When I first found out how many people ask or wonder about this question, I was stunned:
Do babies have gills in the womb?
They can’t be serious, right?
But the more I thought about it, the more the question made sense. After all, babies need oxygen, and while in the womb they’re submerged in amniotic fluid.
So how do they breathe?
Setting up the nursery before baby comes can be really exciting.
In theory.
When it comes down to actually painting the walls, shopping for furniture like swings and dressers, choosing a baby monitor, and assembling the crib, you might start to wonder what you got yourself into.
Like any home improvement project, designing and building a nursery can take a lot of time!
As a short parent myself, I feel your pain.
I’m about 5′ 5″, and I already know the frustration of cribs, strollers, and other baby gear that just aren’t built for me.
When it comes to strollers, there’s nothing worse than a model that’s too tall for your frame.
Pushing your baby around for long stretches should be comfortable, not torture! When the handlebars are too high, it definitely feels like the latter.
About to become a new father?
Congratulations!
You have so many things to plan for and be excited about. Building the nursery, learning to change diapers, and learning to survive on little to no sleep.
But right now you have to figure out what to do those first few weeks after baby comes home. Can you stay home with mom and the baby and get paid? How much unpaid leave can new dads take? What will happen to your salary and benefits when you go back to work?
My daughter’s curly hair is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it is stunningly gorgeous and seems to naturally fall into these incredible locks that I know straight-haired people pay a lot of money to emulate!
On the other hand, her hair causes her (and us) a lot of anguish, pain, and tears when it gets knotted up and tangled.
I remember the days of mixing formula extremely well.
We used to make big jugs of formula at night that would give us plenty for the next day.
The process was simple, but treacherous: Fill the jug with the right amount of water, carefully count out the scoops of formula, stir thoroughly.
When it comes to food, baby’s earliest days are, quite frankly, a bit of a nightmare
Breastfeeding is an enormously difficult and tiring job for mom. And formula feeding has plenty of headaches as well.
(You haven’t lived until you’ve forgotten how many scoops of formula you added to an entire jug of the mixture and had to dump the whole thing and start over.)
Poopy diapers are pretty gross. This isn’t exactly breaking news.
But for some parents, they’re REALLY, really gross, and especially hard to deal with.
It sounds like a dramatic excuse, but some people truly have intense nausea or severe gag reflexes and just can’t stomach a face full of baby stink for the time it takes to change a diaper.
When you’re getting the nursery ready for a new baby, everything revolves around one thing:
The crib!
It’s the centerpiece of the room, and it’s pretty much your baby’s home for the next couple of months, at the very least.
