The First Month With a Newborn: What Nobody Told Me

By Dave  ·  Dad Life  ·  showingupdad.com

The first month with a newborn is unlike anything you can prepare for. Here’s what actually caught me off guard.

My son is about 9 months old now. The first month feels both close and far away at the same time. I remember most of it. I just don’t remember what day any of it happened on.

That’s the first thing nobody told me. The days don’t really exist in the first month. There’s just a long, continuous stretch of feeding and sleeping and not sleeping and wondering if that sound is normal. By the time we hit the end of month one I felt like I had my bearings. Getting there was something else.

Here’s what actually caught me off guard.

Babies make a lot of noise when they sleep.

I did not know this. Nobody told me this.

The first time I heard it I genuinely thought something was wrong. It’s not snoring exactly. It’s more like grunting, squeaking, occasionally something that sounds like a small animal. I’d tiptoe over to the bassinet, stand there trying to figure out if something was wrong, then tiptoe back to bed trying not to wake anyone up. Rinse and repeat.

I did not need to wake my wife up.

Turns out newborns are just loud sleepers. Their little systems are figuring everything out and apparently that process involves making noises that will spike your heart rate at 2am. Once I knew it was normal I could actually relax a little. But that first week, every sound had me up and hovering.

The days run together.

I took extended leave after he was born. I thought that would help me feel present and grounded. It did, eventually. The first few weeks though, I couldn’t have told you what day of the week it was if my life depended on it.

The schedule, if you can call it that, is: he cries, you figure out why, you fix it, he sleeps, you try to sleep, he cries again. Repeat. Day and night stop meaning much when you’re cycling through that every two to three hours.

I change the diaper. She feeds him. We try to sleep. Two, maybe three hours later, we do it again. That was the whole month.

By the end of month one I had found some version of a routine. A loose one. But it was enough to make the days feel like days again. If you’re in the thick of it right now and everything feels like one long blur, that’s normal. It doesn’t last.

She was the natural. I was figuring it out.

I’ll be honest about this. My wife took to it faster than I did. She seemed to know things instinctively that I was still trying to get ahead of. I’d be researching what the next week or two should look like, trying to feel prepared for something you can’t really prepare for. I don’t say that to sell myself short. I was there, I was doing the work, I was showing up. But there was a clear difference in those early weeks between someone who was born to do this and someone who was learning on the job.

That was hard to sit with sometimes. The emotional weight of the first month wasn’t the sleep deprivation for me. It was the feeling of not knowing what I was doing, watching her know exactly what she was doing, and trying to be useful anyway.

What helped was finding my lane. I handled the diapers, especially at night. I took him on walks when she needed a break. I made sure she had time to herself, even just an hour, because a new mom who never gets a moment alone is a mom running on empty. That’s not good for her or for him.

Being a good dad in month one looked a lot like making sure his mom was okay.

Get outside. Both of you.

This sounds simple. It wasn’t.

In the first few weeks the idea of getting the baby ready, loading up the stroller, and going for a walk felt like an expedition. There’s a bag to pack, a time window to hit between feedings, a weather check. For something that takes twenty minutes it requires a lot of coordination when you’re running on no sleep.

Do it anyway.

Taking him to a different room, outside, around the block, it reset something in both of us. He’d calm down. I’d calm down. The change of scenery did more than I expected. It also gave my wife time alone in the house, which she needed more than she would say. Don’t wait to be asked. Just take the baby and go.

Nothing goes to plan. That’s actually fine.

We had a plan for the first month. A loose one, but a plan. Feeding schedule, sleep schedule, who handles what and when. The baby had no interest in any of it.

The faster I let go of what I thought it was supposed to look like, the better it got. Not because things got easier, but because I stopped adding the stress of failing a plan on top of the stress of a newborn. Some nights went smoothly. Some nights were rough. The ones I handled best were the ones where I walked in with no expectations.

A loose routine is worth having. Something to anchor the day. But hold it loosely. The baby will let you know when it’s not working.

How fast it goes.

He’s almost 9 months old now. I look at photos from the first month and he looks like a different person. Tiny and scrunched up and brand new. I remember being exhausted and overwhelmed and not totally sure what I was doing.

Looking back now, one thing I wish I did more was contact naps. For anyone who doesn’t know, a contact nap is when the baby sleeps on you instead of being put down. It feels unproductive in the moment. You can’t move, you can’t do anything. Looking back it’s one of the things I’d do more of.

The first month is hard. It’s also the only time you get a version of your kid that small. I’m glad I took the leave. I’m glad I was there for all of it, even the parts I wasn’t great at.

If you’re in the first month right now, you’re doing better than you think. Subscribe below and follow along. It gets easier and it gets better.