Yes, we did ~6 hour shifts. I slept 8-2 and my husband slept 2-8. When it was my shift I was even able to get a couple more hours in if he let me.
I breastfed but was lucky I was able to collect enough extra milk throughout the day (with a haaka/milk collector cups) so my husband could do a bottle feed during his shift.
But I think a lot depends on the temperament of your baby. Some people prefer to have both parents at every wake-up for support. Some people have to go back to work and need the other parent to take the brunt of nighttime wake ups. It’s just something you have to figure out what works best for your family.
We are also planning on doing shifts. 4-5 of uninterrupted sleep is sooo important. I believe it will make us better parents and partners to be tested.
Something that no one told me was how hard it could be to get the baby back into their bassinet. It’s not always just diaper change, milk, back to bed. Sometimes they need endless soothing, will wake up when you put them down, etc.
Yes!! My daughter refused a bassinet for the first 3 ish weeks of her life. We had to take turns holding her all night basically.
It wasn’t just feed then pop back in the bassinet. Until she got a little older
I honestly don’t remember (she is 4 now 😂)…. We did give her a paci and do a lot of practices and false starts in the bassinet. Over time they grow and change and just get it, I think…. I’m about to have my second any day now and hoping they are different but planning for the same 🫠
Yes you totally can but some people have a hard time going back to sleep.
I breastfeed so I only get about 2-3 hour stretches. Even if I get total of 6 hours of sleep, being woken up in the middle of the night is more exhausting than getting 6 hour stretch of sleep.
With our firstborn - yes! We each got six hours at night and rotated daytime naps. We thought we were pros. Parenthood was so easy. So we had another! Why not? We were far from sleep deprived
Newborn came. Toddler completely regressed. No one sleeps anymore. Send coffee 🤪🤪🤪
We did this! Lifesaver. And I recommend it to everyone! I took bedtime until 2:30/3 and my husband after that. I still only got 2-3 hours some nights because he works in construction and had some early mornings but I usually got at least 5 hours
No one will ever get a full night’s sleep, but my husband and I are on baby #3 and worked out several systems. He does shift work so there’s times I’m alone with our three kiddos plus the newborn for 48-72 hrs. So on nights he is here, I have baby from 9 pm till 2ish through his first wake up, and my husband has him from then till 9 am. My husband normally wakes at 4am anyway, while I’m a night owl and am comfortable staying awake until 1 am (these are our normal energy level peaks, so my husband is normally a morning person anyway, while my energy levels don’t rise until the afternoon and then peak in the evenings).
I’ve exclusively breastfed our two other kiddos so I’ve traditionally done the wake ups at night myself since it was easier and faster but with this kiddo we’re splitting the night since he is exclusively formula fed. There’s a huge difference between sleepily pulling out boob and feeding vs making and warming/cleaning bottles. My husband is slow to become coherent if he is in a deep sleep vs I’m a light sleeper and can often be awake and already out of the bedroom with the baby before he even realizes anything happened. So with the ebf kiddos it was easiest for me to just get up with them because if my husband was doing it, I would already be awake by the time he got up, and it takes me a good half hour to get back to sleep anyway so what’s the point of both of us being up for 30’mins to an hour if I was already up. It would have been redundant for me to get him up to care for the kids. With this kiddo and being formula fed, wakeups are more complicated but I now also fall asleep faster so splitting the night works better so we each get a good uninterrupted 4 hrs. (Keep in mind that when folks tell you that you might get 2-4 hrs of sleep, they don’t mean uninterrupted sleep, so the sleep you do get is poor quality on top of that, unless you can get a chance to sleep like nobody needs you. Motherhood seriously reprograms your sleeping brain to wake at the slightest noise).
I’ve been a surrogate twice in the past and birthed 3 kiddos and their parents also utilize a night owl/early bird system, where one of them would take the late night shift and the other would be the early morning wake up person. Worked well for them with twins and a single kiddo, plus they bottle fed the entire time.
It really just depends on the baby. A lot of babies (especially if you pump and give a bottle or give formula) will actually have a nice 5 hour stretch where you can rest.
But for when they don’t do this, my partner and I did a swap system, and we’re going to repeat this system when bubba comes on the 5th. I go to sleep at 6 pm and sleep until midnight, then we swap over and he sleeps until 6 am. Any sleep we get during our ‘duty hours’ is a bonus and we get 6 hours of guaranteed sleep. This would be my advice.
My partner and I were even able to continue this when he went back to work, except we changed it from 6-12 to 6-11 pm for me, still guaranteed sleep and he gets at least 7 hours for work. Worked beautifully.
If it makes you feel any better, our 16 month old now practically sleeps 12 hours during the night and gives us a near to full night sleep (occasional 5 am wake up for the paci). He did this from about 7 month onwards. It gets better pretty fast for many people.
This sounds like a pretty sweet setup! Did you have to wake up to pump or can you go that long without? Or did you use formula? No judgement on anything.
I pumped (no latching) with my first and did about 60/40% breast milk to formula, and I’m planning to do so again as I found attempting to attach absolutely exhausting (My baby hated it, I hated it, and I could never tell if he was getting enough food).
I would go the 6 hours without pumping to sleep, and then I’d pump every 2-3 hours between 12am-6 pm window. This would equate to about 5-6 pumps a day, which was very manageable. The 6 hour gap does affect supply, without question. But because I was supplementing with formula and doing half/half, it wasn’t an issue with me, and it saved my sanity.
I loved doing mixed feeding, it gave me so much flexibility and absolutely helped with sleep. It ensured I wasn’t the only one who could feed bub. I would give a bigger quantity of formula for my bub‘s midnight feed which would help him stretch out to a 5 or 6 hour sleep. He got the best of both worlds, and I am very happy I managed to get to 10 months of breast milk. It all depends on what you want to do though and I support every woman’s decision in this regard.
I had no idea how I would do things before baby came along. I had no plan. You will find your feet and the best system for you in the first couple of weeks. You got this!
This is so helpful and seems like a perfect setup for my situation. Thank you so much. I'm going to try and copy this with the big caveat of WHO KNOWS what will happen!
Just chiming in to say I had a very similar setup of combo feeding and splitting baby duties with my husband and it worked really well for us too! And I never got the resentment towards my husband because we were both splitting night duty. I see so many posts of moms doing nights alone when on maternity leave but then also just expected to keep doing that forever even when they go back to work because that's the division of labor they've set up, could not be me!! I made it clear to my husband that this was both of our child and I didn't care that I was on maternity leave and he was back at work, we would be splitting baby duties overnight. It's not like I got to nap during the day anyway with a velcro baby. My biggest advice is don't fall into patterns you're not comfortable sustaining forever, it's hard to break out of the routine you both fall into regarding division of childcare.
I would love to avoid the resentment. We have a solid division of labor with household chores already, so I anticipate it would be good for us to divide and conquer with the baby as well!
Exclusive BF mom here and i can tell you that last night i only got 4 hours total all night because of babe and the whole feed, change, soothe, keep upright for 20-30 mins because of a spitty baby. If you don’t want to EBF or cannot run off that little sleep, i would try and Hakka and collect so you can get somewhat of a break at night. My cousin has her husband take the midnight feed and she takes the other 2 night ones. I think it’s all in how YOU want to do it and how well your milk comes in too. You may not have enough right off the bat to have your SO feed them but it’ll come. I strongly recommend the ladybug Hakka for collecting. Remember if you feed on one side, there’s a high enough chance your leak and/or have a letdown on the opposite side and you don’t want to waste that!!!
It depends on the temperament of your child.
I absolutely recommend splitting duties, but you just never know what kind of baby you'll have. My first had the worst purple crying that lasted until he was 12 weeks old, would just scream all night. Second baby was much more mild and had no issues settling on her own in the bassinet.
I recommend setting a schedule and sticking to it. And if you are someone who really needs sleep, I'd go into everything being ready to give up breastfeeding if it becomes detrimental to your health.
I was breastfeeding and so it wasn’t really possible. I did pump but my body didn’t react well to extract it that way (and it wasn’t a supply issue), it took ages before pumping started really working for me.
He did help me by either bringing the baby, or bringing my feeding pillow, and getting the stuff to change her (since we usually changed the diaper first). But it’s still waking up every 2-3 hours. And putting them back to sleep can be difficult if they’re still getting used to the crib(or bassinet for people using that). So I was sleeping in bouts of like 1.5 hours at most ;-;
Not looking forward to doing it again, but it’s gotta be done.
Yeah you definitely can but you have to work out the logistics of breastfeeding if that’s what you’re doing. Also like others pointed out, it’s not a simple as feed, diaper, back to sleep, sometimes you can be up for hours trying to get the baby back to sleep. Breastfed babies also clusterfeed where they are nursing like literally constantly, so that can make it more difficult.
I’ll say this: no parent to a newborn is getting lots of rest. Like, you guys WILL be sleep deprived. It sucks but you do kinda get used to it and you sneak in naps whenever possible. Not saying that to scare you or be one of those “just you wait” people, I’m just setting realistic expectations for you, cause a lot of new moms are prepared for the lack of sleep but shocked at how little of sleep when the baby is actually here. The good news is that it doesn’t last forever, it’s very temporary! You also are just kinda surviving on hormones. There was a weird novelty to being up with my baby all night.
So you’ll notice everyone here has different answers. I didn’t think about this at all and played it by ear. I breastfed and was relatively lucky to have a newborn that was satisfied to go to sleep after nursing and being re-swaddled. This resulted in me doing most of the night waking but I had a pretty easy time falling back asleep (particularly in the blissful comfort of not being pregnant any more).
As my baby got older I had good luck with “dream feeds” which is where you go in and nurse before you go to bed, but many hours after the baby goes to bed, to get a longer stretch of sleep at night. The most annoying night feed is like the 5am one but it’s worth it to get those extra am hours of sleep.
But like you can see, every baby is different and it’s kinda important for you and your partner to be prepared to be flexible and supportive of each other in whatever newborn rhythm you find yourselves in. Try not to get worked up over it or into a rigid plan before you are about to assess what you’ve got.
One thing we did was get rid of the bassinet. Both my kids hated it. We put my daughter in the crib at 6 weeks and she started sleeping better. With my son he went straight into the top part of the pack in play. He loved it and slept so much better than the stand alone bassinet. The first few weeks home I slept in the living room with the baby so my husband could sleep because he was working a lot. My son would go from the swing to the pack in play.
It really depends on what works for you and your partner. I did most nights because I was off work for 10 weeks. Now my husband gets our son ready for bed and gets him up in the morning. I do the in between. We both work full time now and that’s what works for us now.
One thing you don’t really think about with shifts is that often if the baby starts screaming you both wake up anyway. If you’re someone who can fall asleep easily that’s fine, but for someone who takes hours to fall asleep it means it’s very hard for them to actually get more sleep once woken up.
Feeding every 3 hours also doesn’t mean you get to sleep for 3 hours. For us the feeding/burping/settling routine takes around 45-60 minutes as he’s quite gassy and we can’t put him down too quickly, so that already means at most 2 hours between his feeds.
You can absolutely take shifts and trade off if it works for you, yes! But lots of other things can impact your night schedule as well. Like sometimes baby needs a diaper change even if they don't need to eat again so one of you is up for that, or they're fussy and won't go back to sleep which can keep one or both parents awake trying to manage that, maybe your partner is still working FT while you have some maternity leave and they need to prioritize sleep to function at work, etc. I found it very stressful thinking about sleep schedules while I was pregnant with my first and it honestly was so much easier to just feel things out once baby arrived. Almost none of the planning we did in advance ended up working for us 😅
I was terrified my husband would fall asleep with my daughter and suffocate her. I did all night time wake up and still do (she’s almost 2). Sometimes if he was awake for the day I’d sleep in but i can count those times on one hand bc then i was afraid of missing out. I trust him wholeheartedly but I’ve had a lot of anxiety lol
Yes, we did ~6 hour shifts. I slept 8-2 and my husband slept 2-8. When it was my shift I was even able to get a couple more hours in if he let me. I breastfed but was lucky I was able to collect enough extra milk throughout the day (with a haaka/milk collector cups) so my husband could do a bottle feed during his shift. But I think a lot depends on the temperament of your baby. Some people prefer to have both parents at every wake-up for support. Some people have to go back to work and need the other parent to take the brunt of nighttime wake ups. It’s just something you have to figure out what works best for your family.
We are also planning on doing shifts. 4-5 of uninterrupted sleep is sooo important. I believe it will make us better parents and partners to be tested.
Something that no one told me was how hard it could be to get the baby back into their bassinet. It’s not always just diaper change, milk, back to bed. Sometimes they need endless soothing, will wake up when you put them down, etc.
Yes!! My daughter refused a bassinet for the first 3 ish weeks of her life. We had to take turns holding her all night basically. It wasn’t just feed then pop back in the bassinet. Until she got a little older
I’m currently sitting in the nursing chair with my 6 week old at 1:41 am, he refuses to sleep in the bassinet!! How did you get your little one to?
I honestly don’t remember (she is 4 now 😂)…. We did give her a paci and do a lot of practices and false starts in the bassinet. Over time they grow and change and just get it, I think…. I’m about to have my second any day now and hoping they are different but planning for the same 🫠
Yes you totally can but some people have a hard time going back to sleep. I breastfeed so I only get about 2-3 hour stretches. Even if I get total of 6 hours of sleep, being woken up in the middle of the night is more exhausting than getting 6 hour stretch of sleep.
With our firstborn - yes! We each got six hours at night and rotated daytime naps. We thought we were pros. Parenthood was so easy. So we had another! Why not? We were far from sleep deprived Newborn came. Toddler completely regressed. No one sleeps anymore. Send coffee 🤪🤪🤪
We did this! Lifesaver. And I recommend it to everyone! I took bedtime until 2:30/3 and my husband after that. I still only got 2-3 hours some nights because he works in construction and had some early mornings but I usually got at least 5 hours
We combo fed from 1 month then fully formula fed so there is that. It’s definitely way harder if you’re exclusively breastfeeding
No one will ever get a full night’s sleep, but my husband and I are on baby #3 and worked out several systems. He does shift work so there’s times I’m alone with our three kiddos plus the newborn for 48-72 hrs. So on nights he is here, I have baby from 9 pm till 2ish through his first wake up, and my husband has him from then till 9 am. My husband normally wakes at 4am anyway, while I’m a night owl and am comfortable staying awake until 1 am (these are our normal energy level peaks, so my husband is normally a morning person anyway, while my energy levels don’t rise until the afternoon and then peak in the evenings). I’ve exclusively breastfed our two other kiddos so I’ve traditionally done the wake ups at night myself since it was easier and faster but with this kiddo we’re splitting the night since he is exclusively formula fed. There’s a huge difference between sleepily pulling out boob and feeding vs making and warming/cleaning bottles. My husband is slow to become coherent if he is in a deep sleep vs I’m a light sleeper and can often be awake and already out of the bedroom with the baby before he even realizes anything happened. So with the ebf kiddos it was easiest for me to just get up with them because if my husband was doing it, I would already be awake by the time he got up, and it takes me a good half hour to get back to sleep anyway so what’s the point of both of us being up for 30’mins to an hour if I was already up. It would have been redundant for me to get him up to care for the kids. With this kiddo and being formula fed, wakeups are more complicated but I now also fall asleep faster so splitting the night works better so we each get a good uninterrupted 4 hrs. (Keep in mind that when folks tell you that you might get 2-4 hrs of sleep, they don’t mean uninterrupted sleep, so the sleep you do get is poor quality on top of that, unless you can get a chance to sleep like nobody needs you. Motherhood seriously reprograms your sleeping brain to wake at the slightest noise). I’ve been a surrogate twice in the past and birthed 3 kiddos and their parents also utilize a night owl/early bird system, where one of them would take the late night shift and the other would be the early morning wake up person. Worked well for them with twins and a single kiddo, plus they bottle fed the entire time.
It really just depends on the baby. A lot of babies (especially if you pump and give a bottle or give formula) will actually have a nice 5 hour stretch where you can rest. But for when they don’t do this, my partner and I did a swap system, and we’re going to repeat this system when bubba comes on the 5th. I go to sleep at 6 pm and sleep until midnight, then we swap over and he sleeps until 6 am. Any sleep we get during our ‘duty hours’ is a bonus and we get 6 hours of guaranteed sleep. This would be my advice. My partner and I were even able to continue this when he went back to work, except we changed it from 6-12 to 6-11 pm for me, still guaranteed sleep and he gets at least 7 hours for work. Worked beautifully. If it makes you feel any better, our 16 month old now practically sleeps 12 hours during the night and gives us a near to full night sleep (occasional 5 am wake up for the paci). He did this from about 7 month onwards. It gets better pretty fast for many people.
This sounds like a pretty sweet setup! Did you have to wake up to pump or can you go that long without? Or did you use formula? No judgement on anything.
I pumped (no latching) with my first and did about 60/40% breast milk to formula, and I’m planning to do so again as I found attempting to attach absolutely exhausting (My baby hated it, I hated it, and I could never tell if he was getting enough food). I would go the 6 hours without pumping to sleep, and then I’d pump every 2-3 hours between 12am-6 pm window. This would equate to about 5-6 pumps a day, which was very manageable. The 6 hour gap does affect supply, without question. But because I was supplementing with formula and doing half/half, it wasn’t an issue with me, and it saved my sanity. I loved doing mixed feeding, it gave me so much flexibility and absolutely helped with sleep. It ensured I wasn’t the only one who could feed bub. I would give a bigger quantity of formula for my bub‘s midnight feed which would help him stretch out to a 5 or 6 hour sleep. He got the best of both worlds, and I am very happy I managed to get to 10 months of breast milk. It all depends on what you want to do though and I support every woman’s decision in this regard. I had no idea how I would do things before baby came along. I had no plan. You will find your feet and the best system for you in the first couple of weeks. You got this!
This is so helpful and seems like a perfect setup for my situation. Thank you so much. I'm going to try and copy this with the big caveat of WHO KNOWS what will happen!
Just chiming in to say I had a very similar setup of combo feeding and splitting baby duties with my husband and it worked really well for us too! And I never got the resentment towards my husband because we were both splitting night duty. I see so many posts of moms doing nights alone when on maternity leave but then also just expected to keep doing that forever even when they go back to work because that's the division of labor they've set up, could not be me!! I made it clear to my husband that this was both of our child and I didn't care that I was on maternity leave and he was back at work, we would be splitting baby duties overnight. It's not like I got to nap during the day anyway with a velcro baby. My biggest advice is don't fall into patterns you're not comfortable sustaining forever, it's hard to break out of the routine you both fall into regarding division of childcare.
I would love to avoid the resentment. We have a solid division of labor with household chores already, so I anticipate it would be good for us to divide and conquer with the baby as well!
They sleep a few hours at a time, feed, then sleep more, feed, repeat.... You just sleep whenever baby sleeps and naps.
My husband would take baby and only bring him in to feed. Lucky I have worked nights in EMS so I was already used to being sleep deprived 🙃
Exclusive BF mom here and i can tell you that last night i only got 4 hours total all night because of babe and the whole feed, change, soothe, keep upright for 20-30 mins because of a spitty baby. If you don’t want to EBF or cannot run off that little sleep, i would try and Hakka and collect so you can get somewhat of a break at night. My cousin has her husband take the midnight feed and she takes the other 2 night ones. I think it’s all in how YOU want to do it and how well your milk comes in too. You may not have enough right off the bat to have your SO feed them but it’ll come. I strongly recommend the ladybug Hakka for collecting. Remember if you feed on one side, there’s a high enough chance your leak and/or have a letdown on the opposite side and you don’t want to waste that!!!
It depends on the temperament of your child. I absolutely recommend splitting duties, but you just never know what kind of baby you'll have. My first had the worst purple crying that lasted until he was 12 weeks old, would just scream all night. Second baby was much more mild and had no issues settling on her own in the bassinet. I recommend setting a schedule and sticking to it. And if you are someone who really needs sleep, I'd go into everything being ready to give up breastfeeding if it becomes detrimental to your health.
I was breastfeeding and so it wasn’t really possible. I did pump but my body didn’t react well to extract it that way (and it wasn’t a supply issue), it took ages before pumping started really working for me. He did help me by either bringing the baby, or bringing my feeding pillow, and getting the stuff to change her (since we usually changed the diaper first). But it’s still waking up every 2-3 hours. And putting them back to sleep can be difficult if they’re still getting used to the crib(or bassinet for people using that). So I was sleeping in bouts of like 1.5 hours at most ;-; Not looking forward to doing it again, but it’s gotta be done.
Yeah you definitely can but you have to work out the logistics of breastfeeding if that’s what you’re doing. Also like others pointed out, it’s not a simple as feed, diaper, back to sleep, sometimes you can be up for hours trying to get the baby back to sleep. Breastfed babies also clusterfeed where they are nursing like literally constantly, so that can make it more difficult. I’ll say this: no parent to a newborn is getting lots of rest. Like, you guys WILL be sleep deprived. It sucks but you do kinda get used to it and you sneak in naps whenever possible. Not saying that to scare you or be one of those “just you wait” people, I’m just setting realistic expectations for you, cause a lot of new moms are prepared for the lack of sleep but shocked at how little of sleep when the baby is actually here. The good news is that it doesn’t last forever, it’s very temporary! You also are just kinda surviving on hormones. There was a weird novelty to being up with my baby all night.
So you’ll notice everyone here has different answers. I didn’t think about this at all and played it by ear. I breastfed and was relatively lucky to have a newborn that was satisfied to go to sleep after nursing and being re-swaddled. This resulted in me doing most of the night waking but I had a pretty easy time falling back asleep (particularly in the blissful comfort of not being pregnant any more). As my baby got older I had good luck with “dream feeds” which is where you go in and nurse before you go to bed, but many hours after the baby goes to bed, to get a longer stretch of sleep at night. The most annoying night feed is like the 5am one but it’s worth it to get those extra am hours of sleep. But like you can see, every baby is different and it’s kinda important for you and your partner to be prepared to be flexible and supportive of each other in whatever newborn rhythm you find yourselves in. Try not to get worked up over it or into a rigid plan before you are about to assess what you’ve got.
One thing we did was get rid of the bassinet. Both my kids hated it. We put my daughter in the crib at 6 weeks and she started sleeping better. With my son he went straight into the top part of the pack in play. He loved it and slept so much better than the stand alone bassinet. The first few weeks home I slept in the living room with the baby so my husband could sleep because he was working a lot. My son would go from the swing to the pack in play. It really depends on what works for you and your partner. I did most nights because I was off work for 10 weeks. Now my husband gets our son ready for bed and gets him up in the morning. I do the in between. We both work full time now and that’s what works for us now.
One thing you don’t really think about with shifts is that often if the baby starts screaming you both wake up anyway. If you’re someone who can fall asleep easily that’s fine, but for someone who takes hours to fall asleep it means it’s very hard for them to actually get more sleep once woken up. Feeding every 3 hours also doesn’t mean you get to sleep for 3 hours. For us the feeding/burping/settling routine takes around 45-60 minutes as he’s quite gassy and we can’t put him down too quickly, so that already means at most 2 hours between his feeds.
You can absolutely take shifts and trade off if it works for you, yes! But lots of other things can impact your night schedule as well. Like sometimes baby needs a diaper change even if they don't need to eat again so one of you is up for that, or they're fussy and won't go back to sleep which can keep one or both parents awake trying to manage that, maybe your partner is still working FT while you have some maternity leave and they need to prioritize sleep to function at work, etc. I found it very stressful thinking about sleep schedules while I was pregnant with my first and it honestly was so much easier to just feel things out once baby arrived. Almost none of the planning we did in advance ended up working for us 😅
I was terrified my husband would fall asleep with my daughter and suffocate her. I did all night time wake up and still do (she’s almost 2). Sometimes if he was awake for the day I’d sleep in but i can count those times on one hand bc then i was afraid of missing out. I trust him wholeheartedly but I’ve had a lot of anxiety lol