Good friends of ours lent us a few pregnancy and baby books, and I found two of them most helpful. I would love to hear what books, blogs, and magazines other moms use to learn about child development and parenting.
- On Becoming Baby Wise by Gary Ezzo taught me a couple key points. Keep your baby awake during feedings to ensure a complete feeding and then keep your baby awake for a while after the feeding before napping again. So the baby naps, eats, then stays awake for a bit. Then repeat until night time. I got a bit obsessed with trying to drive a schedule too early for us, but once I realized I should just try to get this activity pattern down, we fell into our own natural routine that works out ok.
- The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer by Harvey Karp offers a really long explanation of the five S’s: swaddle, shush, swing, side-position, and suck. In her early days, we entirely depended on the swaddle and shush to calm Hailey down. There was one time I had to do all five S’s at once, and I was glad I had them in my new Mom arsenal. There was one week that I used a the windshield wiper technique that combines these and it worked like a charm when everything else failed. I wouldn’t really recommend reading this whole book, but just skimming the beginning of each of the S chapters might be helpful to other new moms.