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by jtap 4802 days ago
Yes those first two months suck and every child is different. One thing that my wife and I did was that she would pump and go to bed at around 8/9 pm. I would stay up with the baby monitor and the baby was my responsibility till around 1am. If the baby got up I had to deal with it. I also gave our kid a bit of formula as the last bottle before I went to bed. The rumors were true, our child was fuller longer and slept longer. This gave my wife and I pretty close to a full night sleep.

One more thing that people will tell you is that you need to put your child on a schedule. Really, the child ends up making their own schedule, but you can influence the schedule. In the evenings pick a time that you want your kid to go to sleep, and don't let that kid out of his bedroom. Keep the lights dim and don't offer up any stimuli other than basic soothing. Hum a lullaby, really don't worry nobody can hear you. During the day don't let your child nap for longer than 2 hours. Wake them up, feed them and play with them. Start this two hour cycle every day at the same time, and don't let them sleep in. If they sleep in and don't consistently wake up every two hours they will never get on the day night sleep cycle.

We eventually got our child to sleep through the night. We put him down at 8pm every day consistently and he would sleep till around 6:30am. This all will take a bit of time, but wow is the whole family better. Well, until teething, my child just turned 1 and he his next tooth coming in is a molar. This is a whole other post.

One problem that we did have is pooping. That kid had the hardest time pooping. When you rock your kid to bed don't rock them like you see in the movies. Try a couple different positions. One that worked for us was holding them like a (American) football with their head on the outside of your elbow, and your arm and hand supporting their body.

All the books say to put your child on his back to sleep. Supposedly the statistics say that your child is more at risk of sids if they sleep on their stomach, but when we put our kid on his stomach there was a bit more pressure applied to his stomach and that pressure seemed to help. If your child is having a problem pooping say and I'll post more about it.