Lack of sleep? Baby on your brain all the time? Smell like milk and newborn baby poop? Here’s a quick pitstop for your reading pleasure.
I have a 6 week old newborn baby in my room and it’s already 11.30pm and I expect him to be up for his midnight feed in 30 minutes. Then depending on what his current physiology is like at this age, he will get up every 1 to 2 hours to eat until morning.
Some nights, though rare (at least 3-4 times since he was born), he gave us 3 hours.
Parents know how difficult it can be in the first weeks of a newborn’s life.
And even though this is my fourth child and I have a long maternity leave of 3 months, it is still challenging for me and my husband to get through these days.
Especially when I’m alone with her, and not to mention I’m exclusively breastfeeding.
To be fair, it’s been 6 years since I last did this, and I’m ‘older’ now.
However, as she completes her 45th day of life, my mind has created a simple wheel of needs for her and I think it can be useful as a quick guide on those days when parents are not at their best due to lack of sleep and recovery (for mothers) and our brain may not be functioning at its normal optimized state.
I asked ChatGPT to create a basic picture of the newborn’s needs with the following prompts:
Create a wheel of newborn needs with factors including tired (at bedtime), hungry, overexcited, gassy (ready for farts and burps/spit up), wet nappy, discomfort (diaper rash, too hot, too cold) and unknown or multifactorial factors yet to be revealed.’
Here it is.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
It did a great job of creating the image and more importantly, saved me time from painting it myself.
Now I have a visual of what I had in mind.
And you can use it, if you want and if you think it helps.
That is if you are a parent of a newborn and dedicate most of your days and nights to keeping them safe, healthy and thriving.
And to keep our conscience in check when they grow into little babies of their own.
Before I finish this post, a quick shout out ‘sleep’.
I took you for granted, and I miss you. It is now very broken, sleep that, I want so a good 5-6 hours uninterrupted stretch.
And now to go to bed I watch the night watch, just before midnight.
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This post was Previously published at medium.com.
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Photo credit: Mini Zhu at Unsplash
