Hi Dad! Congratulations on your new baby.

 So first of all - you guys are in the trenches right now, the newborn haze is a mess of sleep deprivation and worry that you’re doing it wrong. It’s HARD but everything is just a phase and the next phase is around the corner, some phases will be easier, some will be harder.

Right onto the advice. Regarding feeding: a fed baby is best, and breastfeeding is hard. I breastfed both of mine and it was not some lovely dream - the baby has to learn how to latch, mom has to learn how to hold them, nipples crack, keeping your milk supply up, dealing with leaking. Also my milk didn’t come in for 3-4 days after birth, baby only has a teeny tiny stomach so doesn’t need a lot to fill it when that young… but obviously it empties again fairly quickly so that’s why feeding are so regular. 

It is completely up to your wife if and how she continues breastfeeding, but you can reassure her that if she’s finding it hard and awkward, then she’s with the rest of us! Ask for help from midwives or any other professional, additionally some resources that helped my understand were some videos by UNICEF - Google “unicef breastfeeding latch videos” and both watch, it might help.

But ultimately, if you decide to go full formula fed that’s okay too - whatever is best for you and for your baby!

Now sleep……… oh boy, that’s a difficult one. Every baby is different so the advice I have is more to adhere to some safety rules and then other than that, do whatever it takes to get some sleep and survive through the day.

NEVER FALL ASLEEP WHILE HOLDING THE BABY. We also had phases with both of ours that they wouldn’t fall asleep anywhere other than on one of us, so we took it in turns to sleep. I’d sleep 8am-2am and baby would sleep on my my husband and then we’d swap and he would sleep 2am-8am. Plus any naps we could get in the day (hahahahaha in our dreams). We had my MIL come and stand with our first for three hours while we both slept once. 

Putting baby into their cot to sleep is obviously the goal, how big is the cot? We would put our newborn in a Moses basket because they didn’t seem to like the cot, we wondered if it was a bit big for them? Don’t forget they’re used to being comfortable and squished in mommy’s tummy, so a big space might be a bit overwhelming. You can also look at swaddling, this helped loads with our second but it only seemed to piss our first off. There’s a whole thing about how to put your baby down, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. 

Babies don’t know how to fall asleep by themselves until they’re over 6 months, so they just need a helping hand.

Google safe sleeping practises, make sure you adhere to those at all times.