does your partner help with baby during the night?

[sotough]

I am wondering how often most dads of young babies help out with night feeds/settling baby during night.
I am currently on maternity leave with a four week old DD.
Me and DD sleep in a separate room so that DH has a decent uninterrupted sleep. he does the last feed of the day at 11pm; and then doesn't see us again until he gets up around 7.30/8am. Once a week he is willing to do a whole night of feeds (usually one at 2.30am and then 6am.) so i can have a break. He reckons this is more than most working blokes do, when their wives are on maternity leave. I'd be interested to know if he's right about that. I'd like him to do more but perhaps i'm being unreasonable!

As others have said, its what works for your family.

I don't think its rediculous to sugest that the working out of the home partener may need more sleep than the SAH partener at times. If I am utterly exhausted on a particular day, I can generally muddle through and put the telly on and play blocks whilst lying on the floor, whereas DH can't really get away with that in the job he works - he has to be mentally alert and talking to clients and bosses etc.

Of course me being constantly exhausted would not be good for me or the kids and I would end up with PND - but the odd zombie day I can manage.

That said, I BF the 3 DC and DH is always theoretically willing to get up if I need him (sometimes a PITA to wake up though!), for moral support or for nappies or settling. With the two DDs I didn't really need kim up much and would rather he slept and then could be less tired and more help during the mornings and evenings, but with DS he was up every night settling, for 14 months, and it was never suggested that he should do otherwise.

I did all the bfing during the night but DP did all the extra winding/settling etc if DD wouldn't go straight back to sleep. If he had a very busy day the next day he would sleep in the next room and I would do everything - only about once a fortnight. He did all nappy changing when around at weekends.

My DH has been great on most days. He helps with the housework, puts the washing in for me, gets my breakfast ready for me as he knows that i won't et otherwise.

After his two weeks paternity leave, he told me how he couldn't get up in the night anymore during the weekdays as he had work! And then for the next 6 weeks i felt like i was drowning with everything to do. This included the weeks where DS decided to stay awake from 11pm to 7am. It felt unfair and still on some days feels unfair. Where my day and night merged into one, and i would forget to eat, shower and brush my teeth on some days , he would still have a normal day. Go out to eat lunch with work friends, get drunk when out with clients.....there are just days when i resent him, and he just seems oblivious to it all.

I am grateful for the help he does give me, but i think he doesn't understand how fed up you can feel or how isolated. I'm taking charge of my days again and trying to get sme routine so i do shower, eat breakfast and get some housework done, but its just hard

DD was a sleepy baby, so we were advised to feed her every 3 hours and to wake her up a bit, to change her nappy before feeding. I was trying to bf in the early days so obviously DH couldn't help with that, but it annoyed me that I was also using expressed milk and ff, and when I left the room to warm a bottle up, I would get back to find him talking to DD, hadn't changed her nappy so I had to do that before feeding her, he wouldn't feed her because he didn't want to reset his body clock (this was during paternity leave), so I had to feed her and then express.
I suggested he start to feed her while I expressed, then if she was still feeding when I returned, I would take her back but that only happened twice.

Fairly regularly ( & still does, yay) he would take DD downstairs in the morning so I could have a lie in, which i am grateful for, but I'd ask to be woken at a certain time and he would let me sleep instead, so I would wake and stress that I didn't have time to express / shower / eat before he was off to work, whereas I would have had time if he'd woken me when I asked. I told him why I asked to be woken but he still did it (set alarm clock after that!). Even now when I get up, if he's taken DD downstairs she'll still be in her pyjamas.

There were times I felt we weren't on the same team, let alone the same page, probably unfair but that's how I felt.

I breast feed. Theres a limit to what he can do! To be honest I use him as back up for when the feeding and settling I have done doesn't work and Im at the end of my tether or about to commit murder or suicide. He's always willing to do more but as he presently has to go in to earn the bacon and keep his office on side so Im trying to be supportive back to him for promotion etc possibilities. Im hoping given no2, if we are lucky, it will hold me in good stead with him for whatever other plans we might have by that time. Its a long game not a short win I'm after ha ha!!! ;0)