This was a dinner conversation: if I was having Vincent with foreknowledge (as opposed to having a second child) what would I do differently? (This is all stuff in reach of our current budget, not fantasy stuff like “have a nanny instead of daycare so that we don’t get sick all the time” or “buy a king sized bed” or “move to a bigger place”.)
- got a new washing machine and a car before he arrived (although, an older baby is way less trouble on public transport because they don’t constantly eat and poop, he started getting better just as we got the car).
- got a new GP before he arrived
- put his name down for childcare before he arrived
- gone to the breastfeeding class at the hospital (he was only 12 hours old, I was really tired and wired, but there wasn’t another one until I was discharged)
- not relied primarily on Kaz Cooke’s Kidwrangling for information: we don’t need two nappy buckets, and the first two weeks did not involve me calling parenting crisis lines while crying constantly (I know that can and does happen, but she portrays it as universal)
- gone straight to our current system of nappies (one-size pockets)
- got groceries home-delivered for at least the first six weeks of his life
- had him this summer (which is probably going to be cooler than average on Australia’s east coast) rather than last summer (heat records tumbling every which way): ok, that’s a bit fantastical
- worked out the cost of daycare more clearly in advance and put the baby bonus away for it
- not bothered with purchasing a manual breastpump: double electric all the way baby
- got the baby fences sooner
The most important one though was not realising how quickly babies become more manageable. I thought this happened when they stopped being babies. It turns out that in fact those first six or eight weeks are actually much harder than the months after that just in terms of the sheer amount of constant work that went into babycare. Feeding needing to happen right now OMG starving, nappy changes even more urgent than that, meltdowns after half an hour in an unfamiliar location, that was all little V stuff.
So I’d much easier on myself for the first few months, because I didn’t have to steel myself up and learn to cope in the long term with that precise situation.
Andrew added that we probably would have introduced expressing and feeding milk earlier than we did. I’m not sure. With foreknowledge that he’d adapt to a sippy cup fine, I might have done it later.