The transition from one to two kids was tough for my husband and me. My older daughter had just turned 3 when we had our second baby. The years in between having kids meant our memories of sleep deprivation with a newborn were faded, remembered as only as warm snuggles in our cozy, dimly-lit nursery. Plus, breastfeeding hadn’t worked out for me, so my husband and I really did split the newborn feeding duties 50/50. Now with two kids, my husband and I were in a one-on-one-kid-to-parent situation. I breastfed the baby, and he had to deal with our 3-year-old, who still wasn’t sleeping through the night.
During one dark trudge downstairs to the kitchen to get my older daughter her regular 4am cup of milk either before or after I’d been up feeding the newborn, we had a stroke of parenting genius. We needed to stop walking down to the kitchen at night. It was dark, it was dangerous, our 100-year-old floors creaked, and turning on the light certainly hurt our chances for easily falling back to sleep. So, we ordered a mini-fridge for our bedroom. It is the single most important thing we did for our sleep (and our marriage) during the newborn stage.
Before you picture a college dorm room fridge in our bedroom, know this was a mini-mini fridge. It fit perfectly on our nightstand and would come to save our safety and our sanity from not having to walk half-asleep downstairs to the kitchen again. We still had to prep for the upcoming night, getting my daughter’s milk cup ready or a formula-ready bottle to feed the baby before she became too fussy and woke up the house. But it worked.
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