to be contemplating asking my neighbour to move her newborn into her bedroom at night?

[willow]

Essentially, we live in a semi and neighbour's new baby is in a room that's next to our bedroom. Neighbour is on the floor above. Upshot is that we wake up from baby's cries, well before its parents do. Not even going to go down the advice to prevent cotdeath route, or fact that I think there might be a she who must not be named routine being followed.

Should I ask them, politely, to contemplate having baby in same room as them, at least for a little while until it's settled into a bit more of a routine? Appreciate that I can't demand they rethink where they're siting the nursery - but don't see why we should be disturbed more than the actual parents.

def of passive aggression

seriously, did your babies yell at two weeks? why?

other link wrong

is that someone asking if and why a two week old yelled?!?!?

How does a two week old express anything if it is not through yelling? Some babies are quieter than others and some have strong cries, some have pathetic sounding cries but the all yell at their own levels. Do people not wee after giving birth. My babies certainly yelled when I wee'd, or showered, or until they got the boob actually in their mouths or whilst they were rubbish at finding it and small e.t.c....

at that age both of mine cried, and then i picked them up/fed them/comforted them. and the key thing with your examples is that none of those things take five minutes and happen repeatedly thoughout the night.

at no point would i have considered leaving them to yell hard enough to wake people in the adjoining building for five minutes. two weeks, remember, this is not a colic cry.

Well mine yelled. 0-yell in 0.2 seconds, both of them. Your post implied that a baby should have no reason to yell. A 2 week old can only yell and can only be soothed by rocking, cuddling, feeding e.t.c. they are too young to be talked to or sung at whilst you wee/shower e.t.c. and some of their yells are quieter than others. Yes, weeing and showering doesn't happen many times through the night your post implied that a baby should not yell full stop.

I think 2 weeks is too small to be on their own too, I would never have done it. My opinion about raising children has no relevance to the OP's neighbour. I co-slept and breastfed and my dd still woke my downstairs neighbour. One yelp from a baby can wake a baby when all is still and quiet at night if the divide is thin enough.

What do you think the outcome of speaking to the neighbour would be aitch? I think it would only serve to undermine the work the OP has done on being seen to be a considerate neighbour and might make the problems worse. She has already said, several times that she's going to buy earplugs anyway - your point in posting seems to be solely to criticise and upset the mothers of babies who cry.

• can wake a neighbour! lol

lol, oh yes, that's exactly why i posted, i love to see the ladies upset...

seems to me there's a really weird aggression going on here from the YABUers. my post to skidoodle said 'seriously, did your babies yell at two weeks? why?', very few words given what you are reading into it. i am interested in why a two week old would yell, tbh, and from what even you say it's because they experience some newborn distress and then Are Not Attended To. fair enough if you're on the bog but not tbh if you're sleeping on another floor. esp not when you are disturbing your neighbours.

Yor answer speaks for itself I feel. Just because your baby had a quiet voice or did something in a particular way does not mean you can pass judgement on other people's parenting skills. I conclude you are in fact just a rather mean-spirited, critical person especially as you are rather laughably now saying my babies were clearly distressed and were not attended to.

I do not need your validation as a mother and your criticism is ridiculous having never heard my babies (who are now 2 and 4) or seen where I used to live. I shall away and leave you to your grumbling attacks on random MNs.

what are you talking about?
YOU said that you were in the shower or loo, therefore they're not being attended to. which is fair enough in the daytime but NOT a floor away and several times a night. ye gods.

I had a few nights with DD in the first two weeks where she cried, and cried and nothing would stop her. The more I fed her, the more upset she seemed to get. Somebody on MN suggested trying a soother and it worked like magic. It was as though she was sucking for comfort, but that meant she was drinking so much it was making her tummy sore.

If that person hadn't suggested that solution I might have had weeks and weeks of crying all night, trying to figure out why cuddles and feeding weren't helping.

like curiosity I would not sleep apart from a 2 week old, but that doesn't mean that this woman's choices for her child are the business of the OP, no matter how misguided the new mother may be.

Greenmonkies said:

"Katiestar, and everyone else who has said "babies cry, get over it", um, no they don't, not if they are picked up, fed. cuddled, carried and generally nurtured. Crying is a distress call, they do it when there is something wrong, and for a baby to wake up alone in the night is wrong! Mine were kept close and didn't cry. It's not rocket science, it's nature."

Not true. My first child was textbook-perfect, my second screamed from day one virtually all night long and there was nothing, NOTHING I or anyone else who tried could do about it.

YABU - Personally, if I was approached in the way the OP was originally intending to confront her neighbours I would be very direct in telling her where to go.

yes, skidoodle, so you were present and trying to comfort her. that's the whole point.

No, the point is that how I dealt with my baby was no concern of my neighbours'.

Anymore than I sat around wondering what was going on in her house when I heard her baby crying.

For all anyone outside my house might have known I was just leaving her to cry for hours. You really can't know exactly what is going on in somebody else's home and the attempts to decide what is wrong with this baby and how the mother is to blame for the crying are ridiculous.

It's all a bit "Gina Ford's under the Bed" TBH.

i can't get over people who think that how they choose to live has no impact on the people around them, or who don't care about the impact. this is news to me, tbh, i'm truly shocked.

Greenmonkies you are talking shite. I have no idea if this baby would stop crying so much if they were in their parent's room but ds slept in my bed and in my room fore 6 months from birth. He regularly cried on and off for hours despite being close to me, having breast milk on demand and being cuddled/rocked,walked at night and being carried and using a sling during the day.

Some babies do cry despite co-sleeping, being breastfed/held etc.

I do however feel that YANBU though I do think if any one had said anything to me about ds's cring I'd have been devastated as I was at a total loss as to what to do about the crying. You would have sworn I was doing nothing for hours and yet ds was being fed, walked, rocked, cuddled etc the whole time as he cried.

I think you should gently say something but ONLY if you are really sure it is abut the noise disturbance and not based on judgment of where a baby should sleep and how it should be responded to at night.

"i can't get over people who think that how they choose to live has no impact on the people around them, or who don't care about the impact. this is news to me, tbh, i'm truly shocked. "

Absolutely Aitch - it is thoroughly depressing isn't it. Total self absorption and self-centeredness.

Mrs Thatcher would have been so proud of her legacy - puts me in mind of her quote:"who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families"

I've decided to hide this thread now..then I won't be drawn in again when I am supposed to be writing an assignment!

Ok - not got time to read the whole thread and apologise if this has already been suggested but perhaps there are things you can do to make your sleep better. We live next to a very busy trainline where extremely noisy freight trains come through roughly every half an hour in each direction throughout the night. We invested in a noisy fan which sounds bizarre but it is while noise rather than intermittant noise and means we don't hear the trains anymore. Move your bed as far away from the wall as possible if you haven't already and perhaps buy a fan like we did or leave the radio on. It sounds bizarre but it may well work.

Oh and YANBU - there is nothing worse than having your sleep disturbed when you can do nothing about it. However the baby will not cry at night forever and you may have to live next door to these people long after baby has stopped crying at night. It is turns a bit nasty it could spoil your enjoyment of your home for years and may even stop you selling up if you own it as you have to declare any neighbourhood disputes or risk being sued later. Good luck!

Sorry - should read it is WHITE noise and not WHILE noise

When DD1 smacked her lips and mumbled in her sleep it woke me, by the time she was making any noise that could be considered unhappy she was in my arms and my boob was out. No crying.

DD2 was the same, I never waited until mine were crying before I fed them, I heard/saw the feeding cues and acted on them before they were upset and hungry enough to wail.

However, DD2 did cry quite a lot in her first 8 or 9 weeks. She is intolerant to cows milk protein, and had horrific reflux and colic and used to cry and cry in the evenings, cluster-feeding and wailing for three or four hours. Once we figured out the cause of the reflux and colic and cut cows milk/dairy out of my diet she became a settled happy baby and no longer cried for any length of time.

My point here is that babies don't cry for no reason. There is always a cause, sometimes we figure out the cause, other times we don't, and eventually the crying stops when they get older any way.

And whilst my view may be based on one persons experience (my own), it is not just based on my children. I worked as a nanny for several years and have been working in Radiology for nearly a decade, and in this time have cared for many babies, and I am sure that no baby cries for fun, or to exercise their lungs. They are always expressing something, it may not always be possible to figure out what they are trying to tell us, or be willing or able to give them what they are asking for (even if that is just to not be left alone in the dark ) but they are always communicating in the only way they know how to.

Really, truly, honestly, I think the parents of the baby being discussed in the OP are very selfish and thoughtless. Both towards their baby and their neighbours, and ideally something should be said to them so that they stop a course of action that is both dangerous and distressing.

But of course, I am being unreasonable, and talking shite.......

Not sure if you're either of those things GreenMonkies, but you're very smug.

Reminds me of the story my mother tells (continuously!)

Her and my dad were first time parents and didn't really have a clue. We lived in an apartment building where noise travelled, and I cried non stop for about a day. The downstairs neighbor, a Japanese woman, came to the door, and insisted that my mother try a certain tea from Japan (she knew that my mom was b/fing). She said something like, 'your baby has colic. This tea will help...'

Apparently it did help, but thought the neighbor was very diplomatic

very cool neighbour, ilove. of course half the people on this thread would have sent her and her tea packing.
how is greenmonkies being smug, exactly? she's just answering the question posed to her about her sample size. anyway, it's pretty obvious, babies don't cry for no reason. (it's been interesting, though, of the friends of mine who had 'crying' babies, they also had the more difficult births. to my mind it makes sense that if you've been yanked out with forceps you might have been injured a bit and be getting over that.)

Weird Aitch, because my firstborn came into the world via suction with the cord round her neck and we both nearly died, I was petrified, in agony and distraught yet my second was a wonderful planned, calm, serene caesar.

My firstborn was the textbook baby and my second screamed through the night for months and months, despite all the feeding/rocking/instant attention in the world, plus having my sister and friends trying to calm her when they visited/stayed over. Both my babies were given the same in terms of being in with me from birth and so on.

To this day I don't "get it" and my girls are now 14 and 12 so its not as if I haven't had enough time to mull it over!

yes, dd2 was a caesarean, pretty calm all things considered but she is so much LOUDER and CRANKIER than her sister was. but then dd1 was a pretty ordinary vb, no trauma thank goodness. still, though, neither made a great deal of noise at two weeks cos by and large at that age it can all be fixed with food.

i did take both to a cranio-sacral therapist, as it happens, both fine etc, but she said she treats crying kids who've got birth injuries very frequently.

not that this has anything to do with the OP, of course. after all, willow's next door neighbours can pacify their baby, they just take their time getting there...