If you’re a new, first-time mom, especially if you’ve not spent much time around babies, you might be at a loss when it comes to things like bathtime or a baby who won’t sleep at bedtime. Help! My Baby Came Without Instructions can be very helpful for you. Much of the content also serves as good reminders for those of us who have already been there, in the stress of the moment.
It is not a “how-to” book, per se. Rather, it’s full of lists of tips and tricks – the sorts of suggestions you might get from your mom or a friend if you called for help – categorized by topic. There are chapters about when baby won’t stop crying, sleep time, bathing, feeding, burping, teething, bragging/comparisons, balancing everything, taking care of yourself, babysitters, holidays, babyproofing, and day care, and a chapter just for daddies.
It’s all pretty mainstream advice, and largely sound. I do have a concern with the chapter on starting solids. It says “there is no magic age to begin solid foods,” which is good. (Guidelines for how to tell when a baby is developmentally ready might have been helpful, but I strongly suspect that most modern pediatricians don’t even know what these are.) She continues, though, by saying that if baby is still waking up several times a night after the first two months, it might be time to start cereal! Two months is way too early to be feeding solid anything and, as I’ve discussed in prior posts, cereal is (despite our cultural conditioning) actually probably all but the worst thing to feed to a very young infant.
Apart from this, most of the tips are helpful. A few examples: “[At bathtime T]ake the baby’s diaper off last. Naked babies go the bathroom anyplace.” “Put the spoon in the baby’s mouth sideways. This keeps most of the food from coming back out.” “A glass table can break if a baby climbs on it. Remove the table or replace it with Plexiglas.”
The bulleted-list style of the book, combined with the categorical chapters, makes it easy to find what you need at a glance, without having to read the book from cover to cover. Scattered throughout the text are grey boxes with true (funny) stories from real parents. These lighten the tone of the book and help keep it from being boring.
This might make a helpful addition to a baby shower package for a first-time mom. If, however, you don’t know how to change a diaper or bathe an infant, you would be looking for something else.
Disclosure: The author provided copies of this book to facilitate this review and for giveaway during our Baby Shower for Jesus. As always, all opinions are entirely my own.
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