Hellish first night

Apparently the second night is notoriously hard, we had a really awful night with ours too. We found that he settled better in his moses basket so have sacked off the next to me for now x

@Lou thank you! I don’t remember this with my first but then we were in hospital for 3 days so there wasn’t really chance for rest anyway..! This time I was more hopeful for a few hours here and there as we could come home!

It's very natural for babies to be a dream on the first night and then chaos to start second/third night, especially with being unsettled and cluster feeding. My son didn't get the memo and didn't have the lovely first night and cluster fed and was unsettled from night one, so I am expecting the same this time round too 😅 x

Sounds like 2nd night syndrome, they suddenly realise they're not getting fed 24/7 and need to be awake and crying to be close to you and feeding. It's normal!

My little man had some rough nights when my milk came in as he was cluster feeding which meant we were awake a lot. My toddler has also started waking at 5.30 ish every day, so our sleep window is massively reduced now. He has settled and is feeding every couple of hours in the night now which is heaps better, he is 13 days old now. I'd say rest as much as you can in the daytime. Can one of you have both toddler and baby while the other naps? Does your toddler still nap so you can potentially nap then too? X

@Sam thanks that’s reassuring! She’s in a tricky phase of dropping her nap and tbh we are thinking of letting her drop it, because when she does nap it takes 1 hour plus to get her down and then bedtime is also long and late. I’m not sure how we will manage long nap/bedtimes atm, especially as she prefers me to do it but I will also need to be breastfeeding baby! I have no idea how we’re going to manage two 😅 very overwhelmed! X

I totally get that! My daughter will be 3 in Dec and I think she is on the brink of needing to drop it too. Hence the early wake ups and the bedtime battle we are having. I just couldn't face her dropping it when I was 35+ weeks pregnant. But it'll have to happen before long I think! I understand feeling overwhelmed too! Happy to talk if you wanna message a fellow overwhelmed mum of 2 😂 xx

We had our second night with baby too and he was very unsettled didn’t want to be put down. On the boob for a couple of minutes then unlatching. I found the white noise machine helped a fair bit and managed to get a couple of hours sleep 🤞🏻

We had the same, apparently very common for the 2nd night to be HARD! Sleep when you can in thr day to catch up, maybe your husband will take the toddler out or If toddler still naps grab an hour then. Its hard

The first few nights are very tough with the cluster feeding as they’re used to sleeping in the day, just try and do what you can to get sleep in the day so you can get through them

My second baby is 6 days old today. I could have written this myself. First night in hospital v happy to sleep in bassinet. Nights 2 and 3 awake max. 15 minutes after being put down in the Moses basket (not an exaggeration). I then realised that he was cold and put him in a warmer sleeping bag and we’ve now had 3 nights of getting stretches of 2-3 hours sleep at a time which I’m finding really manageable.

I had the same, but I realised it was just cluster feeding to bring my milk in and the nights since have been much better. We are 1 week now and he even slept a 3.5 hour stint last night.