More newborn survival tips

Month two, I’ve learned something valuable: Always have the next thing ready to go.

When you need something, baby is going to be crying hysterically, or you’re going to be doing liquid mitigation in an attempt to keep fluids off of your things. During these times I’d damned difficult to remove a “sealed for your protection” cap on baby’s gas relief, or peel back a metal tab on the container of formula.

So a quick and dirty list here

More newborn survival tips

• Open medicines, know what the dosing directions are before you need them. Attempting to find a chart or having to go to the internet to look something up while a baby is writing around like it’s a stuck pig will do noone any good. You’re going to have to look this information up anyway, so do it in advance.
• Open the next container of powdered formula a good three feedings before you need to open it. Imagine dealing with a sweaty grumpy baby, you’ve got to wash your hands before touching the formula, now you’ve got a wed hand and a sharp lid. Add to that the serving spoon may not be the same size if you’re not on the same brand, so you’ll need to dig it out and with wet hands you end up wasting formula.
• Down to 10 diapers? Get the next on deck. While you may know exactly where the next set of diapers is your partner, friends, trained monkeys may not. This can lead to massive liquid intrusion as baby has set with no restraints in place to prevent her from watering your wall.
• In every room the baby is going to be in have paper towels, a towel, wet wipes, and something that you could dump an exploded diaper onto without having to take a dripping mess down the hall into the nearest containment facility. You don’t have to use a trash can, it can simply be a piece of plastic that you can one-handedly position, but there should be something.
• In every room know your baby set-down spot, and even if friends are over make sure there’s a set-down spot for her. Babies are great, but things happen and you need to always have somewhere to set a baby even if you’ve got friends who would take her. May sound like overkill, but you’ll benefit even if you don’t have to set the baby there.
• Do not get multiple sets of the on-sale diapers. We learned the hard way that the sale diapers we got at Costco (not Kirkland’s which we love,) are shit. We learned that the hard way. With shit.
• On diapers, you want the wetness indicator. If it doesn’t have that, you’re going to be exposing the baby and opening yourself up for open-air-explosions needlessly if you need to figure out if she’s peed or pood.
• At two months a baby can sleep six hours straight, wake up, be fed, and sleep another couple. You may find yourself sleeping absurd amounts. There’s no tip here, this is just hope for you one-monthers.
• Paper towels are important to a changing room. When a baby is riddled with crap, setting baby down on a changing table, even a changing table pad, is going to end up necesitating washing the pad. While they’re designed to be washed, they dry out slower than a baby needs changing. Easier to have a paper towel to put under stank-ass.
• At two months, if you feel you’ve become a psychopath, the sleep will probably counteract that feeling. You might even start liking the baby from 2am-5am.
• If you move the medicine, pacifier, diaper, etc, make sure you show your partner where it’s moved to. Too much time was wasted in the first couple of months looking for something.
• Pacifiers are relatively cheap, but cheap pacifiers are shit and your baby won’t use them. Find a good one and get a few of them.
• Two parents with two cars = need for baby survival gear in each. Zip lock bag with a diaper, pacifier, some wet wipes, etc are extremely useful.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’ll get to those later.