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Originally Posted by Scroopy Noopers
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There is an oasis called the couch. Legend has it that spouses would punish other spouses by demanding they sleep there.
But being serious, for your situation, you may need to try and teach yourself a habit akin to snoozing an alarm. Basically, you have to teach yourself to be aware at the first whine, but not to have your body jump to attention and raring to go until the fourth to fifth whine/cry. Otherwise, you might start burning too much energy on false alarms. You might not be able to learn to fight those instincts until you're completely exhausted though and some babies are all or nothing screamers.
Another method is also to get far enough that you cannot hear the sound. During some sleep regression phases/temporary busy time at work, my wife and I slept in separate rooms. That way both of us would not be immediately woken up by the child's cries. My wife and I did this when we had our second. Loosely, I'd do nights for the baby Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; intercept our older one if he tried to run to our room plus drive our older one to day home. My wife would do nights Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and prep our older one for day home in the morning. That way I'd be a little more "functional" for work and we'd share the responsibilities as equal as possible without burning the candle at both ends. Not all parents think this set up was fair though, but for my wife and I, it was a set up we slapped together that seemed survivable.
Also, try out some white noise. The best cost effective method is an Echo dot you can pre-load with white noise, car ride, pink noise, lullaby sounds, ocean waves etc. If Amazon is literally using it to listen in on you, they can join in your misery and listen to the screams of children for a few months.
If this is your first child, do not give up any opportunities to take shifts for the baby and get rest/self care. With 2 kids, it's essentially impossible without asking for external help. The transition from 0-1 kids is basically the jet lag that never goes away and the work out that never ends. 1-2 kids was basically, "LOL, let's change the game difficulty from normal mode to nightmare. We'll skip hard."
I love my kids to death, but holy crap do lots of people lie or withhold information about the difficulty level when you inquire about it before certain amount of kids. I remember when my second was almost born. The amount of parents who were ominous and like, "Oh, it's your second? Good luuuuuck." Eff those people. I have lots of candor in telling new parents about the difficulties that arise because IMO the heads up to mentally prepare would have been a god send. Knowing the difference between normal (basically everything), panic calling early start help line (Maybe the occasional thing) and driving to the children's hospital immediately (basically high fevers and rashes/hives only) would have been nice.
You may laugh, but I remember my wife and I waking up in a panic realizing our several month old kid (our first) had not cried for 6 hours. After the normal questions about fever etc. Early start helpline asking us to wake the baby, feed the baby, put the baby back to sleep, get some rest and celebrate our baby starting to sleep longer periods during the night when we had more energy.
