Who is Actually in Charge Here? Surviving the Boss Baby Phase

It was 3:14 in the morning, and I was wearing a maternity nursing tank that I definitely hadn't washed since Tuesday, staring at the glow of an iPad playing that DreamWorks movie for the hundredth time. My husband, Dave, had apparently given up on parenting at midnight and let our three-year-old, Maya, drag her blankets into the living room. She was literally marching in circles around the coffee table chanting "baby boss baby boss" while aggressively shaking a half-empty sippy cup of lukewarm milk.

Meanwhile, I was pinned to the glider, trapped under the weight of our eight-week-old son, Leo, who was currently acting out the role of the actual dictator of our household. He had just screamed for forty-five minutes because I dared to remove my nipple from his mouth for two seconds to scratch my nose.

The irony of sitting there, watching a cartoon about a suit-wearing infant taking over a family while being actively held hostage by an eight-pound infant who couldn't even hold his own neck up, wasn't lost on me. It was honestly too much. Hell.

When your toddler pledges allegiance to DreamWorks

Let's just talk about the screen time guilt for a second because I feel like I'm drowning in it constantly. Before I had two kids, I was one of those annoying smug people who was like, "Oh, my children will only play with wooden blocks and listen to NPR." Fast forward to actual motherhood, and I'm essentially a walking screen-time enabler just trying to survive until my next cup of coffee.

When Leo was born, Maya's entire world flipped upside down. My doctor, Dr. Miller, who's a saint and has seen me cry more times than my own mother, warned me about this. She said toddlers go through massive regressions when a new sibling arrives, and my god, she wasn't kidding. Maya forgot how to use the toilet, demanded to be carried everywhere, and became intensely, weirdly obsessed with the boss baby franchise.

I read somewhere—or maybe Dave told me, I honestly don't remember because my brain is mush—that the whole concept of a demanding new infant coming in and stealing all the parents' attention is deeply triggering for older siblings. So Maya watching this movie on repeat was basically her doing exposure therapy. Or at least, that's what I told myself to justify letting her watch it for three hours straight on a Tuesday while I tried to figure out how to function on two hours of broken sleep. The AAP says no screens before age two and then only high-quality educational stuff, which I guess a cartoon about corporate espionage doesn't exactly qualify as, but whatever, my doctor basically just patted my knee and told me survival is the only metric that matters right now.

Anyway, the point is, I was losing my mind.

The four-month sleep delusion

So while Maya was navigating her feelings via animated features, Leo was systematically destroying my physical health. Every night was a hostage negotiation. If you've a newborn, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You become a human pacifier, a rocking chair, a 24/7 milk buffet.

I started frantically googling how to get my baby to sleep, and the internet is just a terrifying place full of people who seem to have it all together. They kept talking about "sleep props." Have you heard this term? It makes me want to throw my phone into the ocean. The idea is that if you rock your baby to sleep, or feed them to sleep, they get used to that "prop," and when they wake up at 2 AM, they demand the prop back. Which makes sense, I guess, in a very clinical, entirely unsympathetic way.

But when I brought this up to Dr. Miller, practically begging her for permission to let him cry it out at two months old because I thought I was going to die of exhaustion, she shut it down. She explained it to me in a way that actually stuck—she said their tiny brains literally don't have the hardware for a circadian rhythm yet. Like, they don't produce the hormones that tell them day from night until they hit around four months old, so trying to force a rigid schedule on a newborn is like trying to teach a cat to speak French. It's just biology. You just have to wait it out.

Wait it out. Cool. Sure.

I think I completely abandoned cloth diapering that exact same day because I couldn't handle one more complication in my life.

If you're in the thick of it, feeling like you're drowning in laundry and sleep deprivation, just know you aren't failing, you're just in the trenches. Take a breath and explore our baby essentials if you need a little practical help to get through the day.

Buying our way to peace (or trying to)

Since I couldn't sleep train him yet, I decided to aggressively focus on the "bedtime routine" thing that every mommy blog swears by. You're supposed to do this whole calming sequence to cue their brain that it's sleep time, so you give them a bath, rub them with lotion, read a book, and put them down drowsy but magically awake, which is honestly impossible to execute without accidentally rocking them to sleep.

But the one thing that actually did help—and I mean really helped—was getting Leo's sleepwear right. My kid ran hot. Like, a tiny, furious little furnace. We had him in these thick fleece pajamas because it was winter, and he kept waking up covered in sweat and furious. I ended up switching him to the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao.

I'm not exaggerating when I say this was my favorite thing we owned for him. It's sleeveless, so I used it as a base layer under a lightweight sleep sack. The organic cotton is so incredibly soft, and because it has a tiny bit of stretch, it didn't lose its shape when I was frantically wrestling it over his head during a 3 AM diaper blowout. I ended up buying like six of them and just washing them on a constant loop. It didn't cure his sleep issues magically, but it stopped the overheating wake-ups, which bought me at least an extra hour of sleep. A victory.

Now, on the flip side, around the time he finally hit four months and we could start working on sleep independence, the teething started. Of course it did. Because the universe hates me. Dave, in a desperate late-night Amazon spiral, ordered this Panda Teether Silicone Chew Toy. It's a perfectly fine product. It's cute, the silicone is food-grade, and you can toss it in the fridge to get it cold, which is nice. But honestly? Leo was just kinda meh about it. He used it a few times, but he heavily preferred gnawing aggressively on my actual collarbone or his own fist. Every baby is different, I guess. It's easy to clean though, so it lived in my diaper bag for a year.

Making the toddler the manager

The hardest part of this whole phase wasn't actually the lack of sleep—it was the guilt. Maya was having such a hard time adjusting to not being the center of the universe. Dave and I realized that whenever she watched her favorite movie, she connected with the older brother character who was getting totally sidelined by the baby.

Dr. Miller suggested giving Maya "jobs" to make her feel important, like she was part of the management team rather than just a displaced employee. So we tried to lean into that.

We bought the Rainbow Play Gym Set, but instead of just setting it up for Leo, we wrapped it up and told Maya it was a gift for her to use to teach her brother how to play. You guys. The power trip this kid went on.

I'd lay Leo on a blanket under the wooden A-frame, and Maya would sit next to him, very seriously explaining what an elephant was and shaking the little wooden rings at him. It's a gorgeous, minimalist toy—none of those horrible flashing plastic lights that give me an immediate migraine—but the real beauty of it was that it gave Maya a sense of control. She was the boss of playtime. And more importantly? It gave me exactly four to seven minutes of uninterrupted time to drink my coffee while it was still hot. Worth its weight in gold. ALL CAPS WORTH IT.

The light at the end of the tunnel

Look, the baby phase where they dictate your every move is brutal. It just is. You spend half your time wondering if you're ruining your oldest child's life and the other half praying to a god you haven't spoken to since college that the baby will sleep for just two uninterrupted hours.

But then, slowly, the fog lifts. The circadian rhythms kick in. The older sibling realizes the baby is honestly kinda fun to make faces at. You stop wearing the same nursing tank for four days straight.

Leo is four now, and Maya is seven. They still fight like feral cats over the TV remote, but the other day I caught them huddled under a blanket on the couch, laughing hysterically at some cartoon, perfectly content in each other's company. I just stood in the doorway holding my coffee, feeling this overwhelming wave of relief.

We survived. You will too.

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Messy questions about this whole phase