Six Pieces of Advice I Ignored in the First Six Months

Like every visibly pregnant woman to ever stand in a Target checkout line, I got my fair share of unsolicited baby-rearing advice. Great grandmas, teenagers, other new moms – they all have helpful tidbits to share, and most of them are far from revolutionary. I mean, this stuff doesn’t just fall out of the sky – there’s surely some truth to it, for some people, sometimes. So I listened, smiled, nodded, made mental notes I hilariously thought I’d refer back to amidst the newborn fog.

Maybe it was the intense mama-instinct that kicked in when our critter was born, or maybe I should bottle and sell my fake-it-‘til-you-make-it confidence-boosting plan. But once I had a tiny burrito-baby to keep happy and healthy, the clouds parted and gave me permission to ignore all the advice and do whatever was best for my family at any given moment.

Among the well-meaning tips I ignored:

1. Accept all the help. I’ll admit, in the weeks leading up to my due date, I had a few attacks of, “Are we completely crazy to not have any immediate newborn help from someone who knows what in the world they’re doing?!” But we stayed the course, asking my out-of-state parents to wait two weeks before descending on their first grandchild. That time was ours to hibernate as a family, get into whatever semblance of a routine is really possible with a brand-new human and figure out and employ “our way” of doing things. By the time the grandparents arrived, we knew what help we needed and what we didn’t and were happy to hand over the lady of the hour without feeling like we were missing her first moments. [Note: I have no earthly idea how this strategy is remotely feasible without paternity leave or with other kiddos around.]

2. Buy all the gear. Don’t get me wrong: the number of items on our baby registry hit the triple digits (!!!) in the home stretch, so we were only so minimalist about this. But with limited space, we opted out of a lot of the but-you-won’t-be-able-live-without-a-[blank]! items, figuring we’d get them when we needed them. You know what? We didn’t. A bassinet would have only served as a fancy diaper holder. A briefly borrowed swing confirmed our suspicion that we just didn’t have a swing kid. I forgot bouncers existed until I saw one at daycare. We survived, we saved some pennies for the ol’ college fund and we could walk through the living room without tripping – win-win-win!

3. Take all the nap-ortunities. Also known as “Sleep when the baby sleeps” – and I call B.S. The last thing my body wanted to do when I told it to nap was to take a restless “nap” during which the main activity was trying to determine whether the crying baby was real or dreamed. I figured out fast that napping didn’t recharge me. So, when the baby nodded off, I set out to do whatever made me the absolute happiest in that moment. Often it was sleep-creeping on the sweetly snoring munchkin rising and falling on my chest. Sometimes it was showering. Sometimes it was walking the dog. Yeah, sometimes it was getting ahead on laundry or veggie-chopping or toilet-cleaning. Frequently, it was sitting on the couch as my husband and I tried to convince ourselves that yes, we did actually create a tiny human, and no, it’s not a fitful nap-dream.

4. Read all the books. Oh, how I thought I’d be a reader of baby books! Trained as a journalist, my M.O. is usually to read everything about everything until I feel like an expert – and of course that would only be amplified in a situation where my knowledge is crazy-low and the stakes crazy-high, right? Well, I didn’t read anything. I tried, once, to read the Happiest Baby on the Block but got one chapter in and gave up for good when our doula loaned us the DVD. We figured stuff out on the fly, gave a thing or two the old Google and felt surprisingly competent and confident.

5. Schedule all the stuff. The first time someone asked me what time the baby naps, I stared and blinked. The second time, I stuttered that we weren’t quite there yet. Subsequent times, I threw my head back and laughed. The boss lady taught us quickly that trying to sleep or eat or perform bodily functions by the clock would only lead to frustration on everyone’s part. We learned her sophisticated and subtle sign language – like trying to latch onto her grandpa’s shirt for a snack – and threw schedule to the wind. And what do you know? She slept plenty (and at night!), gained weight and filled those diapers right up, just like she was supposed to.

6. Cherish all the moments. Forced fun is the worst – especially when you’re covered in someone else’s vomit at 3 a.m. (college, anyone?), muttering to yourself over and over, “No matter what happens at night, the sun always comes up.” But by allowing myself to admit that not every moment is the most enjoyable moment of all time, I was able to see the humor in them and recognize the beauty in just how fleeting they are. Because nothing makes you feel more alive than stepping out of a blissful shower to your poo-drenched husband, extending to you a baby wrapped in half a roll of paper towels, looking quite pleased with herself.

Photos by Melissa Hayes Photography