My daughter and SIL did sleep training with my 3 yo granddaughter because it was taking 2 hours to get her to sleep and no guarantee that she would stay in her bed through the night even then. They were at the point of locking her bedroom from the outside. They went in for a sleep training consult through their pediatrician. Wrote a plan, all 3 adults followed it consistently, every night. In less than a week she fell asleep on her own and her door stayed shut and she stayed in bed until morning. Stickers counting towards a special reward activity were positive reinforcements. Sleep training sounds harsher than the reality. Read up on it, ask for the best authors through your pediatrician. This very soft-hearted grandma is a believer. 1 kid, 2 parents and 1 grandma have much gentler, better nights now. No locks needed.
Deadbolts don’t always have keys, at least not on both sides. The deadbolt on my front door requires a key to lock/unlock it from the outside but there is no key on the inside , just a thumbturn. If I put it on the outside of a childs bedroom door, I would put it with the keyhole inside (so it couldn’t be locked from the inside ) and the thumbturn on the outside.
How old is your little one?
Yeah, we are lucky. I try not to mention how lucky we are to new parents because they might murder us. My husband and I were both easy babies, and I guess that resulted in a very easy baby.
Things have fallen into a pretty good routine by now, we’re all well-rested and the basics of childcare come more naturally than they did in the beginning. I think the transition from 0 to 1 may be easier for people who have experience with babies. I had zero experience with babies. Neither of us knew what the hell we were doing. The first couple weeks my husband had to help me with every feeding, we had no child care stations set up around the house (I was literally changing him on a mat on the bed.) That maternal instinct they tell you about? Never kicked in.
We ended up hiring a post-partum doula who helped us get our shit together right before the pandemic hit. She’s the one who taught us how to take shifts and suggested we move the baby to the nursery rather than the bedroom. She set up our diaper changing station. She taught us how to bathe him. Og bless doulas.
Thank you. I is one.
Nine months. I had a little experience because of my nieces, but my partner had none. The midwife asked him to dress her for the first time after she was born and cleaned up, and he panicked, lol.
While in hospital I changed her on an incontinence pad on the bed - that’s what the nurse told me to do. We continued the same way for the first few nights at home. She was tiny and very reluctant to eat, so at first I had to set an alarm every 3 hours day and night to feed her and then pump and hopefully get an hour of sleep before doing it all again. Things are a lot easier now.
Why did you get so little sleep in hospital? I certainly didn’t get much, but I was able to function. Five hours in four nights sounds horrendous.
Don’t you get antenatal classes in America? We had four. One was about the birth and the various options and interventions, one was general baby care, one breastfeeding and the last one about brain development and milestones. Luckily I was able to get them all in before Covid. They’re probably Zoom calls now and that’s just not the same.
Well, I was in the hospital for two days before he was born, then he had jaundice, and they put him under the bilirubin lights, and he screamed nonstop for the entire time he was under treatment, so there was no way to sleep. We certainly tried to sleep, and in the hospital we tried to swap off every other hour for sleep, and I guess I would close my eyes for about an hour, but actually falling asleep is not a thing that ever happened.
I only know how many hours it was because my husband, even in his own sleep-deprived haze, tracked my sleep the entire time. I held up pretty well at the hospital but as soon as I got home I had a complete breakdown. I hesitate to go into the details, but it was serious, and I probably should have been hospitalized. The first night the doula just took a full eight hour shift and we both slept an entire night without interruption. And I felt so much better after that. Then the next few days she came over to teach us how to do things.
Were there antenatal classes? Maybe? (I mean such things exist, they are not offered by the government or anything.) I was more worried about childbirth. I thought childbirth would be the hardest part. I took a hypnobirthing class which was largely a waste of time because I intended to use drugs (and did). People kept telling me taking care of a newborn is easy. I did not find it easy. But I was also trying to do it while severely depressed.
That sounds really awful. There’s nothing worse than sleep deprivation for making you unable to function. At least at home you have the option to sleep in another room. My daughter also had jaundice, but fortunately it never got bad enough to need the lights, and she was the opposite - she just wanted to sleep all the time. She couldn’t stay awake to feed and we had to give her formula and wake her for feeds, it was even a struggle to keep her awake to finish the tiny bottle. The other new families in the ward did a lot more to stop me sleeping than my own baby.
Thank goodness it was before Covid so you could do that. I know we all have to stay safe, but some of the side effects of lockdown are worse than the disease.
Mine were offered by the government, so every prospective parent can attend if they want. I should’ve known America wouldn’t have free classes. My sisters both attended hypnobirthing and NCT, but I couldn’t find them in my area. Thankfully no one told us taking care of a newborn is easy - that’s crazy. (I did find the birth hard though; now I know why they call it labour!) And the health visitors asked about PND at every checkup - I suppose that’s another service not offered in the USA? It sucks that there’s so little support, for parents and in general.
I wrote above how easy it was for me.
I’m 8/9 years older than my little sister. It was a long time ago, but I’d changed diapers and entertained and put up with having my life changed by a baby.
Mine was not particularly eventful. I mean, all birth is difficult, but as far as labor and delivery it went about as well as can be expected. I do remember the actual first words out of my mouth when they laid my son on my chest was, “I’m not doing this again.” Even with drugs it was painful. And that’s not even getting into how long it takes to recover. It took about seven months before I could walk without hip pain.
Decades ago one of my USAF pals was an athletic tomboy sort in peak health. At about age 28 when 6 months pregnant the fetus damn near killed her. Over the space of about a week she went from fine to screwed.
She was in and out of the hospital for the last 2 months, and all-but bedridden when not hospitalized. The kid was birthed successfully and apparently none the worse for wear. But the mother’s body was comprehensively damaged. She’s still barely-walking wounded even today and the child is now over 30. All sorts of chronic systemic failures, weakness, wasting, etc. Just a total horror show.
Damnedest thing I’d ever heard of. I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it unfold with my own eyes. Scary stuff. One was waaay more than enough for her.
This is where the Mom-types would chirp “but it was all worth it!” I heard that countless times when I was pregnant, that it would all be worth it in the end. And I’m not saying I regret my decision, because I’m very grateful to have a wonderful son – but I feel this attitude can minimize the real trauma that can be done to a body or a mind. Many people find themselves permanently changed by this experience.
I’m sure some people feel like it was not worth it even if that is not the socially acceptable thing to say. The problem is you can never know going in whether you’re going to have a terrible time or an okay time. You can never account for all the variables. I read about experiences some mothers had and think, “That would break me.” And being broken would then of course make it harder to raise a kid effectively. It’s a total crapshoot.
I found the pushing really hard, and I only had a small baby. The midwife kept telling me to push harder; I didn’t think I could do it. I was very tired after being in labour so long. Finally managed in the end. I was lucky and recovered quite quickly, though. I just felt so much better not being pregnant anymore. Plus I was too busy trying to look after the baby to think about it much.
I think I’m fortunate not to know any ‘mom-types’. (And didn’t experience rude strangers asking intrusive questions, like some women on the pregnancy forums.) I had a pretty standard pregnancy and I still hated every minute of it. Constant nausea and exhaustion for the first half, chronic reflux, aches and pains and just never feeling comfortable for the second. I was sleeping propped on 5 pillows by the end. And all the restrictions on what you can eat and drink and do; missing out on experiences. It does seem worth it now I’ve got my daughter, but I’m not at all sure I’d feel the same if I had ended up like @LSLGuy’s friend. Makes me glad I didn’t have kids younger and got to live my life first, although I wouldn’t mind having a bit more energy now!
It’s so true that it’s all a crapshot. So many things can go wrong, both for the baby and for you, and you have no control over it That’s the scary thing. I know a woman who had pre-eclampsia and ended up in intensive care for both her pregnancies. She wanted to have a third but they told her it would kill her, so they stopped at two. And she seemed healthy otherwise. You just don’t know what will happen.
They had a ton of classes offered by the hospital my wife delivered in and they were all free from what I remember. There were even classes just for dads to teach them things like how to hold a baby and ways to soothe a baby. We took a bunch of them like infant cpr for the first one. For the second we only did one that was for siblings to help prepare them for dealing with a baby. They had a breastfeeding support group as well that really helped my wife through her post-partum depression.
So it’s not necessarily an American thing to not have free support classes.
I’m glad they have free classes at least in some places. I was planning to go to the breastfeeding support group even if I had no problems (and as it turned out I had lots of problems), but everything was cancelled due to Covid. I was lucky that one of my checkups was with the health visitor who usually runs it, and she gave me very useful advice. Otherwise I might well be formula-feeding now.
Not out of kindness. Informed best interest and frankly a good marketing investment. At the risk of sounding sexist health market research consistently demonstrates that the woman of a household tends to be the medical decision maker and spreader of word of mouth. Hospitals and systems want to keep moms to be highly satisfied as that brings along many future years of all sorts of business.
It does. And you could paint it with glow in the dark paint so that it was even easier to spot from outside the door.
Here’s a deadbolt for just this purpose. No key at all; there’s a thumbturn on each side.
This one is a bit expensive, but it proves the category exists. I’d bet that spending more than the 30 seconds I did on Google will turn up more reasonably-priced alternatives.
My parents never used an eye hook for my door, but they had one on the hall closet, which had the medications and cleaning materials, and the closet underneath the stairs, which had the wine. The eye hooks are still there and still used if they have small children visiting.