New Dad Survival Kit for the First Two Months

Just over two months ago, my beautiful daughter Evelyn was born, my second child.

After three hours of fairly intense, anesthetic-free labour, my wife finally gave birth to our baby girl. I lifted her up for the first time, incredulous all over again at how tiny she was. Two days later we brought her home and we were a family of four. Our first day home with baby was full of exhaustion and joy.

Evelyn’s so damn cute. She also strongly resembles her big sister at her age, so have this strong sense of déjà vu whenever I play with my baby girl.

Taking care of our second baby is way, way easier when comparing to our first child. My wife and I are now experts at this baby thing.

I also actually wrote a baby book with advice for new dads that served me as a manual for my newborn baby. I read the whole thing again for preparing for fatherhood, all over again.

Here’s three things from my baby book that helped me enormously in caring for the new addition in our family.

Physical and Mental Fitness Paid Off

I know that taking care of a newborn baby requires me to be physically and mentally fit. Being a new father (again!) requires hard work. The hard work is far less hard if your mind, body, and spirit are fit for the challenge.

Physical prep: In preparing for fatherhood, I set for myself a goal to drop down to 175 lbs (from 186 lbs) by the time my daughter was born. I also needed to be physically fit, which to me means being able to work out for an hour.

To do this, I had a two stage plan:

Month 1: Exercise 5 times a week to raise my resting metabolic rate and to get fit.
Month 2: Go on a ketogenic diet (i.e. extreme low carb).

During Month 1 I didn’t lose any weight at all. The purpose was to (a) get physically fit for baby-rama, and (b) increase my calorie burn rate during the day, so that when I started my diet my body would be efficient at burning energy.

During the first week of Month 2, I lost a whopping 7 lbs due to the ketogenic diet. This weight loss was likely due to water weight, as body chemistry changes when you don’t eat carbs. I achieved my target weight of 175 lbs 3 days before our baby was born. That’s 11 pounds lost in two months!

Mental prep: Mentally, I set to work being grateful for what I have. I keep a daily journal where I write down 3 things that I am thankful for every day.

I made sure I went to church. When I go to church I feel like some batteries are getting re-energized somewhere inside me.

I also put a lot of work preparing my 3 year old for the new arrival. I read to her kid’s books on welcoming a newborn baby. My daughter and I set up baby equipment together. Working with my little preschooler also helped me get in the mindset of bringing a new life into the world.

Wife-Care

Giving birth was easier and faster for my wife the second time around. Sort of.

Certainly the labour was faster. Within 8 hours of arriving at the hospital, my second daughter was born. It took more than a day for our first baby.

On the other hand, the anesthesiologist was too busy this time around to give my wife an epidural, so she Rambo’ed through the delivery without painkillers.

The plus side of giving birth without an epidural is that the recovery is way, way faster. My wife was simply less groggy from the waist down, right away. So she could walk pretty much a few hours after giving birth.

My post-partum care of my wife was thus a lot easier than the first time around. Still, I made sure that I did the following during my wife’s six week recovery period:

•  All physical chores. Yup, all of them.
•  The bulk of the care and feeding of my older child.
•  All cooking, or at least the arranging of food arrival at our house (a.k.a. take-out).

I also made sure that I paid attention to my wife’s mental state. Giving birth is physically and mentally traumatic. I made sure that my wife got regular visitors from family and friends. After a month, we started to go outside and enjoy the summer weather. I kept an eye on how much sleep she got—as a new mother, it’s really easy to lose track of this.

Today, a little over two months later, life is pretty much back to normal at the homestead.

Baby Care: All Systems Are Go

When it comes to baby care, efficiency and know-how are key to running a peaceful and happy household.

Baby systems are a must.

If you don’t have your baby systems in place, then taking care of a newborn becomes ten times harder. Because my wife and I knew exactly what we are doing the second time around, things got way, way easier.

Here’s 3 systems that we employed to great effect.

Baby bottle system: If you’re feeding formula or expressed breast milk to your baby, then you need a baby bottle system. Check out my blog post on this topic on how to set up your baby bottle system.

Diaper changing system: Diaper changing is not even close to the hardest thing about baby care. It’s easy once you set up your diaper changing battle station. My podcast on this topic is here, and I also have a blog post here.

Baby calming system: A new dad is the Calmer-In-Chief. My wife sometimes just gets fed up with our baby and passes her off to me to calm her down. I’m proud to say that I’m actually better at baby calming than she is! I’ll write a blog post about this topic soon, but here’s a couple of quick pointers: bouncing up and down on an exercise ball or taking baby outside are magical ways to calm a baby down.

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From my experience and others I’ve talked to, welcoming a second child into the family is far, far easier than the first. I boil that down to a few things:

• Our increased competence as parents of a newborn baby.
• We also had a lot of infrastructure in place the second time around, such as baby furniture, clothing, and baby bottles.
• My wife healing much faster the second time around, which is really a thing.

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If you’re a first time, or even second or third time dad and want to know how to make this whole baby care thing much easier, check out my book for new dads, “A Man’s Guide to Newborn Babies”, available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.