Don’t feed them kiwi fruit, them seeds stick to their butts like baked on bird poop on a car boot!
You can never ever have enough photos.
Don’t feel guilty about disposable nappies, I have seen granola munching, Prius driving greenies last about 3 weeks on cloth before relenting.
Don’t stress and obsess about if they are getting enough milk or not if you are exclusively breastfeeding. If they are following that normal growth curve, its all good. Also, don’t weigh them every single day like I did.
Like someone else said… if for some reason you have to switch to formula, it is fine. You haven’t failed as a parent.
There will a few poop explosions no matter how efficient you get at putting that diaper on.
Depending on your baby, feeding on demand, especially at night, is fine.
As much as you can, sleep when the baby sleeps.
Trust your partner or other caregivers and let go and take some time to yourself when it’s being offered.
*The TV is a magical device that can give you enough time to shower or put away laundry.
*Babycarriers are great, if you can find a comfortable one- happy baby, and parents with free hands.
*The amount of sleep you can do without is amazing.
*Takeout is worth it some nights, even if you were going to cook a nutritionally balanced healthy meal.
Kissing babies can be the most absorbing activity in the world. A couple of days ago I was holding my babies, and Ithink* I was supposed to pay attention to something else, but I started kissing their little fuzzy heads and didn’t stop for about a minute.
*Some kids are crappy sleepers. Many don’t consolidate their naps into anything longer than twenty minutes until they’re eight or ten months old.
Congratulations! The first few months are so full of change that it’s unbelievable. Enjoy!
I never expected that I’d have to eat many of my meals in a room separated from my 20-month-old by a locked gate. If I try to just eat at the dining room table, and he’s in the same half of the house, he’ll climb up on the table and steal my food and drink as I’m eating it.
My mother would always introduce me as her baby (youngest of 4). She did this when I brought my newborn daughter to visit.
She (to friend): “And this is my baby, AWB.”
Me: “I’m 428 months old!”
Like anything involving human beings, this will vary. Middlebro liked hearing a different story each night and would often fall asleep before I’d gone past the third page; Littlebro wanted The Three Little Piggies, he wanted it told His Way (which did not exactly match either of the two books we had), and would take over and finish telling it as soon as I made a mistake - and tell it to the end, and explain why what I’d said wrong was wrong. And then he’d lie back on his pillow, wiggle a bit and fall asleep. By the time Littlebro started demanding His story, they were already sharing: I’d read Middlebro down first, then go over to Mr Demands’ bed.
My daughter will be one year old next week, and I would like to double that figure… at least. :rolleyes:
What’s so frustrating is that she’s generally the smiliest, happiest baby you can imagine, but no matter how happy and relaxed she seems to be before bedtime, every single night she has to go through a screaming tantrum of anywhere between five minutes and an hour and a half before she will go to sleep.
I hate sleep and small children. My oldest didn’t sleep through the night till he was two.
And since we’re talking about babies and sleep… if you end up with one that won’t sleep through the night at an age when you think they oughta, your only recourses are (1) Ferberizing and (2) taking away crutches that could interrupt their sleep, like pacifiers. You may be surprised at how effective these methods are. Or they might not work at all, and then you just have to put up with it.
You might, for example, end up with the child who screams and screams and screams…and then triggers their vomit response and covers their surroundings in puke. And then - because they really really really hate puking - they start the whole cycle all over again. Or so I’ve heard. :smack:
In my more exhausted moments I’ve wondered why we’ve invented disposable diapers but not disposable vomit catchers. I eventually realize why this would be a Bad Idea. 
There are little absorbent paper pads that the hospital sends you home with, supposedly for changing diapers on. They could count as disposable vomit-catchers. We put receiving blankets down on top of the crib sheet to catch the effluvia, until she got old enough to pull the blanket up. She never vomited in bed, though. No, that always happened seconds before we laid her down, when we had her in our arms, wearing clean jim-jams and a clean sleep-sack and with her special dolly clutched in her arms.
Hint: when we stopped giving her bedtime bottles, she stopped throwing up at bedtime. Yet another reason to break that habit asap.
I guess in that respect we’ve been pretty lucky. Our daughter very rarely pukes. I’m sure it’ll come, though. Also, she has never been interested in dummies (pacifiers). We did buy a couple but she would just spit them out, so we never gave them to her again. I’m glad we don’t have to go through weaning her off them.
My son turns 2 on Friday. I’m his father.
The lack of sleep, constant interruption, and endless revolting bodily fluids were unpleasant enough. But when we discovered that our son had more serious problems, this opened up whole vistas of unpleasantness that I never knew were possible. So count your blessings if your child is normal and healthy; gird your loins if he isn’t.
As far as breast feeding goes, my wife was utterly committed but she just couldn’t get the mechanics to work. The baby wouldn’t latch, he’d bite her painfully enough to draw blood on occasion, etc. It was a hell of a lot harder than anyone might have guessed. We hired a lactation consultant and after a session or two, suggested that we see a pediatric ENT to consider a frenectomy. We did; the doctor excised the tongue tie, and within 24 hours he was nursing like a fiend. It was pretty incredible.
Yes. When our oldest was diagnosed with diabetes it changed everything. Well, not everything, but our attitudes to food, exercise, and illness had major shifts, and there’s a medical schedule overlay to our lives that I couldn’t even imagine.
It’s amazing how quickly I’ve learned to view sleep not as something that happens for eight hours at night, but something that happens for twenty minutes to two hours any time you can manage it. Last night was rough - for sme reason two hours of screaming from 1:30 to 3:30 seemed like a great idea to the kiddo - and this morning I kept falling asleep while I was giving him his bottle. Luckily he was patient with me an just waited until I jerked myself awake and repositioned the bottle. 
A few things I learned:
Those old Popeye cartoons, where babies would sleep through explosions, but wake up crying when a pin dropped? They were right! When my son was a baby, he could sleep without a problem through thunderstorms… but the sound of a pop-top soda can opening would wake him up instantly.
Babies are a lot tougher than you imagine. They seem so small and delicate that you’ll be surprised at some of the punishment they can endure without a problem.
One of the best bits of advice my wife and I got was to not let the kid have a special doll or blanket, but rather an easily replaceable item. Our oldest had a cloth diaper for a “wubby” to snuggle with. Dirty? Throw it in the wash. Lost? Give her another one. They come in six packs.
She has a young cousin who has a particular stuffed animal he drags around. It’s gross and if it gets misplaced? Hoo boy.
My daughter still has her wubby. Uses it in times of stress. She’s 164 months old. (fourteen)
Aha - you’re a fake fake Fake McFakerson!!! Babies don’t do that!!! (mine sure never did!!).
Um, ok, at least you’re familiar with babies, maybe you’re not a complete fake ;). When my son did this the first time, at about age 4 days, we nicknamed him the Crown Prince of Olympic Projectile Pooping.
As Bill Cosby once said, the first few poops are cute. Then, God puts smell in the poo-poo. This latter also got my husband to admit “oh my god, he IS my son!!” (causing me to double over laughing and pop a stitch in a very sensitive location - ouch!).
Some of my own wisdom: Learn to nurse lying down, in a position where you feel safe that the baby won’t get squashed. For the first few months, this was the only way I got any sleep at all (see above. Baby had precisely 3 modes: eating, screaming, and being driven in the car. Note that none of these involve sleeping in the crib).
The first “solid” food us Americans are told to add is rice cereal. This has roughly the same effect on their output as mixing in a spoonful of quick-setting concrete. Therefore, pureed prunes are a recommended second solid food.
This effect can also be offset by trying to encourage the baby to nurse so she’ll keep quiet while you’re on the phone with the guy who’s going to be your new boss when you go back to work.
However, when said baby is a bit older, and needs to poop while she’s in the highchair, the red face and grunting can be pretty damn funny.
Enjoy each stage of their lives. I know everyone says that, but it’s true. Infancy is such a special and short (in hindsight!! it seemed pretty interminable at the time) time of their lives, and they want to go off to college just 3 weeks later.
Yeah - if they have something distinctive, purchase spares as soon as you know what it is. And if you have any input on the process, offer things that can be washed without being destroyed.
Each of my kids chose a lovey at about age 16 months. For Dweezil, it was a stuffed bunny with a wind-up music box inside. Went everywhere with him. Bunny #1 bit the dust after 2 months when the tot was quite ill, and was holding Bunny when he barfed. Bunny was drenched and befouled. We quickly bought 2 spares (then later another one when they discontinued that model). All of them got washed at one point or another, which of course ruined the music box portion.
Moon Unit was given a Discover Toys (I think) stuffed doll with a rattle inside - which at age 16ish months became her lovey. We immediately bought spares of that one - and in fact swapped one out a year or two later when the rattle began to wear through the outer fabric. At least it was more easily washable. When the second one’s rattle began to wear through, she was too old for us to accomplish the swap without being noticed, and the fabric is too fragile to repair without destroying it. So, Moon Unit is 15, still has this ratty old thing in her room, and we have a brand new, still-in-wrapping, one somewhere.
These shenanigans have led to some funny stuff - like the time we’d gotten out a spare bunny because the current one was misplaced - then found it just as Dweezil came into the room with the one he was holding. To hide it, I slam-dunked the Bunny-clone into the nearest vessel - a soup pot on the stove. Fortunately the soup pot was empty!!
Yup. I have the video showing my daughter at 9 months sleeping soundly with an entire pipe band rehearsing 10 metres behind her, but if my stomach rumbled in the same room overnight? Wide awake!
Yup, I use muslin cloths for everything from dribble, snot, puke, spillages to improvised head scarves when she won’t wear a sunhat - she falls asleep cuddling whichever one she has that day (preferably clean) and doesn’t mind which one she has to snuggle with 
(and I have three different colours to co-ordinate with her outfits) 
I never thought I’d enthusiastically say “That’s the cutest little turd!” and honestly want to show it off to people