I'm not at all a "kid person", and it's kind of amazing how little I knew about babies before having one. I'd say that despite this, overall everything's felt p

I'm not at all a "kid person", and it's kind of amazing how little I knew about babies before having one. I'd say that despite this, overall everything's felt pretty ok most of the time, and I quite like the kid and really enjoy spending time together. If you can, try not to worry too much and roll with the punches. The first 3-4 months involved the least amount of sleep, especially for my partner, who was breastfeeding. Babies that young need to eat every ~3h, but what they don't tell you is that they can take 30-45m to eat, so really it's ~2h at a time that you get between feedings, and in that you need to try to do basic taking-care-of-yourself stuff plus sleep. Getting some help, if you can manage that (whether family or paid) can be really helpful, especially once you can do a feeding or two with saved milk or formula, letting the other person/both of you sleep for longer stretches. We moved our kid to the room next to ours about a month in, though with the doors open, and that made it a bit easier to sleep too (for the first few months they always cry when they wake up, so you instantly know when something's up, but you don't need to lie awake listening to every weird noise, and they make plenty of those). Hopefully your workplace gives you most of this time off -- there's a reason 12 weeks should be the absolute minimum parental leave. After ~4 months, well, I'm a very strong believer in sleep training as soon as you think the kid can handle it. Ours cried on an off for a couple of hours the first night (but not in distress, just complaining; by that point you learn to recognize the difference), ~10m the second, and has been sleeping ~12 hours a night (7-7) since then (been waking up every 3 hours to eat beforehand). Every kid's different, but based on my friend circle, while the exact sleep schedule differs, this does not seem particularly rare. We also hired a nanny because both of us had to go back to work, and that's further freed up our time -- now the kid wakes up with us at 7, the nanny comes at 8-9, stays until 5-6 (depending on our schedules), and then it's just the family until bedtime. Once the kid starts sleeping through the night, you start catching up on sleep too, and any time they're asleep is your own. Maybe you have to do a bit more cooking or washing up, and certainly there's more on your mind, but mine's almost 2 and at least up to this point, I don't feel that I've had to "give up" hobbies, nor that I'm not as good a developer. And I get plenty of sleep.