Enjoy the newborn bubble
There’s no experience quite like becoming a dad for the first time. Overnight your life changes forever. At the start, four hours of broken sleep is a solid night, the house starts to look like you’ve been burgled and the gym, pubs, restaurants and the rest of the outside world become a fond memory.
My advice: enjoy it. The newborn bubble is hard, but it has undoubtably been the most magical time of my life. The world will wait for you, but the newborn bubble won’t.
The more you try to fight against it, the stronger it will consume you. Once you accept the obliteration of your usual routine and throw yourself wholeheartedly at your new job of dad, everything starts to fall into place.
Build healthy habits for your baby
Trying to stick to a routine with a newborn is a fool’s errand, but good habits early on can build strong foundations for the future.
Babies are unpredictable and don’t come with a manual, and they have zero concept of time management. They're experts at timing a feed or a nappy explosion exactly at the moment you leave the house, or deciding the night before you return to work they'll test out just how loud and how long they can cry for.
The one saving grace is that the world understands and accepts this. It is okay (and encouraged) to make your baby the centre of everything!
Arrange things on your terms. Don’t be afraid to meet at home rather than out and about. This way, timings become irrelevant and you aren’t running around like a mad man packing a nappy bag, frantically looking for a vomit-free T-shirt and trying to remember which bottles are sterilized – all whilst your friend is calmly ordering their second matcha latte at the café you were meant to be at 45 minutes ago.
Some people worry about friends and family seeing the chaos, the piles of laundry, the overflowing sterilizer, the invasion of toys, playmats and wet wipes. I have found actually letting those close to me see some of the chaos has been very healthy.
Practical sleep tips for new dads
Forget time-based routines with a newborn. Have a few key things you’d like to get done at some point in a day, plod through what you can and a loose daily routine will begin to build itself.
Day-night cycling is how babies regulate their circadian rhythm. Initially newborns shouldn’t be actively kept awake in the day, and they'll spend most of the day asleep, but don’t worry about making noise, having lights on, taking them out and about. Just go about business as usual.
At night, however, treat them as you would yourself - a dark, quiet room, ideally 16-20 degrees, with minimal disruptions. Incorporating consistent activities at roughly the same time each day such as bathtime, storytime and tummy time is helpful. This won’t suddenly mean your baby wakes and sleeps like clockwork, but in time, and as they grow, it will get easier.
Sleep is one of the biggest challenges with a newborn. Although a newborn can sleep for over 18 hours a day, parents are not so lucky. Accepting you're not going to get much sleep, ironically, has done more for my sleep than anything else.
I've firmly accepted that three two-hour naps overnight in the newborn era is about as good as it gets, so when I do get an opportunity to sleep, I’m not stressing about my eight hours. Stealing an extra hour’s nap in the afternoon or when the grandparents are round feels like a win!
This being said, there are ways to maximise opportunities for sleep. Initially it is advised babies have no more than three hours between feeds, with this slowly increasing as they get older. You can however, stretch how long you and your partner are in bed for.
We’ve taken to going up to bed immediately after tea, sometimes as early as 7pm, to do tummy time and bath time. This means if, like me, you need to be up early for work, you’re maximizing the number of individual sleep windows between feeds.
Twelve hours between 7pm and 7am gives four potential gaps between feeds, so if your baby doesn’t feed or sleep like clockwork (which no baby does), and decides to cluster feed or struggles with wind and cries for three hours between feeds, you still have time to get a few good sleep windows.
There’s no worse feeling than finally going up to bed at midnight and baby will not settle, and you look over at a clock saying 4am and you’re yet to get a second of shut eye.
Work as a team with your partner
Overnight, working as a team with your partner is key. If exclusively breastfeeding, mum has to be up for each feed but there are still ways to help each other. I tended to stay asleep whilst my wife breastfed, and once done she woke me, handed me the baby, and I wandered around the house burping and settling her whilst my wife fell back to sleep.
If using bottles - whether formula or expressed breastmilk - try and share the feeds equally, rather than doing every overnight feed together. Working in tandem can give longer blocks of sleep, and you can take shifts getting a few hours of uninterrupted sleep throughout the night. That being said, if you are struggling to keep your eyes open, always wake your partner for support.
If breastfeeding, once baby is 4 to 6 weeks old and well established on the breast, you can chose to express milk and give a bottle feed overnight, allowing the non-breast-feeding partner to help and give the breastfeeding mother a longer block of sleep.
Not all babies will accept a bottle if they’re used to breastfeeding, so this isn’t an option for everyone. That being said, just because they have refused before, doesn’t mean you can’t keep trying here and there, and try out different teats and times of day to see if you can find a combination that works. If baby does take a bottle, ideally the non-breastfeeding partner should give it, firstly to avoid feeding confusion, and secondly as a great way for the non-breast-feeding partner and baby to bond.
Coping with stress and self doubt
The newborn era is about as hard as it gets. Overnight you are thrust into an entirely new world with no practice, and tending to the endless needs of your little bundle of love can seem like an impossible challenge.
There are times you worry you aren’t doing a good job, times when it all gets overwhelming and times when your baby’s crying makes you cry. This is all normal, and just by questioning if you’re doing everything right, you’re already doing everything right.
One day, you will change your last nappy, pat out your last burp and finally get eight hours of sleep, and when you wake up well rested, put on your vomit free clothes and have the day free to do with what you like, you'd give anything to go back to 3am on a random Tuesday morning, and hold your child as a baby again.
Becoming a parent is hard, but it’s the greatest journey you’ll ever go on. Breathe in every moment and enjoy!
