New Baby

Ah, parenting… Don’t do it! Just kidding, being a parent is stressful, emotionally and physically but it is also the most rewarding experience in life. It is full of fear, tears and laughter. There are many restless periods, feedings at all hours of the night, a million diapers and checking on the baby every 15 minutes to make sure he or she is still breathing, a fear many parents have with a new baby. (I remember that fear with all three of my babies.) That fear subsides after a while, mostly because you are so exhausted. There will be days that you say to your self “why did I have kids?” and at the end of those days you’ll know why.

With a new baby any little noise from the crib you fly out of your bed, to the crib and see that the baby was just moving around, and has gone back to sleep. You get supersonic hearing when you give birth. Being so tired, you crawl back into bed knowing that it will be ok to sleep and the baby will be fine. In no time at all there is a little cry. Groggy, you stumble around getting the baby ready for feeding and a fresh diaper, it’s around 2am and you have been repeating the same process all day and know it very well even half asleep.

Even if you have read every parenting book ever written, you will have first hand learning experiences, some great and some not so great. You will get a lot of other parents and non-parents telling you how you should handle things. Trying some of the suggestions may be helpful but not every bit of advice you get is good. You will learn what works and what doesn’t, have some confidence.

Sleeping when the baby does is a good idea, if you have the time and if this is the first baby. If you have other kids, the most you could hope for is an hour nap. If you get a chance to snooze, unplugging the phone will increase your chances of getting some sleep, it will most likely ring as soon as you start to doze off. You will get a chance to get some well needed sleep, because you just don’t know when that chance will come.

It is amazing how many diapers a little person can go through. A lot of the time you’ll get a fresh diaper on and it will need changing again as soon as you get finished buttoning the sleeper with ten snaps. There will be a lot of checking to see if the diaper is in need of changing, and don’t be surprised when you do check that there is a surprise and it’s now on your finger. You’ll find your favorite brand of diapers by trying all of them, there will be some you like and some you don’t. My experience has been they all leak if the mess hits the right spot or you have a really wiggly baby. The diaper will most likely leak during the worst possible time, and you didn’t bring extra clothes because you weren’t going to be gone that long. Having a smelly mess can be embarrassing but as the saying goes, it happens. Just hope you get home soon and keep on smiling no matter what kind of looks you get, they probably never had any kids anyway.