What's the hardest part of the first days with a new baby?

[charcb]

Hi ladies. Someone I know was telling me how hard things were at the start for her - you're tired from labour, so is your partner, and you have to care for a little one you don't know. She told me not to expect I'd be looking at a placid baby asleep most of the time and that she literally felt like a walking feeding mechanism 😄. It made me a bit scared as I thought it was rough but because they sleep so much that we'd have a bit of a chance to catch up on sleep and recover. what was your experience like?

Weirdly perhaps, nothing was particularly difficult those first few days (or months thankfully).

I wasn't tired as had planned sections.

I had a difficult pregnancy and I had difficulty sleeping because of pain for most of it. By the time I'd had the baby each time, I'd had 6m, of sleeping in 30-45m bursts, followed by an hour up because of pain. My newborn was a dream in comparison (2hr stretches) so I was less tired than I had been for months. And overall, for my first anyway, I had more sleep than I'd had (albiet in small chunks) than for many years. I was fine.

Recovery from section was great. Feeding was easy and pain free and lochia was no more than a normal period, and stopped after about a week.

I was fortunate to not get any baby blues.

Parenting is hard and often a slog. I still got woken up 3 times last night (and one was for 2hrs with my 2year old. But newborns, I adored that stage, especially that first week :-)

Oh, and so many people had told me it was hard, and that it was difficult to adjust to the change, that I was surprised by how ok I found it.
As far as the responsibility goes, I found that instinctive personally, and fine, and because babies are so portable, it didn't seem a big deal having to take baby everywhere. I found the transition to pet ownership harder than having a baby, though I appreciate that I'm in the minority with this.

Definitely lack of sleep, but coupled with that was the sheer randomness of a newborn baby. I felt like I couldn't plan anything. If I planned to do something (even just sleep myself!) he'd wake up five minutes in and go nuts. If I planned to just sit there staring at him, he'd sleep for hours and I could have been sleeping/eating/etc too. I never knew whether to seize the moment and inevitably be disappointed and angry that I'd been interrupted or whether to just do nothing and slowly starve to death while wide awake on the sofa. Every time I made the wrong choice.

Especially with sleep. I'd put him down, lie down myself, and then not be able to sleep because I had no idea whether he'd wake up in five minutes or five hours.

I was better the second time round with "living in the moment" a bit more, not bearing grudges, and not expecting what happened earlier to have any bearing on what will happen next.