Is this a fair childcare schedule?

[RookieDad777]

Hi Mums,

This is a new dad speaking. I'm having a hard time agreeing to a childcare schedule with my wife, so looking for perspective from mums out there.

We have a 3 week old son and my wife went through a very prolonged labour and c-section. She is still exhausted from the journey.

I'm back to work as the sole earner. Unfortunately we have little help available in terms of family.

This is the most practical schedule I could come up with. My wife hates the 4 am start and insists I give her 2, 3 more hours to sleep.

Wife:
Sleep: 10 pm - 4 am (6 hrs)
Childcare: 4 am - 7 pm (15 hrs)
Free time: 3 hrs

Me:
Sleep 4 am - 9 am (5 hrs)
Work: 9 am - 6 pm (9 hrs)
Childcare: 7 pm - 4 am (9 hrs)
Free time: 1 hr

I would love to get feedback!

Thanks.

I’m so confused with your wife doesn’t get a wkend and is awake for 15hrs- you have a newborn. Feed the boy when he wakes, sleep in the day when he sleeps-
No time for a weekend hobby/ hate broken sleep - well yes like we said it’s a newborn, welcome to parenthood!

@MrsTerryPratchett

Your wife should be doing this - you're at work she's not. C section will heal in another week or so

If DH had said all the cooking and cleaning was mine 3 weeks post C-section he'd be divorced right now.

It was more in relation to the night feeds and having the baby in with her

I had an emergency c section for twins in January - home in 2 days and driving in 2 weeks. Running around after a busy family
Straight away including home schooling 🤷‍♀️

To be honest the OPs wife sounds like a princess

only are you actually confused, or do you mean ‘my baby was different’?

Posts like that had me in tears not so long ago because I genuinely thought I was doing something awfully wrong.

I’ve never been able to ‘sleep in the day when he sleeps’ because he will only sleep on me (that’s on me, not next to me.) I can’t put him in his rocker, bouncy chair, swingy chair, basket, crib, cot or sleepyhead

Lots of babies are the same, especially very young ones. I consider myself lucky now mine will sleep on me and I don’t have to be walking around, for ages he’d only sleep in the sling when I was walking.

If your baby will sleep in a crib etc that’s great but a lot just won’t. I don’t even have a particularly difficult baby, he is good at night.

I was fine within hours of my emergency section but not everyone is. Some people have a rocky road to recovery.

I think we should all be wary of making generalisations based solely on our own experiences.

Some c sections take a long time to heal.

Some babies are crap sleepers.

Some people take a long time to adjust and need a lot of support.

All will be well.

@daisiesanddaffodils

only are you actually confused, or do you mean ‘my baby was different’?

Posts like that had me in tears not so long ago because I genuinely thought I was doing something awfully wrong.

I’ve never been able to ‘sleep in the day when he sleeps’ because he will only sleep on me (that’s on me, not next to me.) I can’t put him in his rocker, bouncy chair, swingy chair, basket, crib, cot or sleepyhead

Lots of babies are the same, especially very young ones. I consider myself lucky now mine will sleep on me and I don’t have to be walking around, for ages he’d only sleep in the sling when I was walking.

If your baby will sleep in a crib etc that’s great but a lot just won’t. I don’t even have a particularly difficult baby, he is good at night.

I really struggled to day nap with my first, I think partially because I was wired into thinking that I should be doing something. With my second I find it far easier to say sod it im sleeping - although to be honest it doesn’t have to be sleeping to rest, sometimes just lying down can recharge. And nope neither baby slept independently in the day for the first few months (my second dc has silent reflux so has slept on me a lot). The expectations that you get a long stretch of sleep with a newborn and have weekends to yourself baffle me, that’s not contingent on the type of baby you have, it’s a newborn.

Well yes but you said “sleep in the day when he sleeps” so it looked as though you thought this was something everyone could do with a newborn!

@daisiesanddaffodils

Well yes but you said “sleep in the day when he sleeps” so it looked as though you thought this was something everyone could do with a newborn!

I don’t get your point/ the OP and his wife’s expectations aren’t realistic - if she’s struggling she needs to find a way to rest/ sleep in the day when her baby sleeps- it’s how to Survive those early months

We needed different amounts of sleep. I can function on 2-3 hour ‘ power sleeps’ DH needed 8 hours unbroken.
I would hand him the baby when he walked in the door after work, and go to bed until midnight. That way I got 5-6 hours solid sleep.
I also agree that going to work is so much easier than being SAHP. For this reason I went back to work when DD1 was 6 weeks old.
Also agree on don’t be too hung up on roster. Just do your best.
Congratulations

I never found a way of sleeping in the day when ds does - still searching for it now!

He is probably absolutely fine, but do keep an eye out for symptoms of dairy intolerance or silent reflux. We (and dd) suffered for many months with what turned out to be cows milk protein intolerance. After a couple of years without milk she is now absolutely fine. Also consider getting someone in to help if you can afford it. Either in the day so your wife can sleep then or an evening.

Those early days are gruelling but you will get through them. I remember seeing an older dc's doll on the floor in the bathroom and panicking that I had accidentally left ds there and he had shrunk, despite hearing him crying in another room. Now they all sleep soundly through the night unlike me

My view is that the person who isn’t working should do the night feeds on the days that the person who is working is at work. Then the night feedsthey shared on the weekend. Housework/chores are shared equally. Just my view though

@Covidatemyhomework

My view is that the person who isn’t working should do the night feeds on the days that the person who is working is at work. Then the night feedsthey shared on the weekend. Housework/chores are shared equally. Just my view though

This is roughly what we did. Having baby all day isn't like having a toddler all day, and Dad can't be expected to run a full days work with possible commute on minimal sleep.

Oh and some babies don't sleep in the day, by 3 weeks dd was quite happy on 10 mins in the morning and 10 mins in the afternoon. She fed 13 hours initially, screamed quite a lot leaving very little time for sleep. By 9 months she would happily go all day without any naps, but wouldn't be tired, would just giggle and laugh at nursery's attempts to get her to nap. They changed their tune on their 'all babies sleep in the day for us' smugness. She still needs very little sleep for a teenager. People who said to sleep when she slept drove me crazy. One of them went on to have a second like our first and all the 'oh what shall I do all day when my child has their 3 hour naps' was forgotten.

@MrsTerryPratchett

Your wife should be doing this - you're at work she's not. C section will heal in another week or so

If DH had said all the cooking and cleaning was mine 3 weeks post C-section he'd be divorced right now.

Quite. The comment is ridiculous. 4 weeks post major abdominal surgery is early days.

I had two non-sleepers so we had to do something like the OP. We slept in 3 hour shifts as both DDs only slept when held. To be honest it was torture but it was the only way for both of us to rest overnight. We tried everything for weeks and eventually brought them into our bed (with our first we lasted 7 weeks and with our second we made it to 2 before giving in). To be honest, in those first few weeks, I’d had signed over my house to the person who could guarantee me 6 hours of solid sleep every night! We should remember that if we consider 6 hours of sleep too little for mum, then we should also consider 5 hours too little for dad.

There was also no daytime napping either as they’d only sleep when pushed in the pram or on me.

OP, what does your wife suggest? I agree with a PP that 4am was a particularly difficult time to be awake, would she be happy swapping sleeping shifts with you or shifting them so you get the same number of hours, just at a different time?

I can understand why you cannot go to bed later than 4am. I think your wife should try to go bed earlier.

You could tweak this to:

6-8pm dad takes baby, mum naps
8-9pm mum takes baby, dad naps
9pm-4am mum sleeps (6 hours + 2 hours =8)
4-9am dad sleeps (5 hours + a hour=6)

Your wife is looking for short rests realistically and understandably.

If you’re wfh, a good solution would to be to give your wife an hour during the day if you are able and finish work 7. Then take the baby til 8. Then you rest 8-9.

Babies have tiny stomachs. Newborns wake a lot. They need comfort. Is your wife breastfeeding/expressing? If so this also makes a difference - breast milk is digested faster. If you want something close to the system you are working out where you have baby in a separate room overnight then you need to probably switch to formula if you’re not already and establish more of a routine as baby (and their stomach) grows. It’s too soon to make any rigid schedule. I kind of understand what you’re trying to do but the schedule you’ve worked out isn’t sustainable for either of you. I would also try to stop viewing it as ‘childcare’, it’s bonding time. Building a relationship with your child. Some of the most beautiful moments of that for me happened in the middle of the night. My husband would not have been able to function to do a days work if he had done that but he did it any night he wasn’t getting up to work next day. Of course looking after a baby is work too and very hard and demanding work but it is absolutely not the same skills set or emotional work as the sort I would have brought to my job. That’s why I (Was lucky and) took time away from work to handle that first year. Keep aiming to be as fair as possible and it will even out, as long as you both are bonding with your child.

Schedules are tricky because the baby and your needs change a lot early on although I am a planner too and totally tried to do what you are doing.

In reality lack of sleep is painful and sharing it as best you can sounds great but some days one of you might need a bit more sleep. I suffered pnd and my mood has always been sleep dependant. I needed 4 uninterrupted hours then can cope. My dh hates mornings but late nights are fine. Based on this my dh did up until 2 then I did the rest of the night but went to bed at 7 or 8pm. I think that was after the first few weeks when the baby had a bit more of a routine and slept for a 4 ti 6 hour stretch in the evening though. Early days I breastfed so did more of the nights. One lie in a week helped too.

The aim for both of you is survival.

I think it’s pretty obvious this baby is formula fed.

Also take advantage of the weekends. Take it in turns to go out for a 2hr walk while the other one sleeps.

@Cattitudes I agree.

For a while, we sacrificed our weekends almost entirely. We’d just take it in turns to sleep until we’d caught up as much as we could. In these early days, you just do whatever you need to keep going.

If you show your wife this thread in order to prove a point, she may want to divorce you!

What's free time in the context of a 3 week old baby? Or, what do you mean by free time?

Trouble with schedules is the baby hasn’t read them. What do you do with free time anyway? You can watch tv whilst feeding, do most things round the house with a baby in a sling.

I think you need to take it all in turns, this includes the night wakings, and when you're at home, then you both do 50/50 childcare with equal downtime.

Babies don't wake every 2.5 hrs for long, but lack of sleep is hideous, especially if you're a person that needs sleep.

The problem with schedules is that the baby won't always run to a schedule.

As another pp said, it's about survival at the moment for both of you, I wrote off the first year of my dc lives and simply concentrated on looking after her and giving her all the attention.