While I do not pretend to know all there is to know about parenting, I have not experienced that heart-stopping fear that pregnancy books warn about where you have a newborn in your care and no clue about how to take care of it. I am sure this well develop as I get closer to the due date, but right now, I am relying on my long history of babysitting and common sense to assuage my fears.
Setting up our registry today, however, did make painfully clear to me that I know very little about the STUFF a baby needs. The basics are not that hard: I had little trouble with an infant seat/stroller, the crib or even the bedding. But how do I know what diapers to get and how many, what bottles and how many, what breast pump (buy/rent?), how many receiving blankets, clothes, etc...? Do I really need a bassinet if we live in a small apartment with the nursery right next door to our room? Do I need the swing AND an infant bouncer AND a baby gym? At what point do I need a high chair, and can I use one of those that just attaches to a regular chair? I know I want a carrier, but should I go for the Bjorn or the sling? What toiletries do I need? What do I want in a diaper bag? I guess to a certain extent, all of this is either personal preference or trial and error. But I feel like there should be an informational guide without advertisements that tells you what everything is for and the intended use of it.
And just when I think I have heard everything that you should and shouldn't do, either while pregnant or with a newborn, I run into something else that I had never heard before and it makes me think that I know absolutely nothing about how to protect a baby... today, it was that you shouldn't use Neosporin on a young baby. I mean, if I hadn't wasted time perusing the Internet for something else, I might never have seen that. So how much other necessary information is out there waiting for me to stumble upon it?!? I wish more of my friends had babies now, so I could ask the practical mother/friend for advice. While I really do treasure the advice from my mom, most of this stuff has changed dramatically since she had a baby. To save myself from actually freaking out about all of this, I will just think about how excited it made me to see all of this stuff today and make decisions about what we will use in a few short months. I can't wait to meet my little boy, but I honestly can't even really picture that yet. It seems too distant and abstract to spend any real time dwelling on it. But touching the soft blankets and testing out strollers today made everything seem more real somehow...and I couldn't be more excited! I also can't wait to see PJO with a little baby in his arms!
4 comments:
I'm two days past my due date and it still seems too distant! I still don't actually get that I will have a baby. One thing I heard a lot of people say is that babies really don't need much "stuff." And I think that's so true. I think the stuff is mostly for the parents to enjoy.
Also, I didn't buy much of anything and I ended up getting all I think I will need from baby showers so just keep that in mind too.
Get the book Baby Bargains. It will tell you both what you need and how to get it cheaper.
Baby Bargains is great - as is their book Baby 411, it's the only one I turned to repeatedly during Landon's first year.
As far as some of your questions go, here's my 2 cents:
(1) We also lived in a small apartment with Landon's room very close to ours. He slept in his crib his very first night home and every night after that, and we never used our monitor because it got too much static in the apartment complex and we could hear him just fine without it.
(2) I used maybe 2-3 receiving blankets. They don't get very dirty and they're something people tend to give you as gifts anyway.
(3) Get a big pack of cloth diapers to use as burp cloths. They're large, absorbent, cheap, easily washed, and you won't care when one gets super dirty (and you just trash it rather than clean it) or you leave on at a restaurant. Our pack of 12 lasted the whole first year. (We also tied them around his neck as a big bib :)
(4) You don't need need a high chair until he's at least 4 months and you can probably wait longer. We fed Landon in his bouncy seat until about 5 months. He loved his "high highchair" - it let him survey the whole room and he'd often spend up to an hour just playing with toys up there :) But the ones that attach to chairs are great too!
(5) Some kind of chair/bouncer is necessary - we loved the cozy baby papasan chair for those first few months. Landon took all his naps in it in the living room while I studied. The play gym is also good after a few weeks - trust me, anything that buys you 15 min. of "non baby holding time" is worth its weight in gold! A swing you can wait and see on, if you don't want to spend the money. We finally broke down and bought one when our colicky baby ONLY wanted to be held and walked around the house- with NO stopping. The swing saved my sanity, though he did grow out of it quickly.
Good luck - a lot of it is just trial and error and finding out what your particular baby likes. On that note, buy at least two kinds of bottles to have on hand right away - Landon absolutely couldn't drink out of the kind I originally bought and you don't want to send PJO out on a midnight bottle run!
Thanks for the great advice everyone! I am looking into the book(s) as I type :)
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