The New Parent Third Month Survival Guide

The following is intended to keep you sane on to offer hope. It’s not everyone’s experience, it’s nor particularly well researched or formatted perfectly. Your experience will vary from mine, but I thought this might help.

Looking back at the second month my estimation is that I was running on three cylinders most of the time with some brief periods where I felt I was uniquely me again.

Baby on the go survival

You’ve got some time out in the world, you’re probably returning to some sort of normalcy with days of absolute insanity mixed in.

Baby’s new needs

Demon baby pokes out now for gas and sleep. Psycho demon baby where she screams so much her entire body heats up and starts sweating. There is no pleasing this child and I finally learned to recognize the signs of that one popping out and swaddle her and get her burped before the demon awakens.

She’s been sleeping without a swaddler quite a bit, but I notice she’s much more of an asshole. So I’m trying very limited swaddling at the moment as, well, that’s me.

Twilight / Sleep feeding

One of the newer things we discovered that kicked in in the second month for Baby M was that she can eat in her sleep. Waking up for a bit during the night when she’s protesting, you can stuff another 2-4 ounces of formula down her gullet and get another 3-4 hours of sleep.

Baby with friends

When baby’s pissed, baby is pissed. We spent a couple of weeks with asshole baby and friends. It can get to the point where it’s easier to stay in than it is to go out and have to deal with a screaming mentally unstable sweating lunatic.

Only advice I can offer here is to get baby napped and fed, and if baby doesn’t want to nap, well expect some hell.

Time to start making the baby do tricks

If your baby isn’t working on rolling over, head movement, etc, you’ll need to start working with her. Right now ITMama and I have a fairly lazy baby who does not want to get on her stomach, but she has pretty good head control. I’ve been teaching her how to roll mostly so she doesn’t flip the hell out when she’s on her stomach.

You’ll also want to be sitting the baby up in some sort of apparatus which allows them to use their neck and back to sit. About 10 minutes a day total of baby exercise is probably all they need during this time, so don’t go overboard and hire a trainer or leave your munchkin face down for too long.

Things you might need

If your county has a recycling program, you may want to get additional bins. I don’t know how there’s so much cardboard for so little a baby. Between cartons, packaging, etc we can fill up two 90-gallon recycle bins in about two weeks.

If you drink a lot of soda, or have gotten back on the beer train, you might want to consider getting a wall mounted can crusher or just taking out sleep frustration rage outside with some cans.

Get more wet wipes than you think you could ever need. I originally estimated at 1-2 per change, but then they started getting used for drool, poocanos can take 8, etc…

Things you might have figured out

Baby is surprisingly adept at not bursting into flame whenever you do something wrong.

You’ll start noticing faces that a baby makes pre-freakout.

At about three months they can start understanding very little baby sign language… you should learn a few words as it’s pretty simple (food, milk, change (diaper,) sleepy, pacifier) and if your kiddo works with it, yay, if not you wasted 4 minutes memorizing easy signs.

You’ll probably have run into at least one judgmental asshole in public by now. Me and ITMama ran into two at a festival within ten minutes. It’s best just to agree that you’re attempting to kill your child and are a horrible parent for taking them out into the world when it’s in the low 80’s.

Toys, pretty useless, baby up to three months doesn’t seem to have much interest in ’em.

Baby needs a lot of eye contact.

Things that just don’t seem to work

• reason
• Hands-free feeding (it will soon supposedly, but takes a bit more effort)
• Things that supposedly calm a baby without requiring at least one arm

Payoff

Seems to be coming. There’s a lot more cute in the baby than there was before.