91–100 of 343 posts
Everything goes in waves. There are good ones and bad ones. Try to recognize you are in a good one and enjoy it. And in bad ones, remember it will not stay that way. It gets better.
Don't worry if you think you are doing it 'wrong', you aren't - just because a book or person says that "the way to deal with x is y" doesn't mean it will work for your kid - everyone is different, and we're all winging it! As others have said, make sure you carve out time for yourself and partner - I know it can be scary leaving them for the first time - but seriously, you both need it and it will only make it easie…
I tried so hard to gently mold and direct my kids (now all grown). I wanted more than anything for them to grow up with confidence (which I lacked as a kid). I tried hard to help them become what I thought everyone would define as “successful”. Pretty much none of it worked. They’ve turned out fine, but they’ve done it their way, on their time table. What I did right was (try to) show them a lot of love. Even that didn’t come through as well as I’d hoped.
What I wish is that I had realized all this sooner and just relaxed and enjoyed the time more.
Main advice is to look at all the normal expectations you have and be ready to swap them for something different. If you can do that you will find happiness. Try to hold onto the past and you will lose!
Father of a 13 month old here. Couple things: 1) I feel like I was extremely well prepared for how to handle a baby - but I wasn't prepared how much this was going to affect my relationship. People generally don't mention it - but I feel like going throught the stress of living with an infant puts an enormous negative pressure on a relationship(it did for me). Things which normally wouldn't have bothered either of us…
> 2) if the baby isn't sleeping through the night by 6-8 months, pay for a sleep consultant. That's what we've done, it was the best spent money in the world, I'd pay 10x as much as we have. Our baby boy was waking up literally every hour at night from 4 months of age until 8 months, I think we were on the verge of going mad, it was completely unsustainable. After a 2 week training session with a consultant he starte…
Every kid is different though, and that's where the consultant comes in - they made a plan specific to our baby, and he was always available on WhatsApp 24/7 to answer any questions we had.
You're not a mere spectator to the birth; you're the mother's partner, the person who knows her best. During easy births, your job may be trivial, but during complicated births, it can be very important: your wife can be completely wrapped up in her own world where she's doing all the real work, and everybody around you is working on the technical-medical side of things. You're the only one who can get inside her head and tell how she's doing, and communicate that to the medical experts. And sometimes this is important.
During our first pregnancy, I interfered twice, and both times I turned out to be correct. It was a complicated pregnancy that took forever. My wife was at risk of preclampsia, they put her on oxitocin (I think?) to stimulate contractions, and at some point, the contractions were coming at such a rapid succession, that my wife had no time to rest in between. At some point, I noticed she was crying. My wife never cries. Never complains. She's a hardass and when she was younger, doctors have on occasion ignored her broken bones because she wasn't crying out in pain. So for her to be crying was serious. I alerted the nurse or gynaecologist, and they turned down the oxytocin and gave her a bit of morphine to take the edge off.
Many, many hours later, when she was trying to push the baby out, and the nurse and gynaecologist were encouraging her: "It's coming! It's coming!", I asked if the baby was really coming, because she'd been pushing for two hours by now. They couldn't really see. "Well, could you check?" They checked, turns out the baby was stuck behind some bone, and they had to use a suction cup to pull it out. My wife had been squashing our baby against some bone for two hours.
So pay attention and don't be afraid to speak up or ask questions when necessary. Don't be an ass and think you know everything, because you don't, but don't assume they know everything either, because sometimes they don't either. At a hospital, their attention may be divided between multiple births. When birth takes a long time, they may change shifts, and you'll be the only one who's been there from the beginning.
Then again, for our second pregnancy, the gynaecologist was urging us to hurry to the hospital, and thinking of our first birth, I thought: "Have you ever been at a birth? These things take 12 hours at least." We were barely at the hospital, and the baby was already born. No trouble at all. It was the complete opposite experience.
Also: make sure you're home during the first two weeks after birth. Your wife can't and shouldn't do anything; she needs to recover, you take care of her and the household. Also a great time for bonding and learning how to take care of a baby. Don't miss it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add - most people don't take antibiotics seriously. Please do take all of your subscription as long as your doctor says you should. Otherwise, you're breeding resistant germs.
Everyone should listen to the advice of their doctors. But I just thought I’d point out that the evidence that unconditionally finishing an entire course of antibiotics actually is necessary turns out to be very poor: https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418 If you think about it, it doesn’t really make sense. Prolonging an antibiotic course will increase, not decrease, the chance of organisms becoming resistant, an…
The paper you linked reads more like an opinion piece to me (not my field, cannot judge), but it points to this meta-analysis [1] which supports your argument. Surprising that so few studies seem to exist on this link (~20 in the meta analysis).
An honest reflection of being a father for the last 2.5 years: 1. Sometimes for no apparent reason, you'll start crying 2. Parenting is a constant cycle of ups and downs 3. Ask for help (it really does take a village) 4. Friends and family (even with good intentions) will always find something to nit-pick about your parenting style 5. Having a child will test your relationship with your partner and reveal that you tw…
11. Your career will suffer Point #11 is not necessarily a bad thing. Having a child is a forcing function, requiring you to really prioritize what's important (and not important) in your life. All of us only have 24 hours in the day. All of us have limits. Also, be prepared that not all fathers (especially in the corporate world) will see eye-to-eye. My relationship with one of my mentors dissolved practically overn…
It does not seem long in retrospect.
Diapers seem to last forever, that time is but a blink.
Find time to spend with your child, because time is fleeting. Take pictures, keep artwork, have adventures. There is no re-do.
Bring a large water bottle to the birth. Go to one of those newborn classes and learn how to change a diaper and swaddle at the minimum. (If applicable) split the night into two shifts to maximize uninterrupted sleep. Listen to your gut. You're ultimately responsible for your baby. If something doesn't feel right, then speak up and set boundaries with the other people in your life. Do it from the start, preferably. B…
My wife still tells people about how grateful she was for me proposing this. We each had a guaranteed 6 straight hours of sleep: I slept 9pm to 3am, and she slept 4am to 10am. We used the hour between to update me on any concerns there might've been, but usually to watch TV together on the couch.
For my advice, I swear by the Mayo Clinic Guide to Your Baby's First Year (https://www.amazon.com/Mayo-Clinic-Guide-Babys-First/dp/1561...).
Also, I tried to enforce a rule of no visitors staying longer than a few minutes, except our parents. People were free to drop off food or whatever, peek in for a look, but then they needed to leave. We couldn't entertain, and no matter what visitors claim, they did impose. Once he was 2 months old, one of us would occasionally take him to family's houses while the other stayed home to sleep.
My last advice is don't hesitate to contact the pediatrician with a question soon after getting home. Ideally, the first contact should be for an insignificant thing. Use the experience to learn the proper phone numbers or message systems, and get a sense of how long it takes for them to respond. Pediatricians are used to panicky parents with dumb questions, so don't worry about pissing them off.