Reddit reviews The Baby Book, Revised Edition: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two (Sears Parenting Library)

Obligatory link to /r/daddit

Grab some books, man, and just don't stress. There may be times when she has a mood swing or three, just forgive those instantly and ride it out. Foot massages, body pillows, healthy food, and books should take care of most things. Congrats.

This is a great book that will help you with literally everything baby related until age 2. Get it now though because it's lengthy.

I like the Dr. Sears baby book. It covers birth until age 2.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316198269/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

Oh hon, I feel you. This gets me because I felt the same way. I still do. I have a 19 month old toddler.

Start here: Parenting from the Inside Out.

This book will really help you decipher your family, and really give you hope and tools for not reproducing their problems onto your little beauty of a tiny awesome person.

It's pretty straightforward and incredibly useful.

Then read this and this. Yes read them while you're pregnant because again they will give you hope and insight.

Buy this book and start reading it now too. We call it the Baby Bible in our house.

It's a survival manual for the first year of their life. It has everything. I don't know how many times we've pulled it down and flipped to the index at 2:00 am. It's better than Google. It's fantastic. (That said, it has an angle like all parenting books, even though it tries not to. They are attachment parenting writers. Nothing wrong with attachment parenting per se, just an awareness all parenting books have angles, even the impartial ones.)

Also, if you're anything like me, avoid all the happy, glowing, blowing-stardust-and-glitter-up-your-ass, pregnancy books out there. These did nothing but enrage me. I'm talking about What to Expect and similar. Unless you like stardust and bullshit, avoid avoid avoid.

Basically if you go to a thrift store and there's 8 copies of the damn pregnancy or parenting book on the shelf, don't buy it.

Instead check out books like this and this and this.

Now I haven't read those exact books, unlike all my other recommendations above, all of which I've personally read as a scared, overwhelmed pregnant lady or new mom. But as long as you stay in the 'brutally honest' lane and away from the 'syrupy sweet, guilt laden, shame' lane, then you'll be fine.

Even in 2019 there's a mountain of mommy advice bullshit books out there. Keep your instincts and your wits about you, don't forget who you are. Stay strong. And work on yourself with books like Parenting from the Inside Out and the How to Talk books.

Congratulations! Parenting is a learn as you go excercise (every child is different), so I will not offer advice. However, we found the baby book useful.

Also, please read up on febrile seizures. This is not to alarm you, but it is the one thing the wife and I wish we were better informed about. Febrile seizures are not a big deal and have no lasting effects, but can be a bit nerve wracking if you're unprepared.

I highly suggest the book: The Baby Book, Revised Edition: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age.

It really helped my wife when she wasn't producing milk. It also helped me when I was alone with the kid. I had never been around children and it helped me understand what is normal and when and when not to worry.

I'm having a good time with Happiest Baby on the Block (though I think it's really slow and repetitive, and their "conclusions" (it isn't this, this, or this, so it MUST be this) are a bit, uh, presumptuous; I think the book is spot on for how to treat the baby, especially in the "4th trimester") and The Nursing Mother's Companion. And these aren't baby books, but my husband and I are also reading Ina May's Guide to Childbirth and The Birth Partner to prep for labor.

I have a few more books on my shelf to reference just in case, like Sears' The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two (but I am wary of anti-vacc notions of the book), Brain Rules for Baby, and for fun, Experimenting with Babies.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Baby-Book-Revised-Edition/dp/0316198269

All of the Dr. Sears books are great. They treat you and your baby like people, not projects to schedule or manage.

http://www.amazon.com/Thats-What-Theyre-Definitive-Breastfeeding/dp/159337285X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397570127&sr=1-1&keywords=so+thats+what+they%27re+for

This is kind of old, but a funny way to learn to succeed at breastfeeding.

http://www.amazon.com/The-No-Cry-Sleep-Solution-Through/dp/0071381392/ref=pd_sim_b_13?ie=UTF8&refRID=0NSBRKTSW2JNFCDDDGK6

This is the gentlest way to deal with sleep issues if you have them. I have never had sleep issues, though, as we coslept. In fact, I have never slept as much as I did when my oldest was a newborn. I slept 12 hours a night.

> What are some things that we can do early on that yall wish yall had done?

Start a budget and begin tracking your spending. I really like mint.com because it integrates all your accounts and categorizes spending automatically. The budgeting tools are also really intuitive and work well. I'd suggest figuring out the baby's monthly expenses and then starting to set aside that amount of money each month starting now. You'll help to build savings and also you'll get to simulate living on a baby budget.

If you're planning on using daycare, now is the time to start looking. Any place that's good will have a long waiting list for infants, and the cost is definitely something you want to start working into your budget. Here's a useful page I added to the wiki to help navigate this minefield

If you get the financial stuff figured out early it will minimize freaking out later on when you have fewer options and less time.

Oh, also, I found that reading about pregnancy was simultaneously boring and scary. I prefer to read about parenthood instead. I would recommend The Baby Book. It is biased toward attachment parenting for sure, but there is also a lot of great objective information about baby's developmental milestones as well as frank discussions about common problems that arise and several (attachment parenting) approaches to addressing them.

for practical / medical books, my wife and I would highly recommend the Dr. Sears book to all of our friends. our son is 4 and our daughter is 3 months, and we still reverence it :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316198269

the baby book. my daughter is a week tomorrow. love this book, lots of great tips, great information for both partners. coming from a dad.


http://www.amazon.ca/Baby-Book-Revised-Everything-About/dp/0316198269/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374470043&sr=8-1&keywords=the+baby+book

This all sounds pretty normal, and like a non-'problem' that will fix itself before you know it.

At least the kid sounds normal. What doesn't sound healthy:

> He blames me for the way she is.
> He says she's spoiled

You can't spoil a kid with love; dude has some bizarre thinking on this. And you both need to stop blaming and nagging. There's nothing wrong with the kid and if you spend the early years sniping at each other you will miss out on a really lovely time that flies by really quickly.

I would do more reading on normal babies -- this is something you might both read together.

> When I'm home and I try to hand her off for a bit she usually cries.

So don't hand her off. Stick around while she gets to enjoy both of you. Have family meals; have dad provide any needed assistance with solids. Play games together as a family. The more secure she is that mommy isn't just going to take off and leave her with daddy and never return, the easier it will be for you to leave. Keep building a good secure foundation, and don't force things she's just not developmentally ready for.

I bought [The Baby Book] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Baby-Book-Revised-Edition/dp/0316198269) before I even started trying to conceive with my first, just on a whim, having never heard of Attachement Parenting and everything clicked. It's a great resource on babies in general, but from a gentle, AP perspective. I'd recommend this book for ANY expecting parents, honestly.

[The Attachment Parenting Book] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Attachment-Parenting-Book-Understanding/dp/0316778095/ref=pd_sim_b_9?ie=UTF8&refRID=0WC7WNX0VS1BQNCQTK5F) contains a lot of the same information, but with some additional resources, and if I recall it goes into slightly more detail.

I'd also highly recommend [Attached at the Heart] (http://www.amazon.com/Attached-Heart-Parenting-Principles-Compassionate/dp/0757317456/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=0JWRN280KQTRGGP6NH0M) as an excellent resource for new moms who want to practice AP.

As for other resources, I belong to a lot of AP and gentle parenting groups on facebook which, while sometimes overly preachy or cloying, often offer great blog posts or affirmations to mull over. Even when I'm super busy with kids and life, I can usually spend five minutes to read a facebook post and often that's all I need to recenter myself and keep myself focused on my parenting goals.