Ask HN: Concise, pragmatic baby manual for first-time dad?

Unless you want the child in their own room as soon as possible. If you can hear your child from your own bedroom having a room dedicated to the child is a good way to keep a little bit of space to yourself and your partner (and stop your bedroom from smelling like baby poop and wet wipes).

Some people are into what's known as 'attachment parenting' where you keep the baby in a cot directly adjacent to the bed with one side which can be lowered for emotional attachment or something. If you really want that, look into the safety issues and buy the right gear.

There are also people who advocate sleeping in the same bed as the baby. Those people are idiots. Don't listen to them.

> - phone tripod for facetime

For whom? Not for the baby unless one of the parents is away for weeks on end, that's for sure. Babies don't need digital devices. Toddlers don't either (introduce music of course). They'll spend a large part of their lives glued to a 'smart' black rectangle in all likelihood, no need to rush it.

> - Dutailier glider

> - a decent otoscope

Better: don't buy large expensive stuff until you actually need it. Often you don't. Ask people in your family about stuff you actually need, and stuff some people might need. Every baby is different.

"The most consistently identified serious concern of caregivers and health care providers is that high fevers, if left untreated, are associated with seizures, brain damage, and death. It is argued that by creating undue concern over these presumed risks of fever, for which there is no clearly established relationship,"

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/127/3/e20103...

That said, the most helpful resources for me have been:

1. Happiest Baby on the Block. Chapter 1 is an outline of the full book and is pretty close to what you ask for. I had never cared for a child before, and reading it before my daughter was born made me “baby whisperer” for the first week.

2. Everything from Emily Oster.

3. A standard text on pregnancy. “What to expect…” and “Bumpin” are actually not bad from your perspective. They tend to do a good job of outlining the essentials and spectra of choices without being too opinionated.

And finally: get set up with a good peds office before baby is born. Look for 7 day/week office hours and a 24 hour call line. We needed to contact ours the night we came home — don’t put this off till the kid is born!

Show up. Talk to other dads.

This is not glib. If you show up, you'll know what to do most of the time, and if you're nervous or stumped, talk to the other dads.

A few examples of showing up in my daughter's first week after being born:

My daughter experienced decels during labor. That's the heart rate varying. Meconium was expelled, so they assumed without confirming she had suffered meconium aspiration. APGAR 2 at birth, 7 at the next check. She was born blue and floppy.

First show up: the NICU team took my daughter away to intubate her. My wife looked at me, puzzled, I smiled and gave her a thumbs up. I knew my wife still had to deliver the placenta and that was another hazard she had to navigate. Point is, I was there and I knew what to do. I later apologized to my wife for lying to her in that moment; she understood.

Next show up: we finally can see our daughter in the NICU. The doctors are all talking about brain damage and meconium aspiration. My wife and I standing on either side of the warming bed, I sang my daughter's 'womb song', You are my Sunshine. Daughter looked in my direction. My wife read some lines from Hand Hand Fingers Thumb, her chosen womb book. Daughter looked at my wife. We knew she was ok. Of course my daughter could barely see at that point, but we knew that confirmed hearing and motor function, and assumed cognitive function was also ok.

Next show up: The NICU was not set up to support breast feeding. My wife was set on doing this. The bullies with Dr. badges threatened to contact CPS if my wife was unable to feed our child, and also, provided not one single form of breast feeding assistance. I say "bullies" because they actually were hostile in their presentation, not politely spelling out boundaries like a professional. (Key info on breast feeding, compress the breast into an oval shape that matches the child's mouth) So I ran to whole foods to get some formula my wife found marginally acceptable as a backstop to keep the doctor's at bay.

Next show up: NICU doctors said my wife could attempt breast feeding for 30 minutes every 2 hours because the activity threatened my daughter's life. Yes, attempting to provide nourishment is somehow life-threatening. I rented a hotel room across the street and did this cycle of showing up at the NICU every 2 hours with my wife, and we slept for about 45 minutes in between. We did that for 2 days straight, at which point my wife had finally been able to get daughter to latch and was feeding her on a more regular schedule.

Next show up: After daughter improving for 5 days in the NICU I'm at work and get the call she is on the decline due to reduced urine output. I contact our social worker at the hospital and told her I thought it was a load of crap and my daughter was fine. She suggested a meeting with the Attending Physician and the Charge Nurse. In the meeting, I waste no time, I ask how they determined her urine output was insufficient. They said they charted the weight of her diapers. I asked how big her variance was. About 60g too low. The Charge Nurse steps out of the meeting at that point. I ask, how much does a wet diaper weigh on average? About 60g. The Charge Nurse returns and says there was a gap in the chart, and one of her nurses had failed to record one of the diapers at a particular interval, and the nurse said her recollection was it was within spec.

So yeah, you may ask, how did I know how to navigate the adverse first week of my daughter's life? I just knew what to do. But the only reason I had a chance to know what to do was because I was there in the first place. I know we were lucky to get my daughter out of there in a short period of time and there were parents who had their child in the NICU for months who had a much harder road. They continued to show up too.

In my journey with my wife, we have had two miscarriages. The grief I felt also took me by surprise.

Early on, my wife would say, "we got pregnant!" At the time, I thought that was silly. Sure, we conceived, but biologically, she was pregnant and I was not. And I said so.

Well. I was wrong.

When the first miscarriage happened, the grief took me by surprise. How could I feel a sense of loss, when I am not the one biologically carrying the baby? Yet, that sense of loss was there. And it was then I realized, my wife was right -- we got pregnant. This was more than biology.

While my wife's body was starting to change in obvious ways, more subtly, so was my role. It wasn't just my wife's body changing to accommodate a growing body, but we together as a family was changing to accommodate a child, and that include changes with me.

Well before the birth of the child, I was already a father. When the fetus died, that loss as a father is real, and so is the grief that goes with it. When my wife's body expels the corpse, that's a birth. And before the birth, there was a death.

When the fetus dies in the uterus, current medical practices won't induce that birth without a medical reason, so the mother will carry the dead child until her body naturally gives birth to it. For her, she's carrying that reminder for at least a few days. As the father, there may be some biological distance from there, but this is part of what the family experiences together.

My wife and I ended up doing a small funeral and wake. We named the baby, buried it on our lands. Funerals don't help the dead; it's in honoring the dead that funerals help those who live on.

OP, if you are reading this:

You are already a father, even if you have yet to hold your child in your arms.

And, the next major milestone is viability. Your wife probably knows which week that will be. This is the period in development that the child has a shot of staying alive even if not carried to full term. In between conception and birth are also check ups your wife will go through, including an organ scan and the glucose tests.