Reply to Should I excuse DH from nighttime duties?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would talk to your husband about what he thinks. At 4 weeks old, I wasn’t yet pumping and I had to do all the nighttime feeds. It did not make sense for my husband to get up. I also was able to sleep or rest when the baby did during the day. If you are not able to do so, that is a totally different matter.

I guess the question is what does he do now during the night and will both of you be negatively impacted if this changes.

When my oldest was that age my husband was working in person and I was not yet pumping. There was literally nothing he could offer middle of the night. We did the late/early shift. He is naturally a night person. He stayed up until late and I slept early. I did the two middle of the night feedings. When I started back to work at 9 weeks pp, my baby was sleeping until 6am without waking. On the nights that he did wake, we took turns. It worked out fine.[/quote]

Either you’re a liar or had the world’s easiest baby. They’re “literally nothing” your DH could do to help? Your baby never needed to be changed, burped, re-swaddled, or be put to sleep?

I detest people like you who view doing it all themselves as a badge of honor that other new moms should strive for, when really it’s an unfortunate lifestyle born out of a crappy support system. There’s a reason many breastfeeding moms use night nannies (or take help from their DHs or other family members)[/quote]

DP but wow that’s quite the reaction. I had a similar experience. DH got up all the time in the first month or so when he was on leave and the baby was waking up a ton and needed a lot of stuff overnight beyond just feeding (diaper changes, rocked and comforted, swaddled, etc.). But by the time he returned to work, the baby’s schedule had settled a bit and we’d figured some stuff out. She stopped pooping at night, which meant we could leave her swaddled unless her diaper was full. We had switched to those Velcro swaddled too, which are so easy. Plus soon we weren’t swaddling at all so that job went away. Nursing by itself generally got her back to sleep at that point, so there was limited need for DH to rock the baby or take a shift.

I wouldn’t say we had the world’s easiest baby at all. She was really tough in the evening at that point and could be very hard to get to sleep initially. DH definitely did a ton of that, and there were days when he’d come home from work and I’d hand him the baby with a bottle and then just go lie down or get in a long shower and he’d take his shift. But once she was asleep, basically all she needed was nursing and so I handled most might wake-ups. There were exceptions— the occasional diaper blow out, a period when she had acid reflux snd was super fussy — and DH got up for that stuff. But it got less and less as time went on.

It’s fine if you had a different experience or you and your partner sorted out the workload differently. But you don’t need to accuse people of lying or say you detest them because they sorted out this situation differently. We’re really only talking about a few months for most people, before the baby starts STTN. For us it was a little longer because I did night feeds for longer due to a borderline weight gain issue. But by 7 or 8 months, our baby moved into her nursery and slept through most nights and that overnight shift wasn’t even part of the division of labor. This is really not the most important aspect of dividing parenting duties. It’s a blip in the scheme of things.[/quote]

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