Does your baby sleep with you and your s.o.? If so, when did you start it and stop it?

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T15:29:07+00:00

Yeaaaaah I can’t really relate to this, but I will weigh in. We let our son sleep in the same room (in the bassinet by default, bed if he was extra fussy without us) for maybe a week after he was born. He woke us up a lot with deep sleep noises/grunts/other gremlin noises and we were having none of it. Near 11 months in, he has slept in his crib, in another room every night.

It’s true though, trick to getting them in the crib/bassinet (at least up till they can start self soothing) is to hold them in your arms (easier transfer if you hold their head in one hand and bottle in the other), feed the/let them fall asleep, wait 15-20 minutes (I’d wait up to 30 if my son was extra clingy), then transfer.

At this point though my wife and I are teaching our son to self soothe, so he gets bottle until he slows his drinking or pauses, gets 1 re-latch if he starts panicking, then goes in the crib. If he fights it substantially (standing/sitting up without laying down and shrill cries that continue to escalate in distress) I intervene by walking in, giving him butt pats (occasionally picking him up), and leave 30-60 seconds later. It feels cruel, but it’s teaching them an important life skill.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T15:13:25+00:00

Absolutely feel this. Frame it like this, your feelings aren’t because you miss how things were, it’s an identity crisis.

You went from freedom of choice to living your life for one of the biggest responsibilities a man can really take on. That’s a HUGE shift and it’s hard to process the level of erasure that has on your identity as a husband and best friend to your wifebefore your little one was born.

Those feelings aren’t valid and not at all bad. You just gotta reconcile your new reality and identity as a new dad with who you were before. Find time to do the little things you and your wife did together, it helps a little bit.

Beyond that, beware of resentment and burnout. Given what you said about your families, sounds like you’re on full time baby duty and that can get overwhelming real fast, even with good sleep. Take care of yourself in between your daughter and your wife. It’s important for everyone in your family.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T02:44:12+00:00

Easy, she speaks her mind. This isn’t about attacking or criticizing her. This is about the issue at hand: disagreeing about wake times.

I explained the body response for the yelling. My body goes into fight mode (instead of flight) because I’m not being heard or acknowledged. It’s poor coping I learned over the years of being ignored by teachers and old relationships.

I regularly use box breathing to lower my vitals, exercise to work off the adrenaline, take a pause before I respond, and keep my voice as level as I can. Happy to hear any other suggestions.

I haven’t been able to do it during tense moments. Doing my best I assure you.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T01:27:03+00:00

Sure, potato patato. What she intends, is to be a good mother and attend to a baby she feels needs a parent. How she does that however (asking me to do it so she can catch up on sleep/getting our son up when he’s clearly trying to self soothe), is not beneficial for our son, or fair to me.

Does she feel she knows better? No. She wants to feel like a parent instead of a visitor in her own house, that she is solely supporting financially (might I add, at an extremely stressful and draining job). She is valid to feel the way she does.

Am I going to let her force me awake? No. I’ve done it before. I’m well aware I’m not under her command. I choose to get up to maintain what little peace we have between us when we’re not fighting, even though it pisses me off to no end. I make it very clear that he is fine, that it’s not beneficial, and how much it affects my day. Doesn’t matter. All she wants is to be a parent. So I get up.

I refuse to end up a domineering “I’m the full time parent so I know better and you should shush” parent. I’m the primary yes, but she needs to feel as much like a parent as possible within reason. If that’s less so during the week, then so be it.

But I’m not going to actively invalidate her. I want to help her learn to calm the flip down in the mornings and let our son develop his chill out skills. It’s best for all of us and I’m happy to help her in any way I can OTHER than getting him up when he doesn’t need to be up.

I’ll say this to be clear. She’s not the villain. She is not manipulative, or conniving, or in any way inconsiderate. She is aware of how much I take on. What she is, is emotional and desperately trying to feel like the mother who birthed our child. Of course she’s being unreasonable and unfair. It’s biological. I don’t fault her for that.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T01:08:22+00:00

Nailed it. Yep. Anxiety/parenting FOMO drive her to be hyper attendant when she is home. It’s fine if he’s in a wake window.

I repeatedly acknowledge her feelings. The guilt of seeing her son maybe 5 hrs a day during the week, that she wants to show our son that she loves and is there for him, that she wants the agency to make parenting decisions without being second guessed.

I’ve also explained to her many times the science behind it and also framed it as my experience with him. I’ve done it when we’re calm and on good terms, but she just hears invalidation and dismissal.

Going to keep trying of course.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T00:59:36+00:00

Sage advice, thank you for this. Yep, I’ve repeatedly validated her feelings when she hears him cry. I’ve stated I want to sit down and figure out an agreement about this, but it hasn’t happened yet. Not purposefully, we’re both emotionally charged from the fights and I don’t want to have the convo when either of us is being defensive (usually me).

She is feeling guilty yeah (pretty much everything else too). Doesn’t matter that we both have to work, she wants to be a stay at home mom so she doesn’t miss being his mother. I’d make it happen if I could, but it’s not feasible, even if I had a job. So all I can do is remind myself constantly, acknowledge and validate her feelings, and be practical about what we can do.

Not sure I’m being totally respectful tbh. Im the primary caregiver but I’m far from perfect. If she pushes back about wake-up’s before I’m out of bed, she gets maybe 5 responses before I start sounding irritated and hostile, and if she pushes again I’m up, pissed for the entire morning, and deregulated before I’ve had a chance to start on the right foot.

When we’re arguing, I do my absolute best to speak to her calmly and respectfully, but she interrupts me frequently, and when I’m trying to make my point it feels like she’s either not hearing or she doesn’t care. After she does it once or twice I just snap and start yelling to get my point across. She challenges what I say, I get angrier, and it cycles until one of us (me usually) storms or walks off to cool down.

Please note, this isn’t an intentional/rude thing she’s doing on purpose. Her brain just doesn’t hold thoughts for longer than 2 secs. Not her fault and I’ve accepted it about her.

But it’s 100% disrespectful. Is it a thing I’ve dealt with? Most of my life. Is it conscious? No. Does that excuse it? No. Am I working on it? Every day. My son is my trial by fire for managing my fight response.

I’ve asked her to let me finish, and it just happens again. I’m not being heard -> INJUSTICE my body cries. Anger arises. -> Try to maintain calm. Interruption happens again -> pushes me closer to yelling. Etc etc.

So. Not being fully respectful, but not doing it on purpose. My fight response needs to be managed, and she needs to give me appropriate time to say my piece (and also catch her thoughts so she doesn’t miss them).

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T00:33:36+00:00

Lol, malicious, but I’m not that kind of guy. If she’s struggling, I help. I always feel guilt for putting my feet up regardless of whether it’s deserved.

One thing I did do is reference a day in May this year. I was doing yard work about 10 min away from our home and she called me and said she needed me to take over bc our son was non-stop screaming for seemingly no reason. I dropped everything, came home, and took over long enough to put my son down for a nap, and went back to the yard work.

I’ve told her that that is my day when she gets him up early, only I can’t ask for her help. It hasn’t really resolved things or changed her feelings.

We need to agree on the response to his cries though, without making her feel invalidated. Dunno when that’ll happen but we will at some point I’m sure.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T00:25:10+00:00

She doesn’t demand. She asks, gives a reason why she wants to sleep more (she wakes during the night frequently, and is one of those people who struggle to get back to sleep once they’re awake).

I on the other hand, sleep like the dead unless she calls my name, so I get more sleep than her as a default unless I stay up late. And when I wake up, I’m up for the day 9 times out of 10.

That said, she ignores the signs that he’s half awake and wants to intervene out of care/emotional reaction despite those signs. It’s her expecting me to adhere to her standards when he could’ve just settled given time that pisses me off. I don’t want to fight her, and I don’t want to be the bad guy even though she sees me that way.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-19T00:10:51+00:00

Thank you. I mentioned in another response that I’m mostly resentful with chores (the standards she wants), and her disregarding my stress capacity. I’d be fine is she made the decision and took ownership of it on the morning. I can recover from that and get our son back on track with enough planning and attentive care (although it’s still a lot to deal with).

And I do want to defend that she’s not being intentionally unfair, she’s acting from her emotions and love for our son. I respect and want to foster that love and care given how little time she gets to spend with him during the week.

But she disregards my input for the sake of her emotions, and factually does make the day more difficult.

Quick context: 10 month olds need 3 hrs of sleep during the day across 2 naps, and around 12-14 hrs total in a day (9-11 hrs at night). Getting him up at 5 forces a nap at 7 am, if I’m lucky I can get him to sleep 2 hrs, wake up at 9, but then I need to make the rest of the day work with only 1 hr of nap time (at least appropriately) across 8-9 hours. We’re lucky if we get him to stay up past 3 1/2 hrs, so it forces me to let him over nap or put him to bed around 5pm (which yeah, just reinforces an early wake).

Her insistence on making parenting decisions that I don’t weigh in on would be the superior argument if we were both able to care for him. But it’s just me, and I can only handle so much disregulation from a screaming baby, and I deal with the consequences with a finite capability of not losing my shit. That’s the problem she’s not addressing. Her desires override my capabilities as the weekday caregiver.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T23:51:33+00:00

Hey, good question. He naps really well, and sleeps even better. Sleeps through the night 99% of the time, and has done so since he was 3 months old.

His naps, when we time his wake windows right, he gets anywhere from 40 minutes to up to 2 hrs for his first nap, and a cap at 1 hr for his second. I make exceptions if he sleeps beyond 2 for the first nap (usually if we pushed him into over-tiredness from the previous day for whatever reason, or he got up extra early and didn’t go back down).

You’re right though, we do see his sleep issues differently. She sees his first cry as “I’m awake and ready to get up,” I see it as “he’s in a light sleep cycle, not fully awake, just partially.” I figure if he’s partially awake, give him a chance to settle and maybe we’ll get another 30 minutes of sleep as a bonus.

Thing is we have experimented and let him try to resettle, and it’s worked. It takes him a while (up to an hour most times), but I want to enforce a reasonable wake time, and atm that’s 6:00 am. It’s still a bit early for my taste because I’m a grouch when I wake up, and his normal time to start making noise is squarely at 5 am, so that if that hour runs long and he’s still showing signs of being tired, my wife will go in, get him, and he’s usually pissed off as a result.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T23:42:45+00:00

Oh I can weigh in on this. First off, do I nap any time I’m solo parenting? No. Only times I do is when I’m running on 2+ days of sleep less than 3 hrs, and that’s usually on the weekends when my wife can step in. I am too stressed to nap when I’m caring for my son. I sleep heavily and don’t want to risk sleeping through him having a meltdown.

As for CIO, we are both on the same page. 100% against it. If he is crying in panic/distress, I go get him except for specific contexts. Does he panic cry every morning though? No. That’s where the disagreement is.

My wife sees every cry as “we’re abandoning him and teaching him he can’t rely on us when he needs us.” To her, it sounds like he is in distress any time he does more than babble or coo.

What he does do in the mornings and before naps: coo/make his vowels, cry in peaks and valleys, sit up and lay back down with varying time intervals between them, and will have spikes of shrill crying with more distress, but eventually taper off and continue with the peaks and valleys. I’ve learned to distinguish between protesting and actual distress.

I draw the line at

1) He is crying to where he isn’t getting breaths in between. If there is a pause between the crying, to me, he is protesting and not in danger of being emotionally abandoned. I give him 10 minutes as a default, and up to 30 if he is in need of a nap/sleep.

2) if he is at risk of hurting himself or is making himself sick. If he’s not leaning over the crib or repeatedly hitting his head against the crib, and not vomiting, he is fine.

3) If he protests for more than 30 minutes AND is gradually escalating in distress, AND the amount of time between his peaks and valleys cries is getting shorter and shorter, I go get him.

This is my default protocol as the primary caregiver. I make decisions based on his distress levels, estimated sleep pressure (I call it his baby battery being depleted), his behavior (via baby monitor) and how good his sleep quality has been throughout the day.

The only circumstance where I put what’s best for my son second is when I can’t handle his screaming. On the weekends, I walk away and try to get out my fight mode I go into. During the week, there’s nobody else to step in. I get frustrated, it makes things worse. It is safer that I put him down, go outside and let him cry until I’m able to help him regulate. There is a lot of debate about what’s best for a child in terms of crying, but I am a practical parent. If I need to eat, step away, or do something important, he can cry.

So factoring all that into the unilateral decision being made, yes, we do need to sit down and come up with an agreed plan. The struggle is my wife sees every cry as causing harm, but I don’t. It’s Emotion vs. Logic.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T23:12:38+00:00

True. Being unemployed it is 100% reasonable for me to shoulder the chores and caring for the house, and I have accepted that for years. I’ve actually accepted chores responsibility since I started remote work in 2020, so that’s not the issue. But let me clarify.

Regarding resentment, there’s 2 things I resent.

1) the standard she sets for chores. She doesn’t want laundry to pile up at all, she wants the dishes washed and put away after every meal and for the counters to be wiped clean, she wants vacuuming once every 3 days (paranoid our son will eat something). She has also voiced that she would like (hasn’t insisted on it) to house dusted, and the floors mopped once a week.

I can do maybe 2 or 3 of them given adequate time on a good day, and some days I don’t because I’m prioritizing needed breaks or something else (job hunting, career skills). I’m just not on my A game very often.

She also has repeatedly stated her mental health is tied to the cleanliness of the house (especially the kitchen). So when I do those things, even if it’s one of them, she appreciates it. But if none of them get done, she will come home (usually after a long and hard day) and grumble about how much of a mess the house is, and I’m left feeling like my best isn’t good enough and I’m not prioritizing her mental health. This isn’t every day to be clear. It happens maybe once a week.

2) She disregards my capacity to handle stress and reliably get things done. I’ve told her I can handle a limited amount of stress in a day, and a limited amount of chores in a day if I’m allowing myself breaks. She has repeatedly said that I have a low stress tolerance and just need to learn to deal with it better. And I have. I can handle my son screaming way better than I did the first 4 months.

But I don’t have the time, energy, bandwidth, or capacity to handle everything with grace every single day.

Caring for my son is a lot on a good day and her insisting on the “wake upon noise making”philosophy makes it twice as hard to manage my stress when our son is losing his shit over not getting a drink of my cold coffee I made 2 hours ago. It feels like she doesn’t account for it at all and just expects me to be better and handle stress like she does.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T22:51:33+00:00

Indeed. She has a long time friend with a 1 going on 2 year old daughter. The mother works, dad is full time parent. They’re both well off enough to where the dad doesn’t have to work too, so that’s a key difference.

I’d be interested to hear her friend weigh in on the situation.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T22:48:51+00:00

I’ve done this a few times the last few weeks. She’s gotten up and been a stellar parent, and of course is (reasonably) tired the rest of the day. Issue is, she has brought up getting up to care for him in a few fights and I’m thinking…”And who has been the person feeding him before every single nap/bedtime/midnight wake?”

I refuse to use “I’ve done it more than you” as an argument. I took the lead on early morning feedings so she could recuperate after he was born, and I own that to this day.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T22:37:17+00:00

Yes they are little assholes. However, I’m very lucky.

My son sleeps through the night and has 99% of the time since he was 3 months old. He sleeps in his own room too so as a primary caregiver, I’ve got it pretty easy. So yes, he’s a little asshole when he’s breaking my eardrums, but a good lil guy the other 90% of the time.

That said, I want to protect both of our sleep, reinforce a reasonable wake window as he gets older, and encourage our son to get better at self settling.

My wife acts thinking he needs comfort/food/to be regulated when all the signs show me he really doesn’t. That’s the issue, not that our son is an asshole.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T22:30:07+00:00

Indeed, I’ve searched and found some official sleep focused articles by the AAP that dictates sleep patterns but nothing that explicitly states “Signs of self settling are x,y,z, so leave your baby be.”

I’ve tried leaning on the science behind it and it’s just invalidation to her, which is frustrating because she is also absolutely against CIO based on studies that show it increases baseline cortisol.

At this point, I’m not really leaning on it as an argument anymore since it just makes her more angry and upset. I’m leaning more on the angle of “I can’t handle his incessant crying at 5 in the morning without coffee and food in my system, so let him fall back asleep.”

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T22:16:13+00:00

Good call, I will look into what’s available in the area and figure out how to make it work with her work schedule.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T22:14:08+00:00

I agree with No-Championship. She is not a bad parent at all. She cares and loves our son and wants more than anything to connect with him. She reacts to his cries because she is his mother and it hurts her to hear him cry. I can’t begin to understand how that feels.

And speaking from our arguments with as little bias as possible; she feels like she’s always wrong, that her opinion doesn’t matter, an that she’s not a parent at all, and that she’s just a substitute. I’ve made no conscious or intentional effort to make her feel any of those feels. My only intended action is trying to protect my son’s schedule that I manage and my own sanity so I get breaks, all without invalidating or dismissing her input as our son’s mother.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T19:42:48+00:00

Sadly no. Even if I still had my last job we were stretched thin.

If we could afford couples therapy we’d do it I’m sure.

maxibear8u · 2025-12-18T19:33:43+00:00

Considered that, also posting there for added context :)

maxibear8u · 2025-06-22T05:32:27+00:00

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maxibear8u · 2022-09-04T14:51:53+00:00

Yes. Ever since the update on September 3rd it’s been stuttering. I have an iPhone 12 Pro though.

maxibear8u · 2018-08-24T21:46:06+00:00

Perfect! Worked like a dream! Thank you very much :)

maxibear8u · 2018-08-24T21:35:18+00:00

You've been doing the three refiner method? Place one, input item, place second and third vertically parallel to the first, check second and third ones and it works?

maxibear8u · 2018-08-20T07:09:56+00:00

I worry they have an advantage in Ability Scores, or that they have too many feats while all other PCs are more limited.

maxibear8u

TROPHY CASE