Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
251–260 of 343 posts
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#252By all means, strengthen your core and back muscles. Carrying babies around is no joke and I spent years in pain because of a bad movement trying to pick up my daughter.
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#253For the first 6-9 months:
1. Get ready to survive sleepless nights and days and forget about your comfort. It’ll be like a full time job 24x7.
2. Get ready to reach unimaginable before zen master levels of acceptance, patience and emotional stability towards your baby and your wife (she’d better do the same).
3. Get ready to constantly have not enough hours each day to handle all the planned matters, and not enough time for yourself.
4. Get prepared to go to sleep early and to wake up much earlier.
5. Learn how to “train” a baby to follow regular sleep patterns and rituals. This will save you a lot of time and nerves.
6. Buy a good and big enough playpen to afford some relatively free time during the day and not worry about baby safety each second.
7. In doubts, follow your instincts as long as you come from love and good intentions for the baby (you probably are if you ask the question). Rather than some books, gurus, your parents or even HN :)
Parents (especially mother) have unique sophisticated connection with their newborn on many levels. Nobody in the world can know better what exactly your baby in each moment needs. Tune yourself to it.
After ~ 9 months you’ll feel some relief and should become an expert in your baby, so no more advice needed.
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#254Have another kid within 2-3 years. Over the next 16 years you as parents will have hours to yourself every day while the kids keep each other company. Single children spend many more hours a week lonely and the parents have to be their sole family play mates at the expense of their own pursuits, relationship & energy. Adults will never be as fun or engaging a playmate as another kid.
If you keep the gap within 2-4 years then the kids can both enjoy broadly the same activities and schedules. If you let the gap become wider than that, then their needs are too divergent to meet with the same activities. So each day, week & season ends up being more work & complexity.
In the weekends we have to wake up at 6am no matter what because that’s when our 4 yo wakes up. Meanwhile our friends with 2 kids: “sleep in until the kids start arguing“ We f’d it up, it seems so obvious, and we’ve only just realized. No one talked to us about this.
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#255Your life will be destroyed and you will become a slave to a helpless human. There is a significant chance that your relationship with the mother will be end within a few years.
You can build a new life with your partner and the helpless human but it will be very hard work, especially if your child arrives with health issues.
Existing parents don't talk about all of this to those who are not yet parents. It's a big, secret, suffering club.
Hopefully it'll all be worth it for you because you already bought membership of the club!
P.S. Read Brain Rules For Baby. I bought it based on a recommendation on HN a few years ago. It explains the early years using science. I recommend it to everyone.
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#256Your life will be destroyed and you will become a slave to a helpless human. There is a significant chance that your relationship with the mother will be end within a few years. You can build a new life with your partner and the helpless human but it will be very hard work, especially if your child arrives with health issues. Existing parents don't talk about all of this to those who are not yet parents. It's a big,…
> P.S. Read Brain Rules For Baby. I bought it based on a recommendation on HN a few years ago. It explains the early years using science. I recommend it to everyone.
Just ordered. Thanks for the suggestion!
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#257I'm sure some of this was already mentioned, but here it goes... Read to your children. We set a goal of reading 100 novels to our daughters. We're at #80 and the girls are 13 and 11. Create some traditions. Whenever either of our daughters lost a tooth, I'd write a letter from the tooth fairy. The letters offered advice, humor, fairy "facts" and even maps to buried treasure they could go dig up. In retrospect, I wis…
Any chance you can share your novel list?
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#258Read, study to prepare. Respect the wisdom of each gender, talk to find the common principles of your new family. Then, when approaching every new real life situation of your new dad role, embrace and respect your instinct, it comes with millennia of knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#259Schedule romantic times. It sounds cheesy but schedule it. Light some aromatic candles. Have cheese and wine.
Re: Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
#260Your partner is going to need support even if she isn't pushing for it and all seems well, if she's up all night at intervals feeding but you're sleeping well, eventually it becomes irritating. Be willing to do expressed milk or formula feeds in the night, deal with nappies / diapers willingly, make some time off for her by taking the baby out for long walks or car trips when it won't fall asleep etc. It varies but d…
My husband is my hero because I rarely changed an overnight diaper that first year. Had to get up to feed/pump, sure. But when the crying wasn't due to hunger...
In fact, we ended up with me being in charge of "input" and him being in charge of "output". As in, I make the overall nutrition decisions, and when he became really worried about the chemical smell of disposable diapers, I did a little shopping to find ones we both could live with (he rejected the idea of cloth diapers), since I agreed the chemical smell probably indicated the presence of stuff our kid was better off not having in contact with his body 24/7, but wasn't as wound up about it as he was. He's also taking the lead on potty training, while I'm the one who's handling most of the execution of that because I'm the one on a part-time work schedule.
In that vein, when one parent cares about something VERY much, and the other kind of cares but not deeply, we've found it best to let the one who cares more have their way... as long as they're willing to do the extra work.
It also really, really helped that he was able to take a month off after our baby was born, and then the first month I was back at work after a year of maternity leave and our kid was starting daycare. This is available to all regular employees in Germany - 14 months of parental leave per child, to be split with at least 2 months to each parent, overlap allowed.
If you can at all swing it, time off that first month is critical if there's not a close relative or friend who will be living with you.