Daughter no. 2 arrived wednesday morning. Hello sleepless nights.
Congratulations =).
Kids are tough!
But it got easier for us with every child. Now this is not advice of any sort, this is a very culturally and personally extremely sensitive topic
....
In our experience in their first year or two, the closer the kinds are to the mom at night to make nursing easy, the better nights sleep everyone gets for those years. If you cannot nurse long..... it will make things much more complicated and possibly difficult. If you are one of the lucky ones that can nurse a long time.... it is simply MAGIC.
Partners are TOUGHER!
Now everyone here is different and in each situation learning what works for you will probably be toughest part. For us, figuring out what works, adjusting both our routines together .... THAT took a lot of work! A LOT of talking together: talking, discussing, arguing often, trial and error, planning, changing our habbits and some sacrifices by both of us were necessary around the kids routine to get there :-/
Initially it was honestly hell, but having learned to work together better, we have an easy time communicating and working together now with pretty well anything, at home, with our kids, with our extended families.
The MOST agravating, stressfull and biggest *mistake* we ever made (with frist kid) was.... talking to our parents, explaining how we were doing things (on demand nursing etc) .... oooohhh anything done differently from the way parents did things (old school scheduled feeding) .... got taken VERY personally by our moms.
With later kids, all that stuff (nursing, sleeping, kids routine) is no longer discussed or mentioned. It is personal, private and SECRET!, and our extended families are happy again in their blissfull mostly complete ignorance =)
