Welcome in the world of exhausted parents! The most important thing first: The great news is while right now you can't really see it, it **will get better**. What you're going through right now won't last.

>Can you suggest some ways to carv out some free time for ourselves during the day

   1. **Take turns**: You'll have to live with the change the baby brings to your routine. Your activities as a couple *will* become significantly less frequent (I was about to write "nonexistent" but that might be overdoing it). But that doesn't mean each of you can't take some time off every other day. For example, give each other a free evening once or twice a week. Go drink a beer with a friend, get some more sleep, go running, do something for yourself with that time (maybe just an hour).

   1. **Stop sweating the small stuff**: Lots of things aren't all that important right now. For example, if the garden grows over because nobody mows it, or if dust collects because you only vacuum half as much as before, or if dirty dishes collect for a day or two before you wash them, it doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things. So drop doing things that aren't absolutely necessary (and I don't mean just household work -- maybe step back your work schedule too if that's possible). It won't be for long -- you can pick up speed again in six months or in a year.

   1. Try introducing **feeding your baby with a bottle** if you don't already. It might not work, or not reliably, but once it does, feeding becomes independent from having your partner present. Also, sometimes formula instead of mother's milk will make baby's hunger go away for a bit longer periods of time.

   1. **Simplify taking care of your baby**: With our first baby, we tried to do everything exactly right. We measured the temperature of the bottle with a thermometer. We checked and rechecked and discussed everything we did because we weren't sure it was the right thing to do. Turns out they don't die if you get a few things wrong, as long as you get the important stuff right (**never ever shake them in a fit of anger**, for example, but don't worry if baby prefers to sleep on it's back, or it's stomach, or in whatever position -- there's no need to put it back in the "right" position every ten minutes, etc). All this fussing took an incessant amount of time. *Then our twins came along*, and we no longer had the luxury of spending all this time worrying about whether we did things the "right" way. Guess what: They all turned out fine.

But in the end, there is no way around the fact that babies take an incredible amount of time, and some even more than others (our first one was a screamer - he did little besides screaming in his waking hours for the first seven months, took forever to fall asleep and never slept more than two hours at a time). So I'm back to my first sentence: **It won't last**. You only have to survive a few months, and things will get much easier. In the meantime, you'll grow as a person. At the end of it, you'll pity all the people who never had a baby and still don't understand what it means to be responsible for another human being.