When you had your first kid, how much experience had you had dealing with infants?
For example, had you babysat alot or taken care of siblings? Or was your kid the first time you ever changed a diaper?
With our’s my wife had been a nanny for over 10 years and knew them well. Still she had trouble transferring the idea that this one was hers.
None. I was terrified of the damn thing.
She got better. It took a few years, though.
I had almost no experience with babies. I had maybe changed one or two wet diapers.
I was scared to death I wouldn’t know how to tell when he was hungry or what he wanted or what to do. I was scared to pick him up for the first few days.
Somehow it all worked.
I had babysit for infant twins regularly in high school, but it was YEARS before I had a baby of my own so it seemed like a completely different lifetime. I hadn’t been around babies in ages.
I really lucked out and had a very chill baby, which was fortunate because I didn’t have any experience at all dealing with more demanding situations.
The other thing that surprised me is that I had no clue at all about what children’s characters and shows are popular. Very little from when I was a kid is still around (Sesame Street, but even that looks a lot different from when I was little). Because I wasn’t around little kids, I had no clue that things like Dora and Yo Gabba Gabba existed at all.
Zero. Had never changed a diaper. You learn quick, though!
Quite a bit. I babysat a lot in my teens, mostly adult friends’ kids, occasionally my neices and nephews. I’d never changed a newborn’s nappy before I had a newborn, but I had changed the nappies of older babies and toddlers. I felt quite comfortable looking after a baby.
Nappies really aren’t that difficult. Seeing newborn baby poo was a relief, though, odd as that sounds - it helps if the baby’s breastfed only, but it barely smells and doesn’t even happen that often, not like with babies and toddlers on solid food, which can reek to high heaven.
Plenty of babysitting, working in the nursery at church and a brother 11 years younger. I felt fully qualified.
Plenty. My mother had twins when I was 17.
Hardly any. I’d changed fewer than a dozen wet nappies in my life, and that was more than a decade in the past.
Absolutely none with infants. I’d babysat for school-aged kids about twice.
I had held babies three times in my life, all for less than five minutes. I had taken the hospital’s infant care class. That was it. I had babysat for elementary-aged children a few times.
None at all. It’s a very quick self study course, though. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ever moments of sheer terror when you realize you’re responsible for this thing and you have no idea how to to that, but it does mean that just a few hours into it, you already know a whole lot more than you did when you started.
I’d never cared for an infant before I had one. In fact, I’d barely even been in contact with any of them. It took some time after we got our daughter home from the hospital before I got up the courage to change her clothes - as it was, I kept putting the little knitted cap they gave us back on her head for a week before I got brave enough to decide she could go bare-headed.
It’s kind of amazing how quickly you learn, though. And how long the knowledge stays with you - my younger daughter just turned 21, and when I held an almost-newborn a few weeks ago, it was like it hadn’t been any time at all since the last time.