Throughout your pregnancy, you get an unnecessary amount of unsolicited parenting advice from what to eat while you’re pregnant, when and how to hold your baby, how to get your baby to sleep, or even how to avoid being peed on.
Occasionally you’ll get some original advice you haven’t heard yet, but after nine months of waddling around and being told, “your glowing,” when in reality you’re just sweating profusely and didn’t have time to put on copious amounts of powder to cover it up, a good bit of the advice ends up sounding like a broken record.
Now, I am not suggesting that it isn’t helpful to give mom advice and I am grateful for all of the guidance I was given from my fellow mamas; however, in my three short months of being a mom I have found there were some obvious pieces of information that everyone conveniently forgot to tell me.
Babies Sniffle
It is totally normal for your newborn baby to sound congested. Babies are designed to breath through their cute, tiny noses in order to keep their mouths available for sucking and eating. To keep their itty-bitty nasal passages open, they produce mucus secretions. After sitting upright all day, the mucus may start to collect in your little one’s nasal passage while laying flat on their back at night.
So, don’t panic if it sounds like your two-week-old is sawing logs with their father. A stuffy-nosed baby doesn’t necessarily mean they are sick, but don’t let that stop you from following up with your pediatrician, if your mom senses say it could mean something more. Of course, you can assist your baby with clearing their nasal passage, but you should consult with a medical expert for specifics on the safest way to clear the mucus.
Night Time Diaper Changes
Like most new parents, we struggled for a few weeks to get into a routine when it came to feeding and changing the baby at all hours of the night and getting the baby to go back to sleep. Our nights became exponentially easier when our pediatrician mentioned something to me about changing dirty diapers at night.
Apparently, it is common knowledge, aka top-secret mom information that no one ever actually remembers to tell you, that you don’t need to change your little one’s diaper every time they get up to feed at night, even if they’re a little wet. So instead of turning on the bright lamp, making their tiny hiney cold, and basically awakening all of their senses; you can just let them go back to sleep. Now that doesn’t mean they should sleep in a soiled diaper all night, but you are safe to skip a change or two if they’re just wet and not completely full.
Pro Tip: Instead of paying for overpriced night time diapers, which aren’t even relevant until your little one is in size two or three diapers, try putting your baby in a diaper one size up from their current size at night.
Simplify your Pump Process
Fun Fact: You don’t necessarily need to sterilize your pump parts after every single session.
You can simply put your pump parts in a zip lock bag and set them in the fridge until your next pump session. This does not eliminate the need to sterilize your pump parts, but the refrigeration can help prevent bacterial growth saving you at least one wash cycle. Use your judgement when refrigerating your pump parts, you should only skip one wash session. This also may not be an ideal technique if you have a medically fragile baby. Although it can become a costly technique, another way to save time cleaning your pump parts is to purchase pump cleaning wipes or have an extra set or two of pump parts.
You can read hundreds of books and talk to hundreds of mamas, but at the end of the day you’ll never know everything about motherhood. Thankfully, you don’t have to. Whether you have a family full of mamas to offer advice or not, you’re not alone as a new mom. Even if you don’t feel like you have a mom squad, trust me there is a squad looking to welcome you in and share their lessons learned too. As a new mom living in a new area, I am grateful for the new fellowship that the Auburn-Opelika Moms Blog is fostering in our community, thanks to the nationwide City Moms Blog Network.
https://www.unitypoint.org/blankchildrens/article.aspx?id=93395b95-baac-4a22-b434-0db1fe54d1c0
https://breastfeedingusa.org/content/article/14-ways-hack-your-pumping-routine
