A lot of guys get overwhelmed with the whole baby care thing, especially for the first child.
I mean, damn. There are so many things to do when you have a newborn baby in the mix.
- Diaper changing
- Baby bottle washing
- Calming
- Getting enough sleep
- … and so much more
Trying to figure out how to do each of these things is tough.
Fortunately, with the right upfront work, you can create systems to optimize and automate many of the tasks of baby care. The combination of these systems make up your Baby Care Flywheel.
I like the flywheel analogy when it comes to big, difficult challenges in life—such as having a baby. Starting up the flywheel is difficult at first, and you see little benefit—until the wheel starts spinning fast and actually begins to aid your effort.
A consolidated system of baby care is a lot like that. Putting work into optimizing your baby care systems upfront spins the wheel faster and faster until being a new dad becomes a piece of cake.
If you are a new dad, try putting the following systems in place to build your Baby Care Flywheel.
Diaper changing battle station.
A newborn baby pees and poos a lot. You might have to change as many as fifteen diapers a day, at least at first. It is really beneficial to build and optimize your diaper changing battle station.
The difference between an optimized and an un-optimized diaper system can be considerable. My optimized battle station has me changing diapers in a blazing fast 1.5 minutes. An un-optimized station can take 3-5 times that. Multiply that difference over fifteen diaper changes and you can see that a lot of time can be unnecessarily wasted changing diapers!
A fully optimized battle station for diaper changing.
Read about how to build your diaper changing battle station here.
Bottle-washing battle station.
If you feed your newborn baby expressed breast milk or formula, you are going to need a baby bottle washing battle station.
When my wife and I started out, we really had no system of washing baby bottles. We had four different types of bottles, so the pieces were difficult to sort out. We did not have centralized sub-stations for accumulating dirty bottles, sterilization, and drying. In other words, we sucked at washing bottles.
A seemingly innocuous kitchen… but this is actually a highly optimized battle station for cleaning baby bottles.
After two weeks of this non-system, I got fed up and got organized. You can read about how to build your bottle-washing battle station here.
Calming systems.
Calming is one of the key things that you can learn to make life easier for you as a new dad. Former President Barack Obama has been captured several times calming babies in a crowd at his events—the man is a pro and you can be too.
For calming, choose your weapons wisely. Here are my collection of tricks that I accumulated during my baby Victoria’s first year:
- Bouncing with baby on a yoga ball.
- Singing in a deep manly voice.
- Having my baby lie on my forearm face down, hand cupping her face for neck support.
- Going outside (seriously works everytime!)
Sleep rotas.
You and your wife totally need to figure out a system on how to get enough sleep.
Parents cannot properly take care of a baby when sleep deprived. It is simply not safe. It is also not safe for the bacon-earner to go out there and crash the car or get fired because of sleep deprivation.
Build a sleep rota and you can totally figure out how to get enough sleep. Read more about how to do this in the free preview to my eBook here.
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Building your Baby Care Flywheel essentially involves building several sub-systems. The more optimized sub-systems you build, the faster your Flywheel spins, until your baby care tasks start getting really easy.
It took me half a year to figure this stuff out on how to take care of a newborn baby.
I underwent lots of trial and error, research, and testing to optimize these systems. This resulted in an increasingly easier life for my wife and I as my daughter got older and we got wiser.
During the first few months of my daughter’s life, as I worked out my Baby Care Flywheel I wrote down everything that I learned.
This culminated in my book, A Man’s Guide to Newborn Babies. If you are serious about being an ace new dad and fully enjoying your child’s first year, check it out.
‘Till next time,
-Anthony Kim