Tag: newborn

What I’d do differently

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”.)

  1. 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).
  2. got a new GP before he arrived
  3. put his name down for childcare before he arrived
  4. 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)
  5. 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)
  6. gone straight to our current system of nappies (one-size pockets)
  7. got groceries home-delivered for at least the first six weeks of his life
  8. 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
  9. worked out the cost of daycare more clearly in advance and put the baby bonus away for it
  10. not bothered with purchasing a manual breastpump: double electric all the way baby
  11. 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.

Early parenting advice

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.