Disclaimers:

• Every baby and family is different.
• These are some rough notes I made for myself when bleary eyed.
• Most of the advice here applies to the first days/weeks.

Baby Prep Notes

Advice 0

• It’s never too early to call your doc/midwife/etc.

Preparations

• Vaseline: Need a small amount of Vaseline for first 2 or 3 days for babies bum. Birth centre may give you some. Babies poop at first is black and very sticky, Vaseline on the bum helps make cleaning easy. Apply Vaseline to bum after every poop.
• Meals: At least 2 to 3 days (or weeks) worth of easy to prepare food/frozen. More is better. Ordering in food in obviously an option. Mostly this is needed because you will become extremely tired.
• Pads Get some heavy flow pads at the pharmacy, soak one or two in water, wrinkle the water out so they are lightly wet and freeze in a ziplock bag. These will come in handy postpartum. Make a new one every time one is used. They make give mom one at the hospital postpartum, inspect it to see how you can make your own.
• Stool Softner: Pre-buy some gentle stool softener for mom (make sure it is safe for nursing mom). May or may not need this.
• Bouncy Ball: Having a big bouncing exercise ball at home was the only thing that would settle my baby when really fussy for dad. Gently bounce baby.
• Your nails: Make sure your nails are trimmed. You may need to stick yr finger in babies mouth to “pop” a shallow latch. Also if baby cries really hard you can stick yr finger in his/her mouth to temporarily sooth. Always wash hands before if you can.
• Collic Pose:Learn the collic pose, strengthen arms before. It may or may not work but it’s worth trying. You can youtube “collic pose” to learn how to hold your baby like this. Personally, with my daughter, it was a reliable way for her to stop fussing and fall asleep.

Contractions

• When early labour starts, you will want to time contractions.
• Mom will do this at first, but when contraction pain gets more intense, you may want to take over the timing or at least help.
• Don’t be afraid to call your health care provider, better to call than not call if unsure about when to go in.
• Having a clear record of contraction duration, intensity and interval will help you make choice as to when to go in.
• When the contractions are intense, regularly spaced, regular in duration, and increasing in intensity it’s likely time to go in.
• The first night my wife had contractions, she went 45 minutes following the pattern and then they broke, we didn’t go into the hospital for another 24 hours.
• I found it helped my wife when I counted out loud every 5 or 10 seconds during a contraction, like “5, 10, 15, 20, ...”.
• Pain should ease after 30 seconds and contraction usually lasts a minute or so.
• Best to have a notebook where you write down the contractions timing.
  • Because if you do it on your phone, when you call, you’ll need to consult the log to when health care providers asks you about the patterns, timing, etc.
  • If the pattern is highly regular but there is one outlier observation, best call it.

Stamina

• Sounds really obvious, make sure you (dad) eat and drink in labour and delivery.
• You need strength and to take care of yourself. Something like a bag of beef jerky or similar high protein food.
• Also, you don’t need to stand (sitting better for low blood pressure moments if your prone to dizzy spells).

Sleep

• First few days, while milk supply is coming online, I tried my best to give mom “sleep time” in-between feedings.
• Likely baby will still be very hungry after feedings (baby will be cueing for food with tongue, rooting).
• Baby may want to feed non-stop (cluster feeding).
• You gotta buy mom time to sleep as milk production takes energy.
• Staying awake becomes very difficult. I listened to audio books, and stared into soft lights.
• Try to get sleep when mom is awake as best you can.
• This was the hardest part for me as falling asleep while holding baby can be dangerous.
• For fighting the sleep, I recommend wireless headphones and an audible subscription or similar.
• If you are trying to get baby to sleep, don’t make eye contact, that can be very stimulating and wake them up.
• Research shows this is likely false as they can’t see very well
• But generally the idea is try to minimize stimulus when putting them down.
• Babies have two sleep modes, active and quiet.
• In active sleep they can toss and turn and make a lot of noise.
• Learning the difference between active sleep and awake can save you many hours of sleep.
• If your baby is in active sleep they may make noise and fall back to quiet sleep without your intervention.
• If you physically touch them in active sleep, you will likely wake them and they may not go back to sleep easy.
• If eyes are shut likely active sleep.
• Babies sleep cycle is awake then cycles like active->quiet->active-> quiet->...
• Once baby falls asleep in arms, best to wait ten whole minutes before putting them down.
• If they startle and briefly wake, restart count down. If you put them down before 10 mins may wake up while putting down.
• I was never good, LO would wake up when I plopped her on the crib. I think there is at least two strategies.
  • First is the “slick rick” where you put them down in one fluid smooth motion and hope they settle after the startle of relocating.
  • The other is the “gentle gus” where you gently put them down and hold position when they start to startle.
  • The other options is you put them down and they fall asleep by themselves.
  • White noise machine is good. Lights stimulate baby - may not be good for sleep.
  • A fan to circulate air (not directed to baby) in room is good. Best sleep for baby is as dark as possible.
  • Also highly recommend any air purifier as it doubles as a white noise machine and removes particulates from the air which are wideley known to be a net negative on health.

Latching

Disclaimer.

• I'm no expert but just a collection of thoughts.

• Every baby/mom pair is different. Trust your gut. This is my experience.

• Shallow latch feeding can yield bloody nipples (even 10 minutes) Bloody nipples is bad because it’s painful for mom. Baby will happily suck on shallow latch so up to you and mom to prevent. If the latch is shallow, use clean pinky finger, pop it in babies mouth to break suction.

• Rough workflow on how it works in an ideal world in early days: mom hand expresses tiny bit of colostrum, mom points nipple upwards, mom holds breast firm, dad holds baby, one hand on neck, drags nipple on babies nose (baby will smell and know food is close) and then drag nipple over babies mouth, once baby starts rooting, pop the mouth on to the nip deeply, mouth should be latched like a “guppy”. When they start rooting, that’s your chance so don’t be shy to really handle the baby and push mouth deeply onto the nipple.

• Babies may like to sleep on the nipple after nursing. Some people say this is ok. Baby likes to be close to mom, smell mom, etc. But - the more time baby spends on the nips, the nipples can become sore which is not good for mom. My take is, as best you can, early on, don’t let the baby nurse more than 20 minutes per breast. 10 - 15 minutes per breast.

• To stimulate breast feeding, each feeding should involve feed on left, then feed on right. Next feeding alternate which side is first. Can bring hair elastic around wrist to remember which side was last etc. Your memory will be severely impaired due to sleep loss.

• Good idea to burp baby after each nip. Since they are not getting a lot of volume, burping does not have to be super involved, throw em over ye shoulder and pat and run back or sit em on yr knee, hold cheeks, and bend them forward and rub, pat, rub, pat back.

• The golden rule from our health care people was, feed every three hours starting from when a feed starts. A typical cycle may go like this: check diaper and change if wet or poopy, write down the time and diaper, latch baby on L nipple, feed for 10-15 mins, burp baby, latch on R nip for 10-15 mins, burp baby. Mom passes baby to dad, mom sleeps, dad tries to rock baby to sleep, maybe you get him/her to sleep in bassinet after an hour of rocking, you might get one hour of sleep, then you got to wake the baby up for next diaper change, feeding, ... and on. The cycle repeats for the first week or two or three until the baby re reaches birth wait. After, the feeding schedule may change to feed when your baby is hungry, but not until you get direction from your health care provider.

• Breast feeding can be/is challenging, try to manage your expectations and consult professional help as needed.

• Also feel free to abandon things - breastfeeding works for some but not all, this is not a reflection on mom or baby, best to make the call to formula to remove the stressor if it’s not working out.

Googling

• For googling, my strategy is “NHS ” I find the NHS (UK) (National Health Service) website is comprehensive and easy to read. Follow their directives. It's also goood to have a trusted and uniform foundation to help you make decisions.

Expectations

• It’s a journey. You won’t be sleepless forever. Every day, week, month the journey changes. In the first day things change fast, by week three you may be stringing a couple of hours of sleep here and there and feeling adjusted to high doses of caffeine and bimodal sleeping.

• Also to double down on the pace of change thing

  • It’s best to try not to get too anxious over things because they’ll likely be gone in a week.
  • This can be very hard to do as a first time parent and is only easier once you have hindsight.

• You’ll be amazed at your ability to adapt.

• Obvious but worth saying as it's the most important It’s a team sport. Play like a team, win with the team.