nothing. About 20mins later, i got up myself because DS was still fussing in bed (fussing just means he's restless while his eyes are still closed), i take him and fed him the rest of the 60ml and he ate it. I say nothing to DP because he already started sleeping.

Just before 2am, DS is fussing again and i once again nudge DP because he's a deeper sleeper than i am, so, i usually have to wake DP to feed our son. I nudge him and he's like "omg he's not hungry, what time is it? What time did he last eat" and I'm like "that's what you said earlier but i got up and he ate" and DP said "yeah, so how long ago was that" and I'm like "that doesn't matter, he's hungry" and DP begrudgingly gets up and starts feeding our son (our convo was in whisper mode as we didn't want to wake DS). Once again, DS eats 60ml and DP comes out of whisper mode and starts going "see, he only ate 60ml, he wasn't really hungry, let him get proper hungry" and our son pops his eyes open from obviously the not so quiet voice and i was like "really? Did you have to bring this up right now?" and DP reiterates himself again and i was just like "ok, you know what, I'll do the night shift" and i scoot near the crib , essentially taking over where DP was sleeping which is usually my place to sleep.

DP starts going off "move back to your place, I'll do the shift" and I'm obviously over his complaining at 2am over having to wake up to feed our son and i tell him no, I'll do the shift and stay on that side of the bed. DP angrily (i could see his expression) puts DS in his crib and starts to power shove me to the other side of the bed, no bra on and he's just angrily trying to roll me like tissue paper to the other side. After he was done, i was so pissed off that i took my foot to his body and started pushing him back as well and he starts telling me again to move back to the other side "i know what you're trying to get me to do" he says. I'm there like wtf does that mean? I've never been violent in my relationships, never a shove or a slap or even cussing, me shovinv him was the first time ever for me in a relationship. So, i was there like is he implying I'm trying to make him be violent? What an effin laugh! Told him if he can't control himself, he shouldn't try to put that on me by gaslighting me. Mind you, our DS is fully awake in his crib. DP yanks my pillows and throws them on the floor, so i laughed, got up with the duvet, grabbed my pillows and went to sleep in the living room.

He goes to the kitchen while mumbling "i know what you're trying to get me to do and it won't work", i didn't say anything in response. Let's just say i had a difficult time sleeping. Sunday night, he goes to work. Monday morning, DS wakes up early and I'm obviously exhausted from night shift (waking up every 1.5-2hrs to feed him and then change him once) and sometimes when i wake up around 4/5am to feed him, i find it difficult to go back to sleep right away and by the time i want to go back to sleep, DS wakes up right then. So, i grabbed DS from his crib and put him beside me in bed and i start to doze off but fear of him falling out of bed (he's now crawling) if i actually sleep off made me get up and move to the sofa bed in the living room. This way, i can secure him against the back of the chair while i doze in and out of sleep. I finally get DS to go back to sleep an hour later and start to sleep too only to be woken up less than an hour later by DP semi shouting why i have our son sleeping in the living room. Honestly, i could have thrown him out the window. Our son was sleeping, i was effin finally able to get some sleep and he wakes us up. I told him to stop shouting and that we only moved to the living room in the morning, so not like i had our son sleep there all night.

DP goes off like "go to the bedroom and put him in his crib" and i told him to take DS there himself then, he doesn't but keeps repeating himself and i just ignored him and he just kept going on and on saying how petty i get over a small disagreement, as a mother I'm not acting mature and i just continued to ignore him. On his way to sleep, he says "don't bring that boy in to disturb my sleep or else we'll have an issue". Oh, so his sleep is precious and mine wasn't? When DS took a nap, i just left him on the sofa bed because i didn't want to have any sort of conversation with DP. In the evening, he had the audacity to ask if i was going to be cooking dinner and i just continued to ignore him. As I'm typing this, i still haven't spoken to him.

AIBU? Was it really not as big of a deal as I'm making it out to be because tbh I'm questioning my relationship with this man.

Get in contact with your HV, they should still be available for you to access up to 5 years old. I would ignore guidance on the milk tubs of how much your child should be having. I don't think my first ever had the right amount.
The amounts your baby are taking though sounds like what mine was doing as a newborn and we were having to wake him every 3 hours to feed to prevent jaundice. This was not what we were doing at 5 months and we were in a better routine, I don't think he was having the right amount but it was never silly amounts and we weren't up and down in the night. I think he went to bed around 8 and would then be up at 5.

I think tiredness is affecting your relationship and leading you both to be unreasonable with each other.

I think there's a bit of things being unreasonable on both sides but also both sides being bit more sensitive. Life with a new baby is tough and especially figuring things out, you don't get a handbook and every baby is different

Instead of 'night shifts' you could try something else so me and my partner when he went back to work used to do it this way - I would go to bed a bit earlier (would be shattered by then anyway), baby stayed in bassinet with DP in the lounge and I would get a good chunk of sleep this way. DP was a late sleeper so worked for us. Once he got to bed with DD I would then do any other wake/feeds as obviously I could sleep in later with DD while DP got up to work
During the weekends we would do similar but DP would tend to do a bit more of the later ones and I would get up with DD and let DP sleep in later

It worked well for us, although obviously not perfect every time.

Be kind to yourselves, reach out for some help on the feeding and how you can get DS to eat a bit more during the day.

All sounds incredibly stressful lack of sleep isn’t bring the best out in both of you there is definitely fault on both sides

With kindness, the baby does not eat enough during the day because it's been continually topped up over the course of the night.

The idea is to drop the volume and frequency of night feeds over time as this concentrates eating into the daytime.

Bigger feeds during the day, with the last bottle at 10pm. Only feed when they cry, hopefully 2am and 5am. As their tummies get bigger they will drop the 2am then the 5am pushes out to 6am etc etc. 10pm feed is the last bottle of them all to stop.

Bigger tear

How/when do you feed in the day? What's your trigger?

If it's when he fusses and only a couple of hours try to distract him so he's hungrier and stretch to 3-4 hours so he'll take more and then stay full for longer.

Does he sleep in his own room yet? You might just be hearing him sleep and not because he wants milk.

With kindness, you are a new mum and probably jumping at every noise and giving him a bottle unnecessarily.

As PP have suggested, one of you needs to go to bed early and get some sleep. They then get up early so the other can lie in.

But build on day feeding to train in longer portions and the larger test will help him feed better.

Your health visitors will have a drop in clinic for weighing baby where you can meet other mum's and ask for help. Do find one.

You're both clearly exhausted and that doesn't bring out the best in people but you do really need to be working from the same page.
I agree that if your partner is on night duty, let him be on night duty! I'd be fed up if my partner was criticising what I was doing as well!
At five months, I also wouldn't be feeding as soon as the baby fusses. You're teaching them to only tolerate small amounts of milk, instead of 'weaning' to fewer but larger amounts. Do they have a dummy? Maybe they just need settling until they're actually hungry.
Lastly, with my children, DH would do the 10pm feed so that I could get some sleep in then I'd get up in the night when necessary and he'd do the 6am feed before he went to work. It worked for us!

Yeah, slow medium and fast flow. If you Google what bottles you are using and teat sizes there is a rough age range for each one, however mine did go up before the recommended age if that makes sense. To echo a previous poster, I would try the next size in the day and go slowly as it did take my first a minute to get used to the faster flow! I didn't bottle feed my second so only have my first to go by. Best of luck with it all, sleep deprivation is the worst!

Your both sleep deprived, you both need a break and some time together. Take a breath and try to make life as easy as possible x

So much weirdness. Your baby isn’t a textbook, and you are creating a rod for your back reinforcing a lot of negative sleep habits. I was also going to say change tests and see if it makes a difference. I breastfed but one of mine I had to solely use expressed milk via bottle as breastfeeding was not possible for them physically, nor were normal tests or they would have had a few mL’s and then given up. We used ‘special’ teats with larger cross cuts rather than holes so they could get a decent volume. No way would they have ever had what they were ‘meant to’ though, and they are fine.

There is an awful lot of telling DH how yo do stuff that doesn’t sound right/needed and personally I’d jack up on a fair amount of it also.

@Quiinkong

he goes to go to sleep as normal until i tell him he's on night shift

Can he not sleep between feeds?

You should be able to get away with one last feed about 11ish then nothing till the morning by now. Don’t feed a sleeping baby. Honestly, it sounds like neither of you have a clue what you’re doing. Can you see a health visitor?

I did all night feeds as dh was working (well armed forces do not even home)

The baby knows now that everytime he moves you will give him attention. You've put yourself into this situation.

Dd1 couldn't be put down when she was a baby because I ran to her. She slept in my bed off and on until she was 8 because I allowed it. Then dd2 joined in. It was years of hell.

He shouldn't have put his hands on you. You shouldn't have put your feet on him. Please don't put your baby to sleep on a chair that's so dangerous. Probably why your dh reacted as he did when he saw the baby sleeping on the chair.

If he's doing the night, let him do the night. You need to sleep elsewhere on his nights, because you're waking up, waking him up, and micromanaging him trying to get milk into a baby who is still mostly asleep. Wait until he properly wakes up and cries - that's when he needs feeding.

Don't pay too much attention to the tub telling you how much milk he should be having. If he's eating well, gaining weight and toileting normally then he's fine. Try a bigger teat before switching his milk.

Nobody knows what theyre doing with their first baby. Chill out.

I don’t know how I managed to stumble onto this thread because my children are many, many, years past the night waking stage - more likely the stagger home drunk at night stage! It does make me a little sad that the teat size was new information to the OP, not that I’m blaming her at all. It’s just when I was that new bewildered sleep deprived mum, I had so many little health visitor groups and sessions that we were encouraged to join in with, that I mainly just thought I was attending in order to get out of the house, but actually was really bloody helpful with info like this.
Everyone’s probably going to respond and say that still happens now, I hope it does!

Your baby is snacking. That’s why he’s not taking much in one go. If you left him when he was ‘fussing’ he would go back to sleep and the feeds would stretch out and he’d take more each time.

At this age many babies are only having one feed in the night or sleeping through.

My thoughts exactly. Your partner has a point about the baby being hungry - sounds like he is comfort sucking. Have you tried a dummy?

You both sound overtired and overreacted. Your post was slightly hard to follow as it had a lot of rambling but you both need to take a breath and step back.

Having a baby is hard but fussing isn’t crying and feeding every time the baby fusses isn’t working which is what your partner was trying to tell you.

Sleep exhaustion is real and seriously sucks. You both don’t need to be awake at midnight knowing your baby will wake up shortly.

You are a team and need to support each other.

Sounds like he needs a bigger teat size and I’m quite surprised that you have gotten to five months on the same teats!

Your baby isn’t eating enough in the day - 180ml should be normal.

There's a lot of advice already but a couple of things I've noticed could be added:

Look for a mum and baby group to join, get advice and experience from others. Are there any NCT type groups locally?

Your assumption your partner was implying you were trying to make him hurt you is worrying. Yes, he was unreasonable to push you out of the bed space but you were being stubborn. And I'd take "I know what you are trying to make me do" as him saying "you are trying to make me give up the night shift and then you'll be a bitch to me about it" not "you are trying to make me hurt you". The fact your brain went to hurting you, why? Has he hurt you?

OP as you didn’t know about teat sizes does that mean you’ve been feeding him with the same size teats for 5 months? Same size tears as you used when he was a newborn?

No wonder he’s not taking very much during feeds!

If nobody tells her about teat sizes, how could she possibly know?

Health visitors were crap for me. Signed me off at 6 weeks and left me with just a phone number and a cheery wave.

If nobody tells her about teat sizes, how could she possibly know

Surely, if you visit a shop that sells them, you would see there are different types and they state they are for different ages/stages. Similarly, if you purchase online, you need to pick one, and it’s easy to see that they have different types for different ages/stages. That then acts as a flag to look at them and see ‘roughly’ when you need to change for the next stage? Or to at least wonder what the difference is between the different types. Typically, that can even lead to a bit of a Google.

That explains how/why the majority of people know. The other option is someone runs into a store blindfolded and grabs one? Then I guess they wouldn’t know any of the above?

If nobody tells her about teat sizes, how could she possibly know?

I'm sure it tells you on the back of the box on the bottles, atleast it does for tommee tippee. That's how I learned variflow teats were a thing when i was panicking that i was starving my baby when they struggled with both the slow and medium flow.

How very simplistic. You buy bottles when your baby is born, what if you dont need any more teats because you got plenty of the ones you thought you needed? What if you noticed the bigger ones and then forgot that they existed? What if you didn't know what the difference was? What if you're dyslexic, or have other conditions that make it difficult for you to process information such as adhd?

Then you go into the shop and there's 20 different brands of bottles in 3 different sizes, all claiming to have different features and "anti reflux this" and "controlled flow that". It's overwhelming. It might have been ever so easy for you, but it's not for everyone.

Basically, this information is not obvious. It's not actually that unfeasible that op didn't know. People going on and on about it with this air of superiority, well, they didn't know until they were told or worked it out either.

She's got the point now.

From my experience, although i didn't "run into the store blindfolded", my dc were discharged from nicu and we had to figure all that out for ourselves because nobody, not the nicu staff, or health visitors, or the children's centre would help us with bottles because they weren't allowed to "promote bottlefeeding". Wouldn't help us to figure out which bottles to get based on what the dc needed or anything. Wouldn't show us how to make a feed while still in the hospital. They certainly didn't tell us what size teats to get. We were first time parents and we didn't have a bloody clue.

We were entirely on our own trying to work out how to keep the dc alive. A flippant comment from a relative told us there were different sized teats because my dc needed the next size up. It's entirely feasible that having been dropped by the HV (and even if she hadnt) that op wouldn't have just worked it out by herself and it's pretty annoying that people are being snarky to her and acting like she's stupid because she didn't realize.