A friend said this to me with a toddler on her hip and a newborn in the sling: “Sleep when the baby sleeps. Which baby? And who’s doing the toddler?” The advice is kind and it was written for a house with one baby, a parent who can switch off on command, and nobody else needing anything. Most of us do not live in that house. I had a toddler and a newborn with my second and a toddler, a preschooler and a newborn with my third, and sleeping when the baby slept was a joke I told myself at two in the afternoon.
These are the rest rules that worked instead, in a real house. They are about rest rather than sleep, because rest is the thing you can actually control, and they are practical rather than inspirational, because at this stage inspiration is a nap you are not taking. Surviving the sleep fog is the companion post for the nights.
Rule 1: the twenty-minute rule
When the baby goes down, set a timer for twenty minutes and lie down, whatever else is undone. Not to sleep, necessarily: to be horizontal with your eyes shut. If sleep comes, it comes. If it does not, twenty minutes of lying down is still rest and the dishes are still there. The rule exists because without it you will stand up and do the dishes every single time.
Rule 2: the sofa shift with the toddler
With an older child, the baby’s nap is not your nap; it is the toddler’s hour. Make it a sofa hour: a film, a snack, you lying down with them beside you. The toddler gets you, you get horizontal, nobody is being entertained standing up. Call it a special thing and it becomes one.
Rule 3: the two-task nap
If you cannot rest during a nap because the undone things are shouting, pick two. Two, written down before the baby goes down. Do those, and the rest of the nap is yours. The list is what stops two tasks becoming nine.
Rule 4: the help list on the fridge
People say “let me know if I can help” and mean it, and then nothing happens because nobody knows what help is. Write a list on the fridge: hang the washing, take the toddler to the park, hold the baby for forty minutes, bring a meal, run the hoover. When someone offers, point at the list. Specific help is the only help that arrives. How to say no to visitors is the other side of that fridge.
Free · takes ten seconds
Whatever time you have today, it counts.
Tell The Window how many minutes and how many hands you have free, and it picks one small thing for you: a stretch, a shower, a page of a book, ten minutes of nothing. A jar counts them up over the week.
No email needed. Works on your phone, one-handed.
Rule 5: lower the bar on purpose
Cereal is dinner. The floor is clean enough. The outfit can be the same as yesterday if it was chosen; a rail of formulas means it still looks like a decision. Every standard you lower on purpose in the first months is an hour of rest you have bought with it, and you can raise it again in the spring. The two-minute morning is how the outfit standard stays high while the effort stays low.
Rule 6: rest is not a reward
The thing I had to unlearn three times: rest is not something you earn by finishing. There is no finishing. Rest is a part of the day like a feed is, scheduled and non-negotiable, and the house will run on it better than it runs on you running on empty. Self-care is not selfish is the long version.
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How I lay outfits out, for free.
The Postpartum Lookbook is a full set of outfits in the NennVersa style, every top opening at the front, so you can see how the guides think before you spend anything.
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Rule 7: one honest night a week
If there is anyone who can take the baby for one whole night a week, with a bottle of expressed milk or formula if that is your choice, take it. One full night in seven changes the shape of the other six. If there is nobody, then one protected four-hour stretch is the version that is possible, and it still counts.
And the rule about the rules
Some weeks none of these work and the baby does not sleep and the toddler is ill and you are upright for all of it. Those weeks are not failures of the rules; they are weeks. Rest when the week allows, and when the exhaustion stops lifting on the days it should, tell your midwife or doctor, because that is a sign of something treatable and not of anything you did wrong.
Picture goes here
A mama asleep sitting up in an armchair in the afternoon, baby asleep on her, toddler asleep on the rug with a picture book
Replace this box with the picture, then delete the box.
My friend with the toddler and the newborn wrote “sofa hour” on her fridge the next day, under a help list her mother used the following week to take the toddler to the park. Neither of those was sleeping when the baby slept. Both of them were rest, which is the thing the advice was trying to give her all along.
If the outfit is the standard you want to keep without the effort, the Year Round Capsule is two hundred outfits already decided, laid out and then worn, with three pictures of you in them on the house, and the Sunday Reset plans a week of them for free in ten minutes. The five-minute reset is the rest that fits between the rules.
Twenty minutes, the sofa hour, two tasks, the fridge list. Rest is part of the day. The focus is on you, mama.
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