This may be shorter than my other advice posts, actually.
Disclaimer: I have no other qualification to write this than being the somewhat analytical mother of one (1) six month old baby. It’s also likely to be more useful for a relatively wealthy heterosexual couple… like everything is. Damn.
First and most important thing regardless of what you do, the baby will probably get easier. I was under the impression somehow that any change in baby parenting was due to experience on the part of the parents. Which was a crucial mistake, because it meant from about the time I could stand up well (I bled a lot immediately after birth, so that sort of thing didn’t come easy) I was trying to get out and about. For practice, you know. Have to face those demons sooner or later.
If all we’d done for the first four weeks was leave the house for doctor’s appointments (which frankly is bloody difficult enough), that still would have been OK and he still would have got easier. That said, it was nice to be confident enough to take him to high tea at five weeks old. (He lay in my lap and stared at the ceiling fans and the staff merrily chirped “oh gosh, I didn’t even see him down there” while they poured boiling water out of huge jugs. Shiver. But it was good.)
Well, there’s perhaps one exception. If you want to do babywearing (using carriers/wraps/slings), it seems to be a good idea to start it as early as possible. For one thing, the baby weighs the least it is ever going to weigh at that time, and will gain something in the realm of three kilos over the first three months, which for lighter babies means doubling its birth weight. It’s good to acclimatise to the weight. For another thing, most babies that enjoy this (and which have a choice, in many cultures it’s just how babies are transported) seem to have been introduced to it while very young. (For the record, Vincent always hated a wrap… until we started to walk. Then he went happily to sleep.)
Speaking of easy the first couple of weeks might not be that hard. Especially relevant to anyone who has read Kaz Cooke’s Kidwrangling, which, among other things, quotes a mothercraft nurse who nearly gave up on mothering at about day four, and a lot of mothers who cried uncontrollably, or wanted to harm the baby and so on. Don’t get me wrong. The first five or six weeks before the Vincent had even one longer sleep in the entire cycle, where he needed his nappy changed every time he woke up (something like 10 or 12 times in a 24 hour period), where feeding was painful and I got sick and so on, they were hard. And postnatal depression is real and relatively common. But we found the newborn experience manageably hard, not a tunnel of despair and hopelessness. (Kind of like how I found labour extremely painful but not… unimaginably painful. It was just a high level of normal pain. Likewise, newborn parenting was a high level of normal hard work.) And there were plenty of happy bits with some overtired crying stints.
Having other adults around is good. We had something on the order of seven or eight people around for lunch on various days, and it was quite nice. Vincent would sleep or feed, we’d talk about… HTTP proxying, I think. Your mileage may vary.
But much more crucial was the forty or so days of parental and annual leave that Andrew took. I definitely recommend a if you have leave, use it approach. It would have really sucked to be alone with Vincent after two weeks, or no weeks. Plus, in man-woman couples where the man is going to go back to fulltime work, which is of course the majority case, this gets him in on the ground floor of baby care. It’s going to be harder if he is going to start baby care later, once the mother has learned all the baby’s moods, established routines (I don’t even mean deliberately, just that you get used to doing stuff whatever way) etc etc and is thus the baby expert.
My prenatal classes suggested scheduling “no talking about the baby” times in your household, but we didn’t need to. We kept talking about other stuff anyway. But there’s that tip if you want it. I mentioned our privately run prenatal classes with Renee Adair before I think. An expensive luxury, but we were really happy with it, probably particularly for the half of it devoted to newborn parenting.