Mind sharing any piece of advice that you felt particularly useful? Thank you in advance. I’m so excited!
Father of a 2.5 yr old here … Have a few friends who just had kids as well… I told them the same shpiel
- The next few months will be the toughest thing you ever go through (comparable to back to back all nighters in college, but this time it’s for a few months)… Esp if you’re working and don’t have good paternity leave. But after you get over that hump. … It gets a lot better and now you’re in the club where everyone knows what you went through because they’ve been through it too.
- If your/your partners parents are in the picture and offer to babysit. Take up the offer. Go have a date night with your partner… It’ll relieve a lot of stress
- If you live in a decent area, go for walks with the little one as often as you can. (in a bassinet/stroller obviously)
- If you’re in a western country… If you ever feel like you’re doing too little, the littlest amount of effort on your part gets much more props than the amount of effort. Just being there for your new kid and changing every 10th diaper is doing better than 60% of dads out there.
- Everyone, and I mean everyone, has amnesia about the next 6ish months. They’ll say things like “why are you so tired? I don’t understand!” Or “it wasn’t that bad when we had kids”… It was. They just blocked it out
- When the kid gets off milk, any spices yall use usually in cooking. Or just generally like that aren’t spicy. Expose it to them ASAP. It does wonders for their pallet and they’ll be less picky in a few years
- Both you and your partner are stressed. You will fight and hate each other. Don’t make any big life decisions for the next few months.
Hope this helps… Enjoy the journey.
Rereading this a few days later, a few items come to mind
2a. Date night doesn’t have to be fancy. A nice walk in a nearby park, or just a night where you can sleep/chill/watch TV together does the same as a nice dinner/drinks out on the town (and doesn’t require you to dress up). The point is that you do something non-baby related TOGETHER.
-
You’re going to get tons of advice on how to raise the kid. The only piece of advice you need is this. When you get the advice, thank the person. Run it through your personal filter. If you like it, talk it through with your partner and decide if you both like it and help to implement it.
-
You don’t know them now, but you’ll learn the “I’m hungry” vs “I’m tired” vs “I have a full diaper” cries soon. It’s ok if it takes a while.
Lovely advice and spot on about the first few months.
My 11 month old likes spicy things. I also remember from the time I spent in India that their babies eat spicy curries and love it. So you don’t need to avoid spice completely, just start slow and gauge their reaction.
Congratulations! If that kid is asleep you should be too, at least for the first few years.
I’m really sorry, but I hate this advice. If I’m sleeping when my baby is, when am I doing the laundry? having a shower? relaxing and watching TV with my wife? ect.
Agreed, “sleep when the baby sleeps” is the advice we got the most, but doesn’t really hold water.
With our first, my partner and I took turns napping or doing chores while the other was on baby duty. When the second came along, that advice was a joke, it was more like one parent per child and shower after the older one goes to sleep.
Seasonal info:
Santa Claus uses different wrapping paper then Mom and Dad use. He buys the good stuff, but after the holidays when it’s marked down. He stores it in the attic where only he can find it.
You may have ideas in mind about what kind of person they’ll be, in terms of interests, personality, etc. This can be really strong because it may come from deep subconscious wants, and you may not even realize it, but it’ll come out in your behavior. Nudging toward this activity, away from this one - that kind of thing. Be really careful with this - your kid will tell you who they are, and it can be super damaging if you don’t listen.
You can shape values, and you can show them your enthusiasm for what you think is cool, but stop short of trying to shape what they like and who they are. Accept and get excited about the things they’re into and they’ll always want to share with you and keep you involved as they get older. Enthusiasm and passion are so much more important and useful in life than liking this thing over that thing, but it can be hard to let go of your implicit ideas about their future personality.
We very much expected kind of a tomboy-ish, or at least mixed interest girl. Rough and tumble, daredevil, etc. Not at all - she is the most classically feminine, pink-loving, only-interested-in-dolls little kid you can imagine.
Around my household, our phrase was “Sleep when the baby sleeps. Work when the baby works.”
Fucking baby never worked. j/k around
