Baby on the way...

So, I am only a few months away from becoming a Dad for the first time. Everything is healthy, we’re very excited and now we know the sex of the baby. Things really couldn’t be better. I’ve now begun reading up tips online - how not to drop the baby, for example!

Any useful tips on how not to screw up?

Excited but very nervous man here.

 

Congratulations Reggy.
As someone blessed with not having children I'll just wish you good luck!

 

Congrats.

With the first everything is new, and sometimes you feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Basically the baby won't fall apart if you hold him/her wrong, they won't die of starvation if you wait an extra half an hour for a feeding, sometimes babies get runny noses, the runs and vomits everywhere but doesn't mean it's the end of the world.

Most importantly ensure the your child is a hornet.

 

Congratulations Reggy!
The first eighteen years are the worst!

 

there are no tips. Do it you own way

 

I agree about ensuring they are a hornet, going to football with my sons is much envied by my friends as it brings a certain closeness other family's may not have. To have that common ground, excitement, and disappointment together is not to be sniffed at! My wife is jealous as I get to have a good chat with my son on the journey there and back which she says she doesn't have! (Son here is 37 and in the states ( who watches all games legally live 40)

 

Contrats.

The best tip I can give you is this;

For the first year or two the baby will wake in the night and cry. You will both be bolt upright in bed and there will be the thorny question of who goes to check all is ok. It is very useful to be able to build a 1.0 second delay in your reaction time or better still pretend not to have woken up. Your wife will rush off to delay with the emergency. The number of times I got up in the morning and heard tales of sick and poo being cleaned up, clothes and cot sheets changed etc, and been able to say "Really ? When ? I just slept right through...."

No-one can prepare you for the impact of having a baby. Friends say life will change when you get married. It doesn't, they lied. They then say life changes when you have a baby and you think "yeah I've heard that one before". But blimey it does. The best moments are better than you can imagine. The worst moments are worse than you can imagine. The good outweighs the bad several fold. Just the feeling that you are now jointly wholly responsible for another human being's life, health, future prospects, personality etc can be pretty overwhelming but you get used to it and it gives you a secondary purpose in life behind following Wfc !

 

...and 99.9% of the time if your baby is crying it's because its peed its nappy, got wind, is hungry or just tired. It's not ill or in pain !

 

My two haven't started school yet but this 100%. Although it's a great experience @Reggy , you can pretty much say goodbye to life as you know it now. So enjoy the next few months of peace is my best advice.

Oh and don't waste money on loads of new tat from the baby shops. The second hand market is huge. Obviously you'll want to get baby Reggy some nice new bits too but don't fall for the £500 pram, the £300 car seat, the £150 bottle washer... if you can't say with any certainty right now that you'll need something specific wait until the baby's here and decide then.

 

Do it your way.

 

I recommend Pamela Druckerman's 'French Children Don't Throw Food'. A revealing read.

 

Preparation for parenthood is not just a matter of reading books and
decorating the nusery. Here are 12 simple tests for expectant parents
to take to prepare themselves for the real-life experience of being a
mother or father.

1. Women: to prepare for maternity, put on a dressing gown and stick a
beanbag down the front. Leave it there for 9 months. After 9 months,
take out 10% of the beans. Men: to prepare for paternity, go to the
local chemist, tip the contents of your wallet on the counter, and tell
the pharmacist to help himself. Then go to the supermarket. Arrange to
have your salary paid directly to their head office. Go home. Pick up
the paper. Read it for the last time.

2. Before you finally go ahead and have children, find a couple who are
already parents and berate them about their methods of discipline, lack
of patience, appallingly low tolerance levels, and how they have allowed
their children to run riot. Suggest ways in which they might improve
their child's sleeping habits, toliet training, table manners and
overall behaviour. Enjoy it - it'll be the last time in your life that
you will have all the answers.

3. To discover how the nights will feel, walk around the living room
from 5pm to 10pm carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 8-12 lbs. At
10pm put the bag down, set the alarm for midnight, and go to sleep. Get
up at 12 and walk around the living room again, with the bag, till 1am.
Put the alarm on for 3am. As you can't get back to sleep get up at 2am
and make a drink. Go to bed at 2.45am. Get up again at 3am when the
alarm goes off. Sing songs in the dark until 4am. Put the alarm on for
5am. Get up. Make breakfast. Keep this up for 5 years. Look cheerful.

4. Can you stand the mess children make? To find out, first smear
Marmite onto the sofa and jam onto the curtains. Hide a fish finger
behind the stereo and leave it there all summer. Stick your fingers in
the flowerbeds then rub them on the clean walls. Cover the stains with
crayons. How does that look?

5. Dressing small children is not as easy as it seems: first buy an
octopus and a string bag. Attempt to put the octopus into the string bag
so that none of the arms hang out. Time allowed for this - all morning.

6. Take an egg carton. Using a pair of scissors and a pot of paint turn
it into an alligator. Now take a toilet tube. Using only sellotape and a
piece of foil, turn it into a Christmas cracker. Last, take a milk
container, a ping pong ball, and an empty packet of Coco Pops and make
an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower. Congratulations. You have just
qualified for a place on the playgroup committee.

7. Forget the Peugeot 205 and buy a Sierra. And don't think you can
leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don't
look like that. Buy a choc ice and put it in the glove compartment.
Leave it there. Get a 20p piece. Stick it in the cassette player. Take a
family-size packet of chocolate biscuits. Mash them down the back seats.
Run a garden rake along both sides of the car. There. Perfect.

8. Get ready to go out. Wait outside the loo for half an hour. Go out
the front door. Come in again. Go out. Come back in. Go out again. Walk
down the front path. Walk back up it. Walk down it again. Walk very
slowly down the road for 5 minutes. Stop to inspect minutely every
cigarette end, piece of used chewing gum, dirty tissue and dead insect
along the way. Retrace your steps. Scream that you've had as much as you
can stand, until the neighbours come out and stare at you. Give up and
go back into the house. You are now just about ready to try taking a
small child for a walk.

9. Always repeat everything you say at least five times.

10. Go to your local supermarket. Take with you the nearest thing you
can find to a pre-school child - a fully grown goat is excellent. If you
intend to have more than one child, take more than one goat. Buy your
week's groceries without letting the goats out of your sight. Pay for
everything the goats eat or destroy. Until you can easily accomplish
this do not even contemplate having children.

11. Hollow out a melon. Make a small hole in the side. Suspend it from
the ceiling and swing it from side to side. Now get a bowl of soggy
Weetabix and attempt to spoon it into the swaying melon by pretending to
be an aeroplane. Continue until half the Weetabix is gone. Tip the rest
into your lap, making sure that a lot of it falls on the floor. You are
now ready to feed a 12-month old baby.

12. Learn the names of every character from Postman Pat, Fireman Sam and
Tennage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When you find yourself singing "Postman
Pat" at work, you finally qualify as a parent

 

Beekayess, you should have changed a few of the less contemporary references rather than just cut and paste. Ford Sierra?

Here's an interesting site about how many cars of various models are still on the road. https://www.howmanyleft.co.uk/?page=1&q=ford+sierra
The only models of Sierra with significant numbers left are Cosworths.

 

That's fine if you marry a French person!

 

...and what's "a cassette" ?

 

Is the moral, adopt a French baby ?

 

Stick with the one because it's the hardest decision ever picking your favourite after that.

 

ohhh the hours of joy you've missed.

 

Didn't miss it. Still have 100s...somewhere.
Remember getting one stuck in the car rad/cassette on holiday in Turkey. Got it out to fix and the wind from the window caught it and the whole tape unwound in the car. No more Cure, stranglers, or E costello music that holiday.

 

Don’t ever put her in the corner. Nobody does that!

 

I have just one piece of advice: try not to start sentences with 'So...'
Good luck with the baby, though.

 

1. Your life as you knew it is over
2. Bye bye sleep
3. Bye bye friends
4. Its amazing

 

Don't heap expectation on yourself. There are thousands of idiots out there who tell people how they should feel and what having a child should be like.

You might not feel how you thought you would but that's OK. You may think you're doing a bad job, but it can be incredibly hard work and as long as you're holding it together, you're doing well.

 

Congrats, I'm in a similar situation myself. Baby due in January. Only difference is, we're not finding out the sex. Booked in our NCT classes for November time, I had been recommended by many friends and family that doing these is really worth it.

I will of course teach him or her the lucky Watford sitting on the loo technique. I need an understudy.

 

There is a thread on here somewhere that I started at the latter end of 2014 about the impending birth of my daughter, who was born in February 2015. It would be interesting to look back on if anyone can find it.

It is terrific fun, some days are hard but nothing you can't handle. Just chip in and do your bit, that way you'll both get a break fairly regularly. Our routine in the early days was for me to take our daughter out for a few hours on Saturday morning so my wife could have a kip, cup of tea, pamper or whatever she likes. Sunday morning she would return the favour and I'd go back to bed with a coffee and the papers to read the football.

As has already been mentioned, don't get too neurotic when they cry. Normally a boob/bottle, cuddle or a nappy change will do the trick. And as they grow up a bit you'll learn that they do bounce when they bump into things and fall over - they are much tougher than I gave them credit for. My daughter is now 3 and a half and always having trips and falls to keep her knees permanently grazed. All a learning curve for her and I soon learnt the best thing to do was pick her up and tell her to get on with it.

Parental nature will mean you'll be fine. Just don't forget to make some time occasionally for you and your missus, that's very important.

 

And, speaking as a dad of five, the following fourteen are definitely no picnic either...

The best piece of advice I can offer is - never, ever agree to let your wife go shopping while you stay home to look after your beautiful baby daughter who is asleep in her cot. I can guarantee that, when your wife is as far away from home as possible, your daughter will wake up and discover poo in her nappy - then proceed to smear the cot, bedding, herself and the bedroom walls with it.

Twenty five years later, I still suffer from PPTSD.

 

My youngest son broke his finger in a slammed door (his brother not me !), leaving it just attached by the skin, no common blood vessels. After a lot of debate at the hospital they simply sewed it back together and it re-attached itself, as good as new. The other one impaled his head on the corner of a magazine rack. They are pretty much indestructable.

 

My daughters worst accident so far came when she opened the fridge and there was half a tin of beans in there, with the lid still attached but razor sharp. Her inquisitive hand went into the tin and back out slicing her finger open. Claret all over the kitchen floor, her, me, mum, the dog...straight to hospital for butterfly stitches and we were home an hour later. Within minutes of being home she was sat giggling at the telly, one hand bandaged up but happy to just use one hand to eat some crackers.

They are tough cookies.

 

Sleep like you'll never be sleeping again, have as much sex with the missus as you can, because both are off the agenda for a long long time.

Otherwise I echo exactly what UEA said, don't fall for the £900 pram nonsense. The best one we ever bought was the cheapest. Same with everything else in baby places, utter cr*p.

Common sense and babies work well together. Its as simple as that.

 

Haha, that made me laugh. Parents of active kids soon learn the best parking spots at A&E and how much it costs in change for 4 hours. I think I've paid for half of Mount Vernon's car park on my own.

 

DOH!

 

Without wishing to bring the joy level down a notch or two.....never, ever hold the baby in one arm/hand.

I wish someone had said that to me. Instead of me listening to the midwife who advised I should. I won't bore you with the details but my 4 year old son wages his revenge on me every day for dropping him at two weeks and him spending the next week in the PICU.

 

Oh and the midwives may treat your partner like satan if she can't breast feed brilliantly on day one. But many women struggle. So support her and if you need to use formula to supplement breast feeding then the baby is 'getting the best of both' without a doubt.

Maybe I should also say congratulations!

 

Go to ante natal classes and make lots of new friends. Local NHS or NCT.

 

Does your daughter post on here? If so, what's your side of that story, Ms BBS?