Wife having trouble with 2 month old

Our baby is 9 weeks old. I am back at work and my wife is still on maternity leave. My wife is struggling with our baby's lack of sleeping. His typical night is 4 hours, then wake and feed, 3 hrs, then wake and feed, 2 hrs then wake and feed, another hour of sleep, then its morning. We have been fine with this so far. The last 3 nights, we have gotten a few 5 hr stints mixed in. Last night, it took 2 hrs to put him down to sleep (typically it's a half hour), and he was up from 2-5am, writhing and crying every time we put him down, not sleeping for more than a half hour, until finally sleeping 530-8am. Typically, when he wakes, we leave him until he cries, then pick him up and comfort him until his eyelids droop and he gets drowsy, then put him back down to sleep. We do this as often as we need to until he sleeps. About 1-2 wks ago, he started getting very fussy during the days and we realized we should only let him be awake for 60-75 min and then force him down for a nap. And it worked, for the most part. He was overtired and forcing him to sleep during the day was greatly reducing his fussy-ness and helping his sleep at night too. The last few days, he has been very fussy during the day. We can only keep him occupied for about 10 min before he starts crying. The type of crying is that of being overtired, or hungry. My wife is trying to force him down for naps throughout the day, like we have been doing, but he is resisting it much more than usual. My wife called me at work today, extremely upset. She was crying to the point where I could barely understand what she was saying. Her principle complaints are: "He's such a bad sleeper! Why do we have to have such a bad sleeper?!" "I have no one to text! No one else is going through this!" "I can't handle this anymore! I don't know what to do!" To which my responses are: "We don't have a bad sleeper. He sleeps at least half of every night, usually more. We read plenty of stories on the internet of people having worse sleepers. He is probably average." "Other people are going through this. They just aren't going to tell you the really hard times. They aren't going to reveal to you that they were also having a nervous breakdown over the baby who cried all day. No one can really help us but us. The only response we are going to get from people is 'it will get better' and that is just going to piss you off again. There is no magic answer." "Make sure he is fed, change his diaper, then put him down and walk away. If you are losing it, you need to walk away from him. Sometimes he is just going to have to cry." I'm not looking so much for help on his sleeping habits (although that is welcome) but for help in getting my wife to understand what I am telling her. She has been having what I call a borderline mental breakdown (as described above) pretty much once a week at this point (she has always been emotional like this, though maybe not this often, so I don't suspect PPD). She acts (and speaks) like every day is the worst day, it will never get better, the world has it out for us. When she is upset, she pulls in unrelated things, things she doesn't have control over or are even irrelevant, which ends up making her more upset. I am very angry with her that she can't keep it together, that she doesn't know when to put him down and walk away and try to get back her sanity, that she doesn't focus on the things we talk about when it gets tough, that she instead focuses on stuff we can't do anything about, that nothing I say can console her. But I try as hard as I can to be supportive and not show my anger. Today I showed zero anger when she called me. The problem is, the questions she is asking, there are no answers to. This only gets better with time, and that isn't a good enough answer for her right now. All that being said, let's not get it twisted, this is way harder on her than it is on me, since she is breast feeding and avoids pumping and formula as hard as she can (which limits my ability to help). I am about to go home and suggest to her that I should take the next two weeks off, stay home with him, and she should go back to work earlier than planned. I won't be able to respond to comments and questions as quickly as I would like to, since I am at work and wrote this up on my lunch break. I also don't want to spend hours tonight diddling on my phone when I am trying to help my wife. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2OhpWpc