Have a sleepwalker. Related to needing to pee. Absolutely will end up anywhere in the house, in any bucket or shelf. Or out the door. Caught her peeing in Landry buckets, on her sisters head, etc.

We have barriers to keep her on top floor. They have to be sturdy.

Moment we can get kid to pee she is instantly fully awake, confused as to how she got there and goes back to bed for the night.

We’ve leaned to sleep lightly. The moment we hear her first stirrings we swoop in and stick her on toilet.

Crazy times

Man, that's rough.

Our kid had night terrors for about a year. Just about the time the random worrying stopped happening we started getting woken up to blood-curdling screams we couldn't really do anything about.

First kid had those. Truly horrifing. Had no idea she wasn’t awake. All while talking. Faded after A year or so.

Second one went 5 years of them. Almost nightly. Gradually Shifted to sleepwalking instead. Less dramatic, but more dangerous.

Either way exact moment she pee’d it was over.

in my culture, during the last few months of pregnancy, the mother to be goes off to her mom's house. all new borns come home to a gaggle of grandmothers and aunts. and cousins. mom will not be sleep deprived. this is the village. as i got older, i had my share of baby cousins to tend and this gives mom time to recover. sleep is a major healing factor.

babies are a group effort. women need their tribe. its an old fashioned way of thinking, but i am only speaking from my lived experiences. YMMV etc. this was also a way for young girls to become familiar with babies and understand pregnancy. once you have seen a live birth and distended nipples and the bloody river of afterbirth, women have a very realistic notion of what childbirth means...its like acclimitizing before entering the death zone while climbing mt.everest. parenthood requires proper introduction before one can jump into it. exposure to other parents..usually family is better for women because one way or another, we are all going to end up with the same blooms and warts as our grandmothers anyways. might as well understand the terrain before entering it. #female perspective.

as far as men are concerned..all i can say is make sure you have a way to earn and support your child. because babies are expensive. how do you prove that you are worthy of being a father? by being a provider, of course. one can always hire a night nanny. but you still need the means to support a child.

I can relate to the anxiety/firmware thing. I had never really experienced that sort of generalized anxiety before, but the weird thing for me was that it was preverbal. So I couldn't even put it into terms like "buried/lost somewhere"; it was more like a feeling. Like the feeling you would get in your stomach if you showed up to an important class one day completely unprepared for a pop quiz. Just that feeling, constantly. Luckily for me it was directly correlated with (lack of) sleep, so once that got better the feeling went away.