The New Parent Second Month Survival Guide

The following is intended to keep you sane and to offer hope. It’s nor particularly well formatted or well thought out, nor will it solve all your problems because your experiences and mine will vary significantly.

Looking back at the first month I’d say I went from about 88% mental capacity on average down to about 39% and stuck there except for the really bad days and nights.

At home survival

You’ve got your loved one loaded and at the home now for a month and your’e entering the second month. Things start changing in baby and the three or four thing debugging you used to be able to do stops working.

Baby’s new needs

It used to be gas, milk, diaper, and sleep would overpower baby.

Now it’s gas, milk, diaper, sleep, grumpy, hot, cold, rocking, bouncing, and baby actual will start poking out quite a bit more. Baby’s going to need some mild entertainment as well

Maggie decided that at least an hour a day is going to be spent rocking her. To these ends we enabled rocker-mode and she hangs out for about 20-30 minutes at a time in the auto-rocker watching the mobile above.

Why are you hitting yourself?

Her arms have some power behind them now, and she uses it to flail wildly when she’s passing out. She’s punched herself into a crying fit a few times now.

Swaddling has become more common an occurrence, although while holding her the swaddle is extremely loose.

Recognition = serve me

At about this age as far as I can tell you get categorized as either food or heat source. I’m currently heat source. If all else fails to calm baby, I have to strip down and go lay in bed with her and act as the swaddler and heater.

Gas starts becoming funny

Baby can occasionally find farting amusing. Real smiles also start peeking through, although more smiles are gas than not. If your baby’s smiling for no reason you can expect a toot in 3-7 seconds, or a cry in about a minute.

Your baby’s not going bald

The baby’s first month they probably started growing a lot of hair, now it looks like it’s thinning. It’s not. The baby’s skull has gotten significantly larger. New hairs are coming in. You’ll notice bald-looking streaks along the side of the head in some infants.

Mine looked like she had a skullet and a Picard going on for a couple of days although the hair has come in.

Your memory will start to come back

You’re still not getting the proper amount of sleep, but your body will adapt to shorter sleep cycles. You may get the agitated bunny stares and desire to accomplish everything now, right this instant.

Might as well go with it, it works. It was about week 6.5 that I started feeling like I wasn’t in a minute-to-minute world any more and things started cohering.

Baby with friends

Friends and baby go well together until baby explodes in crying mess. What I’ve found works pretty well is remove baby from friends, calm her down, bring her back in. Alternately calm her down, get her to sleep, don’t bring her back in.

Friends should be smart enough to understand that sometimes you put the crying baby down and remove it from overstimulation. If not you probably should seek new friends.

Overstimulation

When all else fails, remove as much stimulation as possible. White noise generator, no tv, music, etc.

Eye snot

Baby may develop something that looks like there’s snot or milk coming out the eye socket. This probably is a clogged tear duct, which start producing tears at about a month to two months.

Wipe it lightly with a warm washcloth, if you’ve got some room or body temp boob juice, drop a couple of drops in the affected eye. Do not use formula for this. Formula contains no antigens that might help the baby and does contain bacteria-traps that might harm the baby. If it doesn’t clear up or looks worse call a doctor. Antibiotic eye drops may be needed.

For us it took about three days of looking like we’d punched her with a snot rocket before it cleared up with titty tang.

What’s that smell?

Baby’s going to start making some stinks. At this point you might want to consider the Diaper Genie or something better. Although I consider that thing to be the fail pail, the flip-top can is starting to smell with the stench of 1000 evils.

If you’ve got a lot of plastic shopping bags like they bag groceries in, you can put the crap-ridden diapers in it and the urine-soaked abominations in the trash. You can generally fold the diaper closed and minimize smell additionally.