During Lil’ Chandra earliest (and pre-earliest) days, I tried to keep a semi-regular journal of what was helpful and what was not helpful. What resources did we keep going back to and which baby classes had me pleading with the Benalish Momma to cut class at lunch. What’s funny about it is that the sleep deprivation is so real, I have almost no memory of any of this. However I have reason to trust the author knew what he was talking about at the time. –May 2019

So you’re having a baby! Congratulations! We’ll start off with the first rule: YMMV. You’re Mileage May Vary. Much like wedding planning (and anything else that is both expensive and emotionally fraught) the only rule is to figure out what works best for you as a couple. Plus, there is a major “N of 1” problem with all parenting advice: just because it worked for Lil’ Chandra does not guarantee that it will work for you. I tried to keep everything here at a higher level, more of a framework for the struggles we faced and how we made decisions. This is a sketch of what worked out for our family. This has into two parts, the pre-birth prep and the whole “omg baby” part.

Post birth

The Baby Flu

Alright, you did your classes, bought a bunch of stuff, given even MORE stuff (seriously don’t buy any baby clothes, your friends and relatives will take care of that for you). You went to the hospital and had a baby! Congratulations! For the first few days you will be in the hospital where teams of battle-trained nurses who can swaddle flawlessly, answer questions, reassure you, &c &c. Then they send you home. And–holy shit–you have a baby. The stress levels will spike as now you have to do it all yourselves and there’s no experts to ask/confirm/check.

One of the best pieces of advice we got was to make sure that you have the “baby flu”. Mom will be recovering from a very traumatic physical experience, labor or C-section. Therefore, for two weeks, pretend that you have the flu and don’t do anything that you would if you had the flu. Lay in bed, watch netflix, be encrusted in various fluids. Have friends drop off food, briefly visit, and then immediately leave. Schedule nothing: no projects, no workouts, no hosting a “welcome baby! party”. Nothing. Waking up every 2.5 hours to feed (a process that–if nothing goes wrong–takes 45 minutes at best) is pretty brutal on you and your relationship. Give yourself space; pretend to have the flu.

Feeding

This was easily the most stressful topic for me and Benalish Mom during the first two weeks. There’s a lot to unpack with varying levels of emotional stakes. Some parents are very attached to breast milk, some don’t care. There is the emotional dagger of “I can’t produce enough food for my baby!”, the health benefits of breast milk, the pain of bad latches on the nipple. The list of things goes on and on and on. Compounding this, this is a fraught topic and quality of advice is sometimes suspect. Our hospital nurses were reluctant to give any advice, just repeating the  line, “Well you can supplement if you want” in fear of seeming like they are pushing formula. One lactation consultant said that powder formula should never be used before 3 months of age; that made our pediatrician violently roll her eyes and refute that when I asked about the perils of powder. So yes: it’s stressful and there are passionate, contradictory opinions freely being tossed around. Plus it’s 3am, you haven’t slept more than 2 hours consecutively for over two days, and your child is screaming. Makes it hard. I highly recommend having a sit-down conversation as a couple with the feeding plan before giving birth. Second, if you’re in the Seattle area, the Lytle Center is an amazing resource for feeding and lactation, complete with a registered nurse watching you feed, latch, and weighing the baby between feeds to measure how much is being consumed. It’s a very valuable resource but–like everybody–they come with their own set of biases, namely here are All The Things you can do to maximize breast milk production, even at the sacrifice of sleep, relationship, personal sanity etc. I would definitely recommend them but take it as advice, not gospel.

Like everything in this essay, I guarantee your baby will have a different constellation of issues/frustrations/roadblocks with feeding than any other baby. So I can’t prescribe a bulletproof plan that will work. However, here is a framework of “Things we wish we knew” that would have enormously helpful while making decisions during some very stressful nights.

• Every mom’s milk comes in at different times, at different rates. Some start generating milk in lockstep with the baby’s demands, some fall behind, some pull ahead.
• “Breastfeed or formula” is a false dichotomy in the early stages of nursing. We supplemented the breast milk with formula to meet the initial demand and that’s very common, though we only found this out after asking our friends after the fact.
• Babies don’t develop a preference for breastmilk or formula until much later. So for the first few days, the only priority is to make sure that your baby is getting enough volume.
• Boobs are stimulated to create milk by the demand exerted upon them, so it’s good to breast feed from the get go. However, more than 8 feedings a day doesn’t increase production and that much nursing may damage the nipples depending on the latch.
• A great way to supplement the boob-demand is with a breast pump (the hospital will certainly have one)
• Breastfeeding should not be painful and it should not damage the breast. Our baby had a tongue-tie, shortening her latch, causing her to painfully chomp on the nipple. There’s no gain by stoically forcing a painful feed.

Be compassionate with your partner and yourself. It was (still can be!) stressful but from the get-go you will catch glimpses of these everyday moments of joy and wonder. It is such a cliché, but it is a real miracle and I envy you that first moment you will have together as a family.

The Timeline

0-60 Days: Survival

Listen, I’ll be level with you. The first 8 weeks are objectively terrible. The baby is basically non-interactive unless they have a need (food/diaper/tired) in which case they start crying. There is no positive reinforcement: no smiles, no games, nothing. Lil’ Chandra seemed about as easy as a baby as it comes, easy feeder/sleeper/etc., and she was still just a giant bundle of chores. Pump milk, clean the pump parts, feed, fill bottles, clean bottles, 2-3x the amount of laundry, +50% garbage, crappy sleep, extra laundering of your favorite poop-stained pajamas (they will only blow out your favorites), random hours of inconsolable crying, desperately try and get something done around the house in a 2 minute window of quiet etc. etc. When I talk to other parents about the first few weeks, they get this distant look on their face and go, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Obviously! Otherwise there would never be any siblings in the world.

I say this not to discourage but to set expectations and to help encourage you not to beat yourself up if there are moments of frustrations, anger, exhaustion. It is not rainbows and tranquility; it seems hard because it is hard. But even now (writing as of 7 weeks) it’s getting better. Our nighttime feeds are cuddly with adorable noises, Lil’ Chandra mimics and even occasionally smiles etc. Don’t be shy about asking for help, eating nothing but Thai take-out, wallowing in a filthy house, &c. This too shall pass.

60-120 Days: Sleep & Travel (!)

Okay it’s time to pull it together and figure out how to live life again. The biggest goal at this stage should be sleep and sleep management. Once again, every baby is different but there are a series of clever stratagems that can help. Realize that sleeping is a skill, just like hand-eye coordination, vocalization, language, etc. Some babies are naturally good at it, some are not, but like everything else, you can help them learn it. Try adding two tools: the pre-bed routine and the ladder. The pre-bed routine is just as it sounds: have a very regular routine before bed. Most commonly, this is a combination of independent play, swaddle, darkness, singing, etc. But the key is to put her in the sleep area *awake* so she learns to put herself asleep, rather than having her always fall asleep while feeding/being bounced/etc. Our sleeptime routine: I place her in her crib/bassinet while I putter around preparing, tidying, closing blinds, laying out the swaddle etc. I then dim the lights, turn on the white noise machine, and swaddle her. I walk around with her, bopping gently and hum our song (“You’re Not Alone” from Final Fantasy 9) for about a minute. Then I set her down, tell her I love her, and walk out of the room.

“The ladder” is progressive sleep assistance when she wakes up. Instead of gritting your teeth for 10 minutes while your child screams and then rushing in with a full feeding/soothing/bouncing blitzkrieg, you intervene earlier but with a much lighter touch. After one minute of crying you enter the room but you *just* stand there over the crib. If the crying continues for another minute, start humming/singing/talking. If that fails for a minute, replace the paci. If that fails, instigate physical touch. If that fails, jiggle/shake the bed. If that fails, pick up and soothe. If THAT fails, then start feeding.

We’ve tried this a few times this weekend and it is SHOCKING how early on the ladder she can self-soothe. This is all from “The Happy Sleeper” by Julie Wright.

Uh, travel?

Now is the time to travel. It sounds comically surreal: you’re already overwhelmed and exhausted, you seriously want me to plan a vacation as well? YES! It is actually easier to travel now while they are small, contained, and immobile. Prepare yourself for a very different vacation: you won’t be dashing from place to place hitting every highlight in the guidebook. Get a VRBO/Airbnb so you can do laundry and have a separate room for the baby. Choose a country that has well-stocked groceries and pharmacy to get more diapers with ease. Spend several nights in the same place. Crack open the guidebook for the first time on the flight over.

Lil’ Chandra did New Jersey at 8 weeks. The entire Benalish Phalanx did France at 14 weeks. We did three stops (Paris, Avignon, & Arles) over two weeks. We would wake up slow, find a café, feed Chandra in the café, go for a walk to another café, &c &c.  Really it’s more about spending time together as a family (and you happen to be in France) than it is an exotic travel vacation. Also, babies are fantastic icebreakers no matter how poorly you speak the language. We did our trip with nothing finalized beside lodging and travel and the fading remnants of my high school French.

120-180 Days: Daycare & Sleeping through the night

At this point, I started to feel like I was finally “getting it”. I could distinguish between the hungry cry, the dirty diaper cry, and the ‘fake news’ cry. While blindfolded I could disassemble, clean, disinfect, and reassemble the breast pump parts. I knew exactly how to bounce her to sleep. I finally had a good smooth routine of getting Chandra (and myself!) prepped for the mornings. But now it was time for my greatest challenge: to endure her cries and pleas for help. For it was time to sleep train.

The reason is deceptively simple. It’s time for Chandra to learn how to do soothe herself. She needed to learn how to put herself to sleep without outside intervention like bouncing/singing/swaying/etc. Really it’s parenting in a nutshell: it’s your job to help them to learn to do things on their own. And ‘learning to sleep’ is first on the list.

Plus, sleep is *really* worth fighting for. The first time Chandra did 9 hours uninterrupted my thought progression went, “The alarm broke…the baby died…holy crap I feel GREAT. Who wants to go run a half-marathon?!” It’s been so long since a full night’s sleep that I had forgotten what it was like.

Our methodology was that we continued “The Happy Sleeper”. They call their transition “the sleep wave” where–like a reassuring ocean–you regularly check-in while they practice sleeping. Your goal is to provide confidence but not comfort. So our first night of sleep training we did our usual bedtime routine then I put her down and said, “Good night. We love you very much” and left the room. I set a timer for 5 minutes. If she was still awake, I went back in and repeated, “Good night. We love you very much” and left. I did not touch, sooth, rock, or anything. And then if she was still fussing 5 minutes later I would repeat the script. The Wave can be used to help them get to sleep or for breaking the habit of midnight awakenings. For us, this system worked like a charm. Chandra zonked out really easily though we did have to repeat the Wave a few times to break her habit of a 3am quasi-feeding. At this age her stomach is big enough where she doesn’t need the food; she just wanted a warm nipple. And who can blame her? It was also important to have her moved out of our room at this point. We can’t do the Wave if we are already there and she could sense our proximity.

Interval: Daycare

The massive debate of “day-care vs. stay at home” is hilariously outside the scope of this blog. Needless to say, different solutions work best for different families. The fourth month was also when we started daycare. Honestly–for us–it was a non-event. I dropped off Lil’ Chandra at our Bright Horizons where she immediately found this awesome toy she could both chew and grip. I stood mournfully in the doorway, “Good bye …I’m leaving now…I love you!” Turned out, she was just fine. The more difficult part was managing the parents. It was really hard on Benalish Momma as she had a deep seated fear that her vulnerable, tiny baby would be sobbing on the floor and no one would help her. But we got through it, she spoke to the daycare director several times, and the more we saw Lil’ Chandra develop (and we got to reclaim pieces of our lives) the more we decided this is what was best for our family.

180 Days+

I freely admit that we were a little slow to start introducing solid foods. Again, it felt like we just hit a smooth plateau where we figured out how to *do* things. And now we have to create a brand new set of challenges! Fortunately we asked for some tips from our primary daycare teacher (another plus to daycare: the teachers there have literally seen everything 100 times before. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel). She recommends a gradual procession of interacting near food, interacting with food, and gradually mucking around with it in her mouth. Now we are just at the point where Lil Chandra shovels everything into her face with reckless abandon. She has a very specific pose: slouch, grip the table with the right hand and use the left hand to pick out food to eat. Messy but adorable.

This was the point where we added some new Infrastructure.

• High Chair: Oxo Spring Sprout
• Food: Peter Rabbit Food Pouches (very simple mixes of *just* fruit and veggies, with nothing else added. However, the babies never like the beets. Never. 0% success rate at the entire daycare)
• Mesh Pacifiers. Sheer genius: it’s a pacifier that has this mesh sack that you put food in. The baby then sucks on it, gets used to flavors, occasionally demonstrating alarming suction strength sucking it dry.

Alright, that’s as much advice as I have for newborns. I’m excited for you and your family!