Sean E. Britten

My little girl is turning three months old today! And after three months of fatherhood, I’m going to let you in on the parenting secret that no one is telling you:

Babies are super easy. Way fucking easier than they make it sound.

I might be being a little bit facetious, but I can honestly say the late stages of my wife’s pregnancy had me a lot more stressed than the three months since Zoe actually got here. What with the preparations and the appointments and the anxiety about whether it was all going to work out. But, the truth is we’ve also been super lucky with her. The last three months she’s been really healthy so we haven’t had any mystery illnesses to worry about, she’s a really good eater and she only really cries when she’s hungry so that’s always an easy one to solve. She’s a great sleeper, she already sleeps right through the night. I’m a little worried about the four month regression period since we’re kind of spoiled at this point but the truth is right from the beginning she wasn’t that terrible, at least not for me!

So really I feel like I can’t give any ‘tips’ about being a parent at this stage. Me giving advice feels like this Bo Burnham quote:

“I would say don’t take advice from people like me who have gotten very lucky. We’re very biased. You know, like Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner telling you, ‘Liquidize your assets; buy Powerball tickets – it works!’”

I just thought I’d do a little bit of reflection as a way of ordering my own thoughts three months in!

I will say we were extremely prepared. We were fortunate that we were in the position to have everything ready for Zoe honestly months before she actually arrived, there’s been no mad need of having to figure out how stuff works or where to get this or that. We were given A LOT of stuff by many wonderful people in our life. Honestly, we’ve barely bought baby clothes, like maybe 10% of her wardrobe for the whole first year of her life is stuff we bought as opposed to stuff we were given as hand-me-downs or gifts. And we got a lot of great advice, including, you know, babies are a lot easier than you think, chill out, enjoy it, it’s not as stressful as you’ve been led to believe.

Chilling out I’ve got to say has been central to my parenting. Before Zoe came along I was so worried that if you didn’t feed a baby the exact right amount, or hold it the right way, or dress it exactly right for the current temperature, then that baby will almost certainly spontaneously die. Like the world’s most oversensitive houseplant. The first time I picked her up she felt so damp and dense and it was like handling spun glass. Then I watched how the midwives, the people who actually knew what they were doing, handled her, and they were tossing her around like an old football no problem, wrapping her, doing the measurements. Like of course she’s precious cargo but I could see she was also not so fragile she’s going to shatter, and that’s true of how she eats and what she wears and when she sleeps. She’ll bounce at least the first few times you drop her! (That’s a joke, I haven’t been dropping the baby).

Another big factor in things going smoothly for us has honestly been formula feeding. I’m not going to get involved with arguing for or against anything. There seems to be an enormous amount of contention in that debate and I’m simply not that educated in it. To my wholly ignorant eyes it seems there are advantages and disadvantages to both and it all kind of pans out in the long run.

We were always going to formula feed for medical reasons I won’t get into and otherwise probably would have at least attempted breastfeeding. But I will say, if you were in a position where you need to formula feed and you’re worried about it for some reason, I wouldn’t. For one, my kid has been crazy healthy. No sickliness, she’s been gaining weight following the exact right curve, and she is freakishly strong, way ahead on physical and mental milestones. I don’t put that down to formula, I think we might have just created a superior breed of human personally, but there have been some distinct advantages:

• My wife, Tess, has actually been able to sleep. First night home from the hospital I was able to take the whole night shift because I was able to feed the baby just as easily as she could. And from then until the point where Zoe started to sleep through the night we would take things in shifts so both of us got at least a partial night’s sleep.
• Bonding is one you often hear about with new dads. Newborns are just big slugs and if they’re not eating then they’re probably sleeping, or crying because they want to eat or sleep. And because mum is the source of food they only want to be around her while awake. Well, I will say that stage doesn’t actually last all that long, at three months old she is already a developing person who takes an interest in all sorts of things and she’s actually got an attention span. But being able to feed her means I’ve been able to bond with her from day one and it’s still the number one activity her day revolves around so that’s been pretty great.
• We know exactly how much she’s drunk and when. That’s been a big reassurance, I will say the absolute most stressful thing I’ve experienced with her is when she was still learning how to eat. Something about that, not sleeping, knowing she wants to eat but for some reason she’s unable to right now, triggered incredible frustration in me. I have no idea how breastfeeding mums do it when we were at least able to go, well, she definitely drank that much and she’s drinking this much in a day and it’s all fine.
• Apparently formula babies shit less. More on shitting and stuff in a moment, I will say poopy nappies bother me a lot less than I thought they would, but breastfeeding babies apparently poop after every feed for a while? That sounds insane to me, that’s so many nappies.

That does bring me to my next point, which is that the love hormone is honestly one hell of a drug. While I wouldn’t say I’m easily grossed out, I’d say before all this I did have a more than healthy revulsion to human shit. Just not a fan. But I can honestly say changing nappies hasn’t bothered me at all right from the beginning.

One example of how much the mental state changes though is that a few months before Zoe was born we went to a baby expo with some friends. And while there, we got onto the topic of snot suckers which are these little bulb things that you stick inside a baby’s nose to suck out any excess mucus which, at the time, I thought must have been a major daily issue for a baby. Tess or one of our friends explained the alternative to the snot sucker is creating a seal around the baby’s nose with your mouth, and sucking it straight from the nostrils that way. The thought made me physically gag. Thankfully, excess snot actually isn’t that much of an issue most of the time it turns out. Haven’t had to deal with it at all yet! But looking at her now, I know I could do that utterly revolting thing if I needed to without a moment of hesitation. So, I guess that’s what love is.

Okay, I do have a couple of tips if you’re having a kid soon and you’ve come across this article somehow. These are small things, I’m not going to share a whole philosophy because by and large it’s just been easy because we’ve been lucky and my wife and I make a really great team. So here’s just a few things I’d recommend getting to anyone:

• Christmas Lights: Holy shit, if your baby is anything like ours it must fucking love Christmas lights. We were lucky, we had a November baby so we put up a Christmas tree pretty soon after she got here. And she is so obsessed with the lights that we never took them down. We just transferred them to the plastic bamboo plant we put in the same spot as the Christmas tree. Nothing shuts her up like staring at the lights, not even a bottle, still gives us time to eat dinner uninterrupted most nights if we stick her in front of them.
• Rain Stick: A friend of ours gave us a rain stick toy, kind of looks like this thing? Instant sedation. Will go from screaming to hypnotised in about two seconds if you put this thing in front of her face.
• Gym Ball: Man, Zoe is generally not a bad sleeper but nothing will put her to sleep as quickly as being held by my wife while bouncing on a gym ball. In fairness, Tess has probably permanently injured herself trying to rock her to sleep during the hardest period of the first three months, but lately she’ll be wiggling and refusing to settle in any way, and then will go straight to sleep after thirty seconds of bouncing.

Anyway, I’ll let you know if I have any plans to revamp this whole website into a parenting blog now. Because clearly I’m so fucking good at it already that I expect everything else to be smooth sailing! Thanks for reading!