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TIPS FOR NEW PARENTS | PREPARING FOR BABY: WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW BEFORE BABY ARRIVES

 Modern Mommy Doc


PUBLICATION DATE:

Dec 23, 2017

TIPS FOR NEW PARENTS | PREPARING FOR BABY: WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW BEFORE BABY ARRIVES

 Modern Mommy Doc

CATEGORY: NEW MAMA + BABIES

I give medical advice and tips to new and expectant parents all day long as a pediatrician. When I had my own baby, though, I learned some more personal lessons about having a newborn. Some were practical, some were about perspective. Many were downright humbling. Here are some of the most important tips for new parents that I have my own little love nugget at home. Hopefully, they will help with your mommy (or daddy) metamorphosis as well:


1. The birth is just the beginning.


Before baby arrives, many parents focus primarily on learning about the birth of their child versus learning about the weeks and months after that fateful day. There's good reason: the act of giving birth is scary and can be painful. Still, I encourage parents to focus more on baby than on birth. After all, you will be taking care of another human being 24-7 and the hospital does not send home an owner's manual.


2. Buy a bunch of zip up sleepers. 


No snaps, no buttons. When your baby is a newborn, you want easy access to all those poopy diapers, especially at 2 am. I will never forget my husband fumbling with my daughter's tiny snaps in the middle of the night, mumbling under his breath about the makers of such "ridiculous get ups." He was right. Lose the fancy clothes while at home until about 3 months. Stick with zip-up sleepers at night.


3. Adjust your expectations. 


You will have fun again, you will have date nights, you will at some point (kind of) get back to who you were before you became mommy or daddy. Right now, though, it's time to dig in your heels and expect there will be a lot of tough days and nights. There will be moments of complete bliss, to be sure, but being a parent can be, well, annoying at times. You don't have your freedom, you lose control of your schedule, you get lost in a sea of feeding and pooping and sleeping, then doing it again. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Is it hard? You betcha. Better to be mentally prepared for a period of awkward transition than to expect smooth sailing from the get-go. Becoming a parent, just like starting any new and challenging job, usually involves a steep learning curve at the beginning.


4. Before your baby is born, buy these things:


➜ 1 small box of newborn diapers. You don't know how big your son or daughter will be and you'll be sad if you have a storage shed full of newborn diapers when your child is a size 1 within a week of birth.


➜ Tons of wipes.


➜ A hospital grade breast pump and Vitamin D drops if you plan on breastfeeding. Breastfed babies need 400 International Units of Vitamin D per day until they reach 1 year of age.


➜ Swaddle blankets.


➜ Zip-up sleepers.


âžœ A place for your baby to sleep. Many parents use a bassinet next to their bed for the first few weeks of their baby’s life for easy feeding during the night.


➜ A car seat.


These are the essentials. You will receive and buy many more items but, if you have these things, you'll be able to survive the first few weeks.




5. Embrace Technology.


Diapers, cleaning products, baby toys: they can all be purchased online and delivered to your home for a small fee. Have a friend set up an online meal calendar (mealbaby.com, for example) so that friends can bring warm food to nourish your family. This is the time to take advantage of a few modern conveniences. Really, you have more important things to do than drive around town, like sleep and bond with your baby.



6. Plan to accept advice.


It really irritated me at first, especially as a pediatrician, when my mom would give me parenting advice. She hadn't done this is 30 plus years, what did she know? But the reality is, she had the ability to see things about my daughter that I could not. She also was not exhausted like I was. Same goes for friends with older kids - they can be a huge wealth of information. As my friend said when I was just 4 weeks into the process, "Don't feel bad if you don't always know what to do. You went to medical school, not mommy school! I imagine the things they teach in mommy school are much different than what they teach in anatomy class."


Just take everything as a suggestion and as an interesting perspective and then filter, filter, filter. Not everyone's opinion is something you will use with your own child but, if you are open to others' observations, you will be less frustrated and more successful.



7. You will buy a lot of stuff. 


Some things your baby will love, some your baby will hate. Some your baby will hate now and love later. Don't throw it out or sell it until you are really sure you don't want it or until you have a second child who also hates it.



8. Embrace the fact that your home will not be a serene haven of adult life for several years.


If you have toys and play mats and kid's stuff all around, do not stress out that your house will never be as neat and tidy as it once was. It won't be. That's life. Congratulations, you have a child now. Where there was serenity, there will now be a little being full of joy and life (and noise and mess).



9. Focus on sleep. Then focus some more.


 The sleep habits you help your child develop from a young age (as in 2 weeks old), are important. However, if you fail (or feel like you are failing) at getting your child to sleep well, it's wasted energy to beat yourself up. I read all the books and tried my best to help my child develop healthy sleep habits. At 3 months, it felt like I was spinning my wheels. Just now (at 6 months old) our hard work is really paying off.



Hey, the clichés are true: it goes SO fast.


You will cherish those little memories over and over, even the hard moments. And, even if you take a million pictures, you will wish you had more.


Want more help winning at parenting without losing yourself? Check out our self-care and newborn care courses.



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Episode Takeaways: This is not an episode about “how to grow a multimillion dollar business” or how to double your following overnight. I really shy away from talking about business because it’s disheartening to see that most of the people making online are people who are trying to teach you how to make money online. This is an episode that comes from many conversations I’ve had recently with people who are wanting to start a side hustle or even a full blown business, but are curious how to do that with the rest of life that’s going on around them. I’ve recently made a hugely drastic shift in my career and have moved from private practice into a company called Blueberry Pediatrics . It is a shift that still allows me to practice medicine as well as still running Modern Mommy Doc full time. The thinking behind this shift really is born out of these 8 tips I have about running a business while you’re working full time or maybe still taking care of your family. 1) Know your why. We’ve heard it a thousand times, but if we don’t know the driving force behind why we want to do a certain thing, it’s infinitely easier to stop doing it when things get hard. Ask yourself why you’re so committed to this one particular area. In my business, my why is to help, support, and encourage women (specifically working moms) so they don’t feel alone in their journey. So when I’m pulled away from my family for a time period or I’m exhausted from traveling, I remember the greater mission behind what I do. 2) Expect that you’re going to fail. I just pulled the plug on a project we had been working on at Modern Mommy Doc for two years: the Modern Mamas Club app. I thought it was going to be so valuable for moms, when in reality it was just duplicating what we already had. I learned so much through that process and at the beginning, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Failure is a natural part of growth. 3) Prepare to invest in your business. With your time, with your money, with your emotions. People ask me how I grew and I told them it took a lot of time and a lot of my own money. There were times that that was discouraging, but because all of this was tied to my why, I was able to push forward. 4) Figure out what you can outsource and what has to be done by you. At the beginning you might not have any money to outsource with. But set yourself up for success and know what you’ll hand off when you get to that point. Don’t waste time trying to do it all. 5) Network based on what you love & pay for good PR. When you want to grow your business, network with the people that you genuinely connect with, not just because you might get a sale. Figure out who it would be mutually beneficial for you to get to know. And when it comes to PR, you’ve gotta pay to play the game. PR isn’t for instant leads, but is also a long game like networking. You show up, do the interviews, and every once in a while something will pop and you might get a ton more exposure. 6) Prepare for other people to not be on your level and to try to pull you back down to theirs. No one wants the homeostasis to change. That’s why it’s so important to surround yourself (even virtually) who believe in you and/or who are on the same journey with you. It doesn’t have to be in the same industry, but look out for other working moms that you can get to know. 7) Give something back to yourself along the way. If you aren’t making a single dollar and giving it all away to the business, you’re down a quick path to resentment. I understand all the moms who just over-function and grind it out to get things done (I was one!) but you’ve got to get a reward from the thing that you’ve been putting so much into. A small way I do this is by working at a coffee shop a couple times a week. It reminds me that I’m so grateful for my job, that it’s flexible so that I work where I want, and that I’m in control of my life. A big way I do this is through a travel rotation with my kids and husband. Each trip I go on while consulting, I’ll rotate through taking one daughter, then the next, then my husband, then I’ll do a solo trip. These are trips they never would have been able to take on their own, and it’s a cool way my business gets to give back to my family. 8) The way you set up your business is a marker if you will be successful. Not the way you structure it, but the mindset you have around it. In fact, there are so many parallels between the way I run my business and the things I taught in my newest book, Doing It All: trying to build efficiency into how I do my tasks, batching my work, not spending extra time on stuff that doesn’t matter at all, swapping out for what others can do for me, pairing things that aren’t enjoyable with things that are, not letting things contaminate my time, and making sure my desk, home, and calendar are decluttered. More Blogs on this Topic: T he forgotten boundary: setting limits with yourself Thanks for the cookies in the breakroom, I’m still tired Wake up, working mama. Are you wasting your life? More Podcast Episodes on this Topic: T ranslating “mom skills” into “boss skills” How to be an ambitious, out of the box, career maker and an engaged mom How to claim your confidence as a working mom
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