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Things we never bothered with: microwave, sterilising absolutely everything,
It is the things that come into contact with milk that have to be cleaned - the baby doesn't have the ability to cope with the bacteria that can quickly develop in milk until they are about 6 months old.
It is the things that come into contact with milk that have to be cleaned - the baby doesn't have the ability to cope with the bacteria that can quickly develop in milk until they are about 6 months old.
We very rarely used bottles at all, especially in the first 6 months.
Fair enough - just pointing out what items need particular attention with the sterilising and why. If breastfeeding it goes without saying that it isn't relevant.
Our three were breast fed (not by me I hasten to add as I am their father) and if you think about it it is actually the easiest way of doing it, if it works out for you, that is. You have a ready supply of milk on tap, as it were, at exactly the right temperature and consistency (it also makes nappy changing a little more pleasant :wink:)
Some things that made the first few weeks easier...
Love film subscription
Sky Plus
Marks and Spencer dine in for £10 deals
A bouncy chair
A job lot of baby grows from Tesco.
Gina Ford for the general principles, but don't let it get under your skin and don't let her think you are failing your baby if you don't stick to her daft and impossible regime! There is a book called 'the first year', which was brilliant.
Microwave- check. We've never owned one.
We don't even have a TV (could explain why I'm here all the time!), maybe I'll look into it though. We do at least have a love film subscription and a computer to watch DVDs on...
can i recommend a new bottom lip to bite through after your in-laws come for 5 days over christmas, sit on their fat arses, expect to be waited on hand and foot, do sod all then take home the 6 bottles of wine they brought having drunk all yours.
Our first born was 3.5 months old at Christmas having been born 3 months premature and been home for 3 weeks. The peak of my pissed-off-ness was when father-in-law was making a brew for his missus on day 4 and didn't think to even offer me one as I came into the kitchen after being up most of the night with his grand-daughter. a minor point in isolation but in this instance the final straw. His other daughter was requested to bring desert for Christmas dinner (arranged round her need to leave at 2:30 to swap the kids with her idiot ex-husband) and rolled up with a christmas pud with a sell-by date of May 2007
Still seething
Yardley_Hastings - Ive already put a stop to that ready for next Xmas. Another step is I do all the cooking as my missus (bless) trys too hard and really stresses out with the cooking. Whereas mine wont be as tasty but it will be ontime and painless!
Something works well is that for the first week or two my wife has a circle of friends that brought us meals so we didn't have to cook and she's contributed to them when they've had kids since.
Be prepared that everything will take at least twice as long as it did before (even getting dressed before lunch can be counted as a success).
Get sleep when you can and be prepared for the hormones to be all over the place on the 3rd day
Everyone will give advice - but just do what works best for you.
If people come round - get them to make their own drinks etc - also tell them to bugger off when you've had enough of them.
Get involved with some Mums and Toddler groups - they tend to be pretty helpful + loads of people in similar situations.
by the way, hope it goes well.
babies are hard work but hugely rewarding, even when cleaning pooh from between their shoulder blades like I was last night, no idea how she managed that
we had nearly 10 weeks of getting used to the idea before we could bring her home, still a bit of a shock when your walk through your door with an extra mouth to feed and no instructions
You do get instructions.
mine came with big books (free), "ready steady baby" and in England it was "birth to five" - pretty much everything you'll ever need to know is in them.
If breastfeeding, you'll need loads of breast pads and milk collector for the other side when feeding. This means you can collect some milk, freeze it and leave it for someone else to feed baby with when you feel you can go out for a few hours. Oh, and a breast pump comes in very useful!
Also a book by Penelope Leach, Your Baby and Child, it's a common sense bible
[i]microwave bottle steraliser jobbie.
babywipes.
inflatable baby bath.
vasaline/sudocream/bepenthan/oilatum.
blackout blinds and comfy chair in nursery.
those grow bags are ace, can't rate them highly enough. [/i]
that's about it in our experience too - other than the inflatable baby bath, which is a non-essential.
You don't need around 95% of the crap they try to convince you that you need.
I'd even hang off on the pump/pads business until you find out if your mrs is a gusher or not...
Another vote for the Nature Boy nappies - our son had bad eczma, and these were the best to cope with it, along with a swaddling blanket, which seems very old fashioned but works a treat if you have a 'wriggler' 🙂
So lets have all your baby pics then (I'll start)...
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Oh on the breast feeding thing.
My missus developed a cyst and couldn't breast feed (She couldn't count to 2 at one point and didn't realise that she was wearing her glasses... fun times).
Anyhow's it's amazing how much the midwife's tune changed when it became apparent that there was going to be no breast feeding for the nipper for the forseeable future. She couldn't have been more helpful with which types of powerdered milk and bottles etc, which is where the bottle steralizer come into it's own.
We read all the bumph in waiting rooms, and were keen to give it a go, but me and my 3 siblings were all bottle fed as were the the missus and her 2 siblings and all 7 are healthy as.
Mini-clubber at about two weeks old ( he's 18 months now) in his first cycling jersey 🙂
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Breast feeding's a funny old thing. As are most midwives.
- Stockpile frozen meals in the run up to the birth.
- AngelCare AC401 monitor, it has a breathing sensor so you dont have to keep checking. 2months in and no false alarms so far.
- A really good breast pump, we have a Ameda Lactaline double pump which the NCT have on sale at the moment. Forget tommee tippee, they are crap.
- Triple the number of towels and sheets you have.
- Book 3 months off work.
Here's Thomas at about six weeks 😀
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If you're breastfeeding a breastfeeding pillow is a godsend, went away for xmas without mine, and I realised how much I used it.
If you decide to go the reusable nappy route get a few to try second hand, I got a load of kushies off freecycle, but due to a baby with skinny legs they just leak constantly, have tried them at different stages as she's gotten bigger, but have now given up on them.
Something else you might need...
A brush to push the poo through the plughole of your bath when your little angel decides that a nappy isn't acceptable and it is much more enjoyable to dump in the bath.
I used my finger to perform that task last night 🙂
Only had to do that once luckily. He does think it's funny to pee in the bath as soon as his feet touch the water though...
A brush to push the poo through the plughole of your bath when your little angel decides that a nappy isn't acceptable and it is much more enjoyable to dump in the bath
A shower with an adjustable stream works for this too; it breaks it up nicely.
Only had to do that once luckily. He does think it's funny to pee in the bath as soon as his feet touch the water though...
He's right. That is funny.
A shower with an adjustable stream works for this too; it breaks it up nicely.
Ours is a fixed head shower and it wasn't nearly powerful enough to break this particular monster up.
Right enough - I have to stiffle a laugh every time 🙂
Big/solid ones got picked out and dropped in the toilet.
Big/solid ones got picked out and dropped in the toilet.
Yeah I was thinking about that - then decided the finger push was the better option.
I wonder if the tool used to perform such an function would be a Pooh Stick?
handle end of a toothbrush is the perfect size.
Just to avoid any doubt - bin the toothbrush afterwards (I have a variety of old toothbrushes in the bathroom cabinet for various cleaning tasks)
Will try to remember that for the next time it happens - I was thinking on my feet as we tried to get her sister out of the bath, clean her, empty the bath, refill it with her still in it without getting it too hot, cleaning her again.
Ohh fun!
nct membership / sales
get as much as possible 2nd hand / from mates
and other than immediate stuff , wait and see what yuo need, rather than buying tons of crap you don't use.
Another top tip - make sure you have a hospital bag and all the real essentials ready well in advance of your DD. They can have a knack of surprising you with sudden appearances.
When i have trouble breaking them up at work, i find a length of 2x1 batten does the job, ...oh, we're talking about kids.
"He does think it's funny to pee in the bath as soon as his feet touch the water though... "
Mine too. Then he fills a cup with bath water and gives it to me to drink...
Must have: Baby monitors with battery option. Allows you to relax when the baby is sleeping upstairs or outside in the pram.
As mentioned a while back - we too have the AngelCare heartbeat monitors. They work really well and we have only had a couple of false alarms (when they roll to the far end of the cot) but we are used to that now. They also have all the functions of a decent top-end standard monitor (temperature alarms, talk-back, temperature monitor etc).
I wasn't sure about the need for them, but they make my wife able to relax and sit down on an evening and sleep soundly too as she isn't up and down every ten minutes checking them. I know they aren't for everyone, but if you are considering one they *do* work.
Our nipper is 10 months old now. Things which we found of use in the early days:
Infacol for colic - lots of it
Zinc and Castor oil creme for nappy rash
New washing machine and separate tumble drier
Growbags, as mentioned above, mega useful and not kick-offable like a blanket
Baby monitor with a temperature sensor on it. Dressing your baby for the right temperature is important.
The cot we purchased turned out to be a bit of a disaster. We opted for one one of those uber expensive [url= http://www.stokke-nursery.com/en-gb/stokke-sleepi-crib.aspx ]Stokke[/url] cots which can be expanded over time, from mini cot to regular sized cot and up to a bed when your child is old enough. Sounds like a great idea.
However, they do not have drop down sides and you can't get your feet under the cot when lowering junior down in to it. Mrs B is quite short and the Beamlet is quite heavy. All of these factors have resulted in Mrs B having a knackered back.
So, get a cot with drop down sides.
People have mentioned that Gina Ford book. We read it before the Beamlet arrived - unfortunately she didn't read it in the womb. We persevered for a week or so but it was causing all three of us so much stress trying to stick to the routines we gave up.
Thankfully the Beamlet is sleeping (most nights) from 2230 through to 0700 and when she is awake she is always happy and smiling and enjoying life. I don't know if this would be the case if we had stuck to Gina Ford's draconian techniques which would have smashed the will to live out of all 3 of us.
Mrs B and I look like was have aged dramatically in the last 10 months though.
Infacol for colic - lots of it
Zinc and Castor oil creme for nappy rash
New washing machine and separate tumble drier
Growbags, as mentioned above, mega useful and not kick-offable like a blanket
Baby monitor with a temperature sensor on it. Dressing your baby for the right temperature is important.
That's almost a list of things we didn't bother with 🙂
Yup - I guess every baby is different.
Thankfully the Beamlet is sleeping (most nights) from 2230 through to 0700
At ten months? You should get her back into a routine then - she *should* be sleeping 11 or 12 hours unbroken at that age if no other factors (illness/teething etc) are involved.
But as beamers has just said... [i]I guess every baby is different.[/i]
can i jump in....
ours is due in june fingers crossed june 6th, i have 2 weeks parternity booked but dont know wether to book 2 more weeks off making a month.
mate suggested just take the 2 weeks paternity to start with as the baby will be sleeping most of the time and you'll be hanging round, leave the extra leave for later on when its a bit older.
I would take the extra time off - by the time things are much different you will be in another holiday year.
Two weeks is more than enough, you'll be glad to get back to work for a rest. 🙂 p.s. my second is due in 3 weeks...yikes!
you'll be glad to get back to work for a rest.
There is that 🙂