I wrote a different comment about my experiences with miscarriages, and how experiencing that lead me to understand something:
You are already a father. You are already a parent, even though the baby has not been born. You're already at the deep-end, even if you are not yet directly involved in the care of the baby growing in your wife's womb.
It's from this perspective, I offer this:
1. Being "data-driven", while helpful, is not complete. Raising your child is not a mission. You cannot push buttons and expect results to follow, or define objectives, and then somehow expect your child to also go along with it. They will grow with or without you, and are most vulnerable in the early stages of life. If you have ever grown a plant, it is more like that -- no matter what kind of ideal conditions you can create for the plant or child, ultimately, the power of growth does not lie within you. It lies within what you are nurturing.
2. You're going to have to sacrifice your time, energy, and sleep. There are going to be other missions you might go after ... and you're going to have to sacrifice some of them.
3. Accept all the help from family, friends, and community that you can get.
4. There are defined milestones, and they start before birth.
5. The first major milestone is viability. That's when, if the fetus is born prematurely, it has a chance of surviving in the NICU.
6. Minor milestones are the organ scan (to check if there are any severe deformities in the developing organ, also affecting viability), and the glucose test -- for gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia, which can potentially not only affect the child's health, but also your wife's.
7. Labor and birth, and recovery for your wife
8. You cannot directly impact anything for 5 - 7. Your best course of action is to support your wife
9. Watch out for post-partum depression in your wife.
What follows after are:
1. Development of the blood brain barrier.
2. Development of the immune system
3. Watching out for Sudden Infant Death syndrome in the first months (or year?) There are some advances in understanding this, but right now, unfortunately, this is mostly luck.
4. Being able to roll from back to front, and front to back. That allows the infant to be able to adjust posture without suffocating
5. Being able to hold the head steady. Until then, you have to make sure you are supporting the child's head yourself.
A good pediatrician or family nurse practitioner will remind you of all of this during the checkups. Checkups happen more frequently at the early age and get less frequent as the child grows.
Immunization matters a lot. When the child starts going to child care or school, that will start a cycle of the whole family (including parents) getting sick, even with immunization. Fall of 2022, we saw an epidemic of RSV, Flu, and Covid among families with small children.
The rest goes on with physical, mental and social development. They don't go in any specific order. Sometimes, children are mildly delayed in some things and not in others, and sometimes the delay is symptomatic of say, Autism Spectrum Disorder (which is currently diagnosed in 1 in 44 children now). This can get fairly complicated, but there are usually state services that help families with this.
Lastly, my wife is connected to support groups online for moms. There's a Facebook group involving tens of thousands of members that, smaller subgroups break off for that. If there's a similar one for dads, I suggest joining it.