Lessons Learned in the Hospital Part Two: Your Partner Needs a Break

You can’t nurse two babies at the same time all by yourself. Not right away. Especially not if you’ve had a c-section. Until you can get up and move around, your partner will be bringing your babies to you for feedings. And even after you can get up and move around, your partner will still probably need to bring at least one of the babies to you if you are trying to nurse them together and get them on the same schedule.

This means that at every feeding, every three hours, both you and your partner will be losing sleep.

I remember with my daughter how I let her nurse on command. She set her own schedule, and if she slept for four or five hours between feedings, I slept that long, too (My grandma says, “Never wake a sleeping baby!”). And Rob could sleep even longer, because he didn’t help with feedings. He couldn’t help with feedings. He would help with diaper changes and swaddles and bounces during her periods of wakefulness, and we both got adequate amounts of broken sleep.

Things are not so pleasant with little twins who need to grow and increase their blood sugar levels. The doctors and lactation consultants set a strict 3 hour feeding schedule for the boys. If they were sleeping when it was time for a feeding, we woke them up and fed them anyway.

For me, this was exhausting but not problematic. I didn’t even have to set alarms on my phone. I would wake up right on time even if the boys were sleeping soundly. We moms just do what needs to be done for our babies.

But my sweet, sweet husband could only handle about two days of this before he became a confused zombie man from midnight to sunrise every night.

I often hear moms complain about how their husbands don’t get up to feed the babies at night. “I didn’t hear them,” is his excuse, and the moms are in disbelief. The neighbors could hear this kid screaming! the moms think. Well ladies, your husbands are being sincere. They magically become deaf from midnight to sunrise. It’s not their fault.

My husband wants to help me. He wants to be by my side every second. He wants to snuggle his babies back to sleep after every feeding. But at the 4am feeding, some grumpy monster takes over his body and glares at me for waking him up. And this monster never knows where the burp cloths are or whose diaper has already been changed.

The other night I woke Rob up for the 4 am feeding and he angrily said, “We just did this!” To which I replied, “Darling, that was three hours ago.”

So if I were to do the hospital stay over again, I would plan to have someone else take a night shift at least once in the four days we were there. I would send my husband home to get some rest and keep the monsters at bay.