Parenting Guide to Your Baby's First Year
352
Parenting Guide to Your Baby's First Year
352eBook
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Overview
With its timely, in-depth advice and hands-on guidance, Parenting magazine has emerged as the child-care resource of choice for aware, involved parents. Now the editors of Parenting bring you a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute guide to the all-important first year of your baby’s life. With fully illustrated chapters organized in three-month increments from birth to first birthday, Parenting Guide to Your Baby’s First Year provides the essentials on everything you need to know about:
Your Baby’s First Hours: How newborns look, act, and feel • Making the most of your hospital stay • Taking your newborn home
The Adjustment to Parenthood: Dealing with postpartum blues • The challenging demands of a newborn • Older siblings
Feeding Your Growing Child: The pros and cons of breast and bottle • Strategies for dealing with picky eaters • Avoiding mealtime power struggles
Child Development: How your baby grows • Mastering motor skills • Baby’s social and emotional life
Health & Safety: First-year medical checkups • Baby-proofing your home • Common illnesses of infancy and early childhood
Special Concerns: Preventing SIDS • Living with colic • Developmental delays
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307829023 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2013 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 800,554 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I was lucky enough to know three other women at my office who were expecting around the same time. We picked out baby clothes together, shared fast-food cravings, and talked, talked, talked. We discussed baby names, the size of our bellies, our worries about labor, and our excitement about motherhood.
After our babies (two girls, two boys) were born, the new mothers’ club really took off. We exchanged dinners plus a great deal of advice and loving support. I received near-hysterical calls in the middle of the night and did my share of crying on friends’ shoulders. What made us weep? Happiness, fatigue, worry … well, who could understand better than another new mother that sometimes you don’t have a clue why you’re feeling the way you do? The emotions, challenges, and joys of the first year of life with baby aren’t always easily explained. But they certainly are a lot more manageable—even fun—when you can share them with folks who are in the same boat.
As a former editor in chief of Parenting magazine, I have been reminded again and again of this power of shared experiences. Parenting’s readers have always turned to the magazine for the authoritative advice for which it is known, but they love the magazine for the honesty of the voices and experiences of real parents presented in its pages. It’s that combination of expertise and accessibility that the editors of PARENTING and I had in mind when we conceived this Guide to Your Baby’s First Year. We’d love it if you thought of this book as your own new mothers’ club, a place where you can turn for practical, timely information, side by side with the experiences of many new mothers and new fathers, too; a club where you can find inspiration, reassurance, and answers to your questions; a club, in fact, with an index.
To deliver answers to your questions as easily as possible, PARENTING Guide to Your Baby’s First Year is organized chronologically. Information is served up when you really need it—whether you’re in the throes of baby’s first bout of colic or in the thrall of his first word. You don’t have to slog through a whole year’s worth of baby’s social development, for instance, when all you really want to know about is that belly laugh you just heard bursting from your 4-month-old.
After a chapter on newborns, all the information in the book—from baby-care basics (care and feeding, sleeping, health and safety) to baby’s development (physical, mental, social, and language)—is packaged into four chapters, one for each quarter of a baby’s first year. This ensures that age-appropriate information is easy to find and puts the emphasis on development where it should be—that is, that each baby has his or her own timetable of development and that there is a wide range of normal development. Since months are grouped together, the subject of walking, for instance, can be covered in the 10- to 12-month chapter instead of being arbitrarily dropped into a section on 11-month-olds—a much more realistic way of presenting how babies develop.
Each chapter also includes a section specifically about Mom and Dad’s development as parents. The transition to parenthood, while exhilarating, can also be rocky. One of the hottest topics of conversation in my new moms’ club was how motherhood changed us, scared us, delighted us—far more than we had ever expected.
Before I was a mom, for instance, would I have ever dreamed that I’d keep my daughter’s nasal aspirators as keepsakes (the rubber bulbs used to suck out a baby’s nose and mouth when she’s born)? Would I have been able to guess the identity of the little raisinlike thing in the memory box (an umbilical cord stump)? Would I have imagined that I’d let my own mother take a Polaroid of my engorged breasts? That I could happily watch a sleeping baby for hours? That I’d cry when the baby was born, cry when I went back to work, cry when she turned 1?
No, no, no, no, and no. There’s just no imagining all the delicious details of what your new life with Baby will be like. Your first year with your infant will be a unique journey, just as your pregnancy or adoption was. It is our hope that with PARENTING Guide to Your Baby’s First Year at your side, your trip will be enlightened and enjoyable. And that you’ll know you’re not traveling alone.
Anne Krueger
There will be a thousand memorable moments during your baby’s first year of life. But for many parents, it’s the time during and right after birth that is the most unforgettable—those first Technicolor minutes, hours, and days when your world revolves around your tiny bundle of joy and time seems to stand still. New parents often describe this special period as “intense,” “awesome,” “overwhelming,” and “unreal.” How could it be anything but, when life as you know it is about to change so dramatically?
Like all beginnings, this one will have its ups and downs, its highs and lows. Fatigue and fear are right up there with exhilaration and excitement. But at the end of the day, your family will have grown by one and your heart by leaps and bounds.
The First Minutes
The minutes leading up to the birth of a baby are often fraught with equal parts excitement and fear. After the birth, these emotions sometimes take a backseat to a potent mix of euphoria and exhaustion. So, get ready: the more you know about labor and delivery, and about your baby’s first minutes of life, the better you’ll be able to handle the physical challenges and the emotional roller coaster that is part and parcel of new parenthood.
In the Delivery Room
About 30 minutes before the birth of my first child, a wonderful labor nurse named Mary rolled in a full-length wardrobe mirror. For a second I worried that in addition to pushing I’d be asked to try on bathing suits or get my pants shortened.
“It’s to watch the baby come out,” Mary said as my husband and I stared blankly at the mirror.
Ah, the baby. After eight and a half hours of labor, the last one spent in what seemed like totally fruitless pushing, I had forgotten all about the baby.
“See, see there,” Mary said, pointing to the mirror. “Every time you push I can see a tiny bit of your baby’s head.”
My baby’s head? In that moment, it finally sank in: I was going to be a mom. Soon. Today. But not before I experienced 30 of the most intense minutes imaginable.
Having a baby is like that: surreal moments when time seems to stretch out forever followed by flurries of activity when you feel as if someone hit the fast-forward button when you weren’t looking. What exactly is going on in those final 30 minutes?
• You are pushing—and pushing. And if it’s your first baby, you’re probably pushing some more. Your labor attendants will be giving you lots of encouragement—from kind words and progress reports, to bringing in that mirror so you can take an inspiring look at the action.
• The baby makes her way down the birth canal and the crown of her head begins to stretch the perineum (the area between the vagina and the anus) in preparation for birth (typically, the baby’s chin is down on her chest and she’s facing Mom’s back). The practitioner gets in position to help the baby out. (Sometimes your partner is allowed to help “catch” the baby.)
• The staff prepares the equipment that’s needed to perform an episiotomy, cut the baby’s cord, and examine her once she’s born. A bassinet with warming lights is usually set up nearby.
• If it looks as if your perineum is going to tear and you and your doctor have decided on an episiotomy, the surgical cut is made right as the baby’s head crowns; given the circumstances, you probably won’t even notice the incision (until later).
• As the baby’s head crowns, you may feel the sting of the episiotomy and a release of pressure as the baby’s head and shoulders are eased out, followed by the rest of her body. Your baby is born! If you hadn’t already learned the sex of your child, this is when you’ll hear the news.
• Your newborn’s nose and mouth will be suctioned out with a nasal aspirator (see “Anatomy of: Baby’s First Breath,” above) and she may be put on your belly while her umbilical is clamped and cut (often by her delighted daddy).