What things need to get done to get our house ready for our baby?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Mr. Neville and I are expecting our first baby, due August 13. We’re pretty clueless about this whole baby thing, and neither of us is very domestically minded or handy around the house. We’re both stressing about getting what we need to get done done before the baby arrives. Adding to this stress is the fact that we’re basically clueless about what does need to happen.

I know we need to de-clutter the room where the baby will be sleeping, and get baby furniture. Our mothers are coming to help me pick out baby furniture in mid-June.

We recently read this article in Consumer Reports, and we’re concerned about lead paint in our pre-1978 house. We’re particularly concerned about surfaces that get a lot of wear, like doors and windows. Any idea what we need to do to mitigate that hazard? We’re also thinking of having someone encapsulate any lead paint in the room we’re planning to use as a nursery.

I also know we will need to get baby gates, to keep the baby from falling down stairs.

What am I missing?

2

Turn your water heater down below scalding temperature. A simple sleep-deprived mistake on your part, or a grabby baby hand can cause burns.

3

Well, I would look into the lead paint thing, I have no idea about that, but realize that after you bring the baby home, you have months before you need to baby proof anything. They are immobile for quite some time.

Have a place for the kid to sleep, some diapers, burp cloths, clothes, and some method of feeding them. Everything else is gravy.

Also each kid is different. I didn’t have to do any baby proofing besides gates on the stairs for my first. My second is not quite 9 months and gets into EVERYTHING. So relax and see how things pan out.

4

The good news is you don’t need to babyproof for a newborn. You can let your babyproofing grow with your baby as s/he gains mobility. At first, your baby won’t really be moving around without you. Apart from not putting a baby on a high surface unsupervised (because even a newborn can wiggle and squirm enough to fall off a changing table or bed), don’t worry too much now.

I’d say the big thing to concern yourselves with is the sleeping arrangements. First, I can’t tell from your wording, but if you’re thinking of having the baby sleep in a separate room, you should know that this can increase the risk of SIDS by as much as 100%. So you might want to look at a bassinet or co-sleeper you can have next to your bed, rather than worrying about a crib and matching furniture for a nursery.

The other thing is I strongly suggest you make some preparations for bringing the baby into your bed safely. Most parents wind up sleeping with their babies at least some of the time, because otherwise no one gets much sleep. Even if parents don’t plan on bedsharing, I always suggest they check out James McKenna’s safety guidelines, because the most dangerous thing is to get so exhausted you cosleep out of desperation, and wind up doing it on a couch or recliner, or in a waterbed or squishy bed with lots of poofy covers and pillows, because you never read about it.

I can’t think of much else. Make sure you have a well-functioning washer and dryer. Babies make a lot of laundry! Maybe make sure you have a good non-slip surface in your tub and a stable, non-slip bath mat, so you can take a bath with your baby. I could never keep my babies warm and comfortable bathing them in the little baby bathtubs - they were only happy when I sat in the tub with them lying on my lap.

Congratulations!

5

Like Ludy mentioned, a lot of the baby-readying doesn’t have to happen right away because the baby isn’t doing that much for a while. So don’t stress too much.

On the other hand, some of the things we put off I vaguely wish we had done in advance, simply because after the baby comes, you don’t have as much time to devote to projects (or shopping for projects).

The thing I would recommend the most is to put child-proof latch hooks on the floor-level cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom. We first put all the poisonous things in higher up cabinets, which I thought might settle the issue, but then I realized it was really tedious to keep having to tidy up all the harmless things our baby would pull out of the cabinets. I would say this started at around 9 months. I left one cabinet un-childproofed, and keep Tupperware and plastic bowls in it – this keeps her occupied while I am cooking or cleaning in the kitchen, and it’s easy enough to chuck all the Tupperware back in one place.

In addition to the latches, or if you decide not to go that way, it’s a good idea to keep cleaning products, alcohol, and other things you would especially not want a baby to drink on high shelves (especially in terms of the cleaning products, we kept all those under the sink before the baby’s arrival) and use your bottom cabinets for baby-safe things only. Just in CASE the baby gets past the latch, you don’t need her drinking Drano Max. Same thing with items stored on the bottoms/tops of closets.

This is a little specific to our house, but we had to rig up another latch on one of our doors so that it could stay open enough for the cat to go in and out (to get to his litter box) but with a small enough gap that the baby can’t go through.

Oh, cat toys. A lot of our cat toys had small parts that a baby could swallow or choke on, so we put those away and limited the cat to a few basic toys. One of my favorite pictures though is of our baby cheerfully teething on a grotty old catnip toy covered in cat hair and lord knows what else.

Some of our radiators had sections of exposed pipe that get quite hot, so we purchased foam insulators for them.

If you don’t already, I would suggest getting in the habit of keeping a box of Kleenex in each room (like EVERY ROOM) because there are a lot of times with a baby that you could use a Kleenex right the heck now.

6

Here to second the latching of cabinets and drawers, with leaving one openable with harmless items inside.

Also - electircal outlet covers. And, remove all springs/auto-closing door mechanisms - you do not want a door swinging closed on the little one’s hand.

If you do get a crib - note to the dad (who will usually be the one assembling it) - set it up IN the room, not the hallway or garage or workshop. Cribs are too wide to get thru the doorframe (take it from me!).

Oh, and congratulations!!

7

If you are going to latch your bookshelves to the wall take the books off and do it now before the baby arrives. It is a pain in the butt to latch the shelves to the wall and you don’t want to have to stop 50 times to feed, change, or snuggle your little one.

8

I think you can buy test kits for lead paint.

As for baby-proofing, my wife is due a couple days after you and I’m planning to have any “needs installation” type baby-proofing done before baby arrives (stuff like magnetic cabinet latches and anti-tip straps). Other stuff, like the thing you put on the door handle so the kid can’t open it, can wait.

9

I would second what Unauthorized Cinnamon said.

Having the baby close by is not only helpful if you’re breastfeeding, it can be good for your own peace of mind (at least if you’re like me and kept making sure they were breathing). If you’re not comfortable having them in the bed with you, don’t. We wound up with both our kids in bed with us at one point or another and still do sometimes if they’re sick. I was adamantly against it but unfortunately, they never read any of the baby books that I did saying that you can just put your baby down drowsy but awake and they’ll drift off. :slight_smile:

10

There are surface test strips that you can get. Possibly even at your local university or city environmental/health service.

They’re super easy to use, (at least the last time I use them around 1990something :D). They’ve probably improved a lot since then. Barring that, Test America is a national testing lab, if I recall correctly, lead tests are around 25 bucks.

11

If I can be a contrary voice, having a newborn in the room with me was almost the death of me. When the baby was little (he’s six months now), I simply could not sleep when he was in the room. Any noise he made woke me up and I had to check on him to make sure he was breathing, or at least lay there, tense, waiting to see if he’d fall back to sleep. For weeks, I rarely slept more than an hour at a time, and I think I was honestly waking up more like every half an hour.

I managed while I was home, but once I went back to work the whole thing collapsed. I just couldn’t do it. I had a long slow meltdown over the course of a weekend. Finally, my husband convinced me to put in a pair of earplugs and go to bed. He slept in the baby’s room on the spare bed. Six hours later I woke sane. Tired still, but sane. After that, we started the schedule: I would put in the earplugs at 8 PM and go to bed. I’d get up at 2:30 and express, then take over baby duty: my husband would then go lay down in our bed until six, so that he got at least 3 solid hours a night. We kept this up until I quit expressing around five months. This routine really saved us.

I have really, really liked having the spare bed in the nursery. During the day, we use it as a changing station, and these days we are both sleeping there at night. Fairly soon I expect we will move back into our own bed and I think that transition will be less stressful than if we were moving the baby out.

12

Buy an extra pack of cloth diapers, whether you are planning to use cloth or disposable, they will come in handy for many things besides emergency back-up diapers. Just as everyone is settled in is not the time to be out of diapers. For a few weeks (months?) my daughter went through 18 a day!

Keep to the basics and don’t over stress about things, if you’re all alive and relatively comfortable, it’s all good.

Congratulations!

13

BEST advice? Listen to the Grandmas!

Our granddaughter was born in 2009. I was AMAZED when our daughter told us all the new “rules” that babies come with today! No pacifiers for the first six weeks! No bottles (even WATER) for the first six weeks. No powder, no cream, NOTHING on baby’s bottom! If the little buttsie gets irritated, a LITTLE bit of Vaseline is okay.

All these rules!

Well, our granddaughter didn’t get a pacifier at all. We all tried to get her to use one after the six-week shut-out, but she wasn’t having any of that!

She sucks her thumb, instead.

So…really, listen to the Grandmas.
~VOW

14

Our standard gift for new parents was to go to Sam’s Club and buy a 24-pack of white washcloths. My brother and his wife had twins through in vitro fertilization, and we got them two packs. They were kind of thrilled to get the BIG FLUFFY PACKAGE, thinking it was a quilt or something, but then they opened it and they were like “washcloths? yay?”, until they got home from the hospital with two newborns, and then it was “Washcloths! YAY!” and you couldn’t get more than a few steps away from a little stack of washcloths, anywhere in the house.

15

Me too. I didn’t get much sleep at all when she was in the room with us. When we put her in her own room - I stll was up to breastfeed, but I at least slept when she did.

We also never got the hang of the apparently wonderous thing that is nursing in bed.

I’d think long term. You have time now that you won’t really have for about seven or eight years - more if you have more kids. So if you want to decrap your house - now is the time - and you should because whatever crap you have will multiply like rabbits when children enter the picture - friends of mine are the least materialistic people I know - and have a baby - they went from few possessions to a house that looks like a Babies R Us truck exploded in it. And they haven’t even reached the Happy Meal toy stage (even if your child never has a Happy Meal, somehow you’ll have two dozen Happy Meal toys).

The second piece of advice is KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. Don’t buy every baby thing known to mankind - later you’ll wish you’d put that money in a 529. MOST things you “NEED” for baby you don’t really need.

I agree, you have plenty of time to childproof and since most childproofing is a pain in the butt, don’t do it until you have to. And then be selective. DO child lock cupboards holding dangerous chemicals - but do you really need to keep baby out of the tupperwear cupboard? Do put outlet covers where a young child plays, but the ones above the bathroom counter and the ones in your bedroom?

16

My advice: don’t buy any bibs, cloth diapers, onesies, or washcloths until any baby showers have passed and/or the baby is expected soon. My wife was thrown three(!) “baby showers” between work friends, non-work friends, and back home friends/family. We had enough of the aforementioned items for many babies.

17

Adding another voice to the mix that’s saying sleeping with the baby in the room just doesn’t work for everybody. When my daughter is in her room down the hall, I can still hear every sound she makes as if she was right next to me. I can only sleep at all with earplugs; I can only sleep soundly if my husband has the monitor and responsibility for her, and I have earplugs in and the doors shut. You’ll find out within the first week what works for you and what doesn’t, and THAT is what you should do. Don’t let maybe-statistics and effing Dr. Sears scare you into a nervous breakdown.

That rant over, all you need to do to your house is have a safe place for the baby to sleep, and that can be a large box or a drawer if you’re really strapped. If you want to do more:

Put washable covers on all the furniture that you and the baby will be spending time on. Blankets work great. Washable washable washable!

Also put a pile of burp cloths next to every place you’ll be sitting with the baby.

Put a fan in the baby’s room. It reduces the risk of SIDS dramatically and makes it less likely that noises in the house will ruin that fragile newborn sleep (which is only fragile when mommy is also trying to sleep.)

18

Another thing I’d recommend is double-making your baby’s bed in the event of a blowout. It makes nighttime sheet changes easy - water-proof crib cover, sheet, water-proof crib cover, another sheet. This makes it easy to change the crib or co-sleeper in the middle of the night - just rip off the first layer and the bed is ready.

And with respect to bed-sharing, I definitely agree that your mileage may vary. I’m speaking from my own experience, which is by no means representative of the entire maternal population, leading to more advice that you’ve probably heard here a lot: take what info works for you and chuck the rest without any guilt.

19

Maybe pick and choose the advice you use from the Grandmas (sorry VOW!). If I’d listened to my Mum, I’d have been cleaning the umbilical stump with methylated spirits, dunking the dummy in malt, and what did I need that fancy car seat for? They didn’t have infant car seats when she was a baby and they all survived (“Except the ones that didn’t, Mum”). Grandmas are dead on about some things, but other things have been improved since they had little ones so weigh up all the information and go with your gut.

20

YES, double-making the bed(s) is so brilliant!

As for where the baby sleeps, I hope I didn’t come off as wagging my finger and saying how to do it right. I just remember learning about the statistics, and being like “Holy shit, wish I’d known that!” Some people can’t sleep in a room with some babies (my first was much noisier than my second), and you have to compare any increased SIDS risk with the documented risks of having exhausted parents, possibly a depressed mom, driving while sleepy, etc. It’s a constant balancing act.

I do love seeing all the creative ideas about sleep arrangements people are sharing. We went through a lot of similar schemes at different times with each child. I agree with the concept of having a split shift so each parent is guaranteed 3-4 hours uninterrupted. Lifesaver!

This isn’t a house thing, but now is a great time to learn about car seat safety - what seat to get, how to install it, and how to secure the baby. I see way too many babies with loose or twisted straps, chest clip down at the belly, after-market accessories, and poofy coats and blankets under the straps. I generally like Christie Haskell’s stuff on The Stir - lots of good info, and good pictures.