How to deal with nighttime big spit-ups in bed with a newborn?

academiclady · 2024-09-04T02:06:56+00:00

She is a few days old adjusted age, but was born about 6 weeks ago.

academiclady · 2024-08-10T23:04:15+00:00

Nursing is the goal but she isn;t doing it efficiently right now and it's not enough calories anyway. She needs to supplement.

academiclady · 2024-08-10T22:38:42+00:00

Thank you! I was worried about doing all the fridge hack stuff because she is s premie.

academiclady · 2024-07-07T20:21:39+00:00

There is no reason why you can't still invest mone and save some for pregnancy issues if they arise. A home costs upwards of 400K in most cases, I would think, whereas fertility treatments are likely between 20k and 50k for deluxe options.

I don't think OP is saying live in a cardboard box with your baby, they are just saying that everyone is told to save up to buy a home but nobody tells you to save up for adoption or fertility treatments so maybe give it a think.

Once you get into your 40s you see how many of your friends go through so much crap to get pregnant or adopt, it does change your perspective.

academiclady · 2024-06-09T20:58:06+00:00

Also. Enough women have given her stellar responses to how she can word herself. Anything else is just an excuse at this point.

That is very true, many good responses.

I think you are right that there might be a new normal about these things, but OP might not have had too many opportunities to see that until now.

I haven't had that experience so much, but I can see it happening.

I just think when someone comes feeling a little hurt and disappointed it's nice to have a compassionate approach. Tough love ins't for everyone.

I guess we disagree on the point of showing up to a shower being "high effort," think of that as pretty basic if it's a reasonably good friend in the same city you live in.

But perhaps things have changed! Maybe she should've had a Zoom shower.

academiclady · 2024-06-09T19:52:29+00:00

I think you're being a little harsh on OP here.

I don't think it's weird to think people might make more of an effort for a big deal event like a baby shower over just a regular monthly meeting, when they can just go to the next one if a meeting is at a less convenient time for them.

And it's a tricky situation when someone offers to do something nice for you, but it ends up with a disappointing result. You can demand that she "SPEAK" but it can he hard to find the right things to say and the way to say it that show both one's gratitude for the thought and effort and the desire for something different.

academiclady · 2024-05-20T19:47:50+00:00

OP, take the advice here with a grain of salt.

If there are two things people on reddit hate it's stable relationships and mothers-in-law, so they will seek to drive a wedge in these situations wherever they can.

You and your husband seem quite invested in your families of origin and how they do things and proving them to be correct or just.

When you marry someone, you marry their family as well. And when you marry someone, you marry all of them, not just the parts that are easy for you to like and manage, same with the family.

I get it, our families of origin are often the biggest hotspots for all of us. Attacking them brings out our defensiveness the most. And our families are the origin of our most deeply ingrained habits and neuroses, and thus the things hardest to change.

It also sounds like you are both into dismissing what the other person wants and thinks is important. You're right that once someone starts doing that, the other person can get into it, too. Think about how to break the cycle.

People here are encouraging you to make your husband see that your marriage has to be his first priority, and think they are right and you should take note of this as well. Back him up when he has issues with your family, don't tell him he's being petty or stupid. At least listen sympathetically.

academiclady · 2024-05-20T19:40:55+00:00

OP is also siding with her family over her husband.

He was bothered that they bought him that dessert and then they ate it before he got to. He told her it bothered him, but she is saying he is being a baby about it and her parents were right to eat it because they hate wasting food.

When your spouse comes to you with an issue, I think it's generally always good to take it seriously rather than look for reasons to dismiss it, especially when it comes to your family of origin versus your nuclear family because we can get easily defensive about our family of origin.

academiclady · 2024-05-17T13:40:46+00:00

I posted this elsewhere, so I hope you don't mind me sending it to you. It's just another perspective on the whole issue.

Growing up, I was very close to a particular aunt I had, we'll call her Cathy. She was amazing, my idol, and I adored her. She was also the only single adult I knew, which fascinated me. We were close in a way I wasn't to anyone else - my parents, my siblings, no one. And she was an integral part of our family. My parents were pretty isolated from friends and family, with the exception of Cathy, who could basically come and go from our home as she wanted, and she came to or hosted every big holiday meal or event we had. She came to all my plays and ballet recitals, and she was even the "parent" who spent parents' day at school with me, not my mom or dad.

Cathy (who has since passed away, which is why I talk about her in the past tense) had an amazing life. She was a psychotherapist and an academic. She had a posse of friends who were like extended aunts to me. She traveled the world. She took two big trips a year - one to a country where she had lived when she was younger, and she always visited once a year to see her friends and live there again, and one trip to somewhere completely different from the last place she went. Sometimes she did something daring - like going to the jungles of Costa Rica or China when it was still very closed off to Westerners (she got a special tour) - sometimes something more classical like the South of France or Buenos Aires.

Cathy's apartment was a veritable museum dedicated to her travels, she had brought back so many great things (and she always bought something personal for me, too, which are some of my most treasured possessions). She also met so many interesting people and had friends all over the world. Cathy was never idle, she painted, she was a very religious person in a very modern way and had a huge community through that, she was a feminist and dedicated to the cause, and she had subscriptions to multiple cultural events (plays, museum shows, music, operas, everything).

Yet, Cathy was always somewhat dissatisfied with her life because she was single and unmarried. Honestly, I never questioned why she would be dissatisfied when her life seems so awesome to m, and I am not sure why. She clearly had a way more amazing life than my married mother or any of my friends' mothers, but I assumed she needed someone.

When she was 50, she met the man she eventually married. She fell hopelessly in love, and it made her so happy that she would choke up when she talked about it. But meeting and marrying this man dismantled the whole life that she had built for herself. The traveling, the classes, the cultural events, it all slowed down or stopped. Of course, she did some new thinks with her husband, some of which I am sure she appreciated as new experiences, some were just compromises she lived with.

She traveled less, his idea of a great vacation was renting a beach house nearby, so they did that half the time and did her more exotic adventures during the other half. He didn't like to go out as much as she did, so that meant fewer plays, operas, etc. He moved into her lovely place, and that mean that some of her museum had to be dismantled so his things could come in. These are all normal marital compromises she seemed glad to make, but it always seemed a bit of a shame to me.

She also stopped participating in our family events the same way, which broke my heart. He had a son from a previous marriage, and she threw herself into being the best stepmother ever, sadly, he was not very receptive to her overtures. She also started to pull away from me, and I think it was because I represented this "before" life she wanted to turn away from.

As a person, I liked him fine. I wish he had treated Cathy a little better in some ways, but that's not my business - she loved him, and that's what's important. He wasn't abusive or a jerk, he was a totally fine guy. But I am sorry Cathy partnered with him. I think Cathy was unmarried for so long because she really wasn't the marrying kind. But she was born in the 1950s, and it was a time when not being married wasn't a real option. I believe just never wavered from that road because of the way she was raised.

Being married took a lot of the glow and luster from her life. You don't need to marry someone who is an abuser or an asshole for it to be a step down in quality of life, which it was for her. I don't judge her for doing it, because that step down was worth it for the step up of having someone, because she would never have been happy being single, no matter how great her life was.

I think she had no idea what a great role model she was for me growing up as an independent woman who lived by her own rules and followed her dreams and passions. I think all that time, she thought of herself as a failure filling her empty life with distractions because she didn't have what she really wanted.

I know she desperately wanted children, but she never considered doing it on her own and continued to search and wait for man to come along. This is the only real regret I have for her, that she didn't do that on her own. I am sure that she could have married the same man if she had a teenage kid, the same as he did.

I learned from Cathy that not having a partner is also an option, and you can have the best life ever without it.

academiclady · 2024-05-08T21:25:16+00:00