The Book

There’s always a book (it’s usually quite colorful and has the following keywords in the title or the subtitle: children, happy, wonders, parenting and easy). And the book will have all the answers, and it will tell you what to do if you wish your child to become the president of your country and what to avoid if you do not wish your offspring to off a few of his schoolmates later on. It will be a firm teacher and a loving friend. And will tell you absolute crap and make your life miserable.

There’s no way to organize anything for the first few months. You’ll barely keep up with the daily tasks and activities. Just to show you an example: You’ll get up at 3:00 am (babies think of this as morning), get the baby out of the cradle, fetch some warm water, change the diaper (twice), wake-up mum to feed the baby, make the coffee, change the diaper again and put the baby back to sleep by carrying it around the apartment for a few hours. Around 9:00 am it will smile at you and fall into deep sleep. You’ll enjoy a brief moment of bliss knowing you’re a good daddy. At this moment the book will tell you that responding to your baby crying at 3:00 am was wrong, changing diapers at night will make your baby a violent sex offender, feeding a gremlin after midnight would have been a better idea, mum drinking coffee will cause the baby to stop drinking her milk and that babies must learn to comfort themselves and must not be held in arms for more the 30 minutes.

So I recommend a book that’s more like something a man can use. So pick up a copy of The Baby Owner's Manual at amazon. Your mileage may vary.

Though now I think the section on programming sleep mode needs to be expanded…