One month later, I gave up and decided to get a new Stokke. The Bugaboo wasn’t a bad pushchair, really, but Stokke suits me much better. (Eric spends less time pushing the pushchair about and wasn’t as interested in the choice as I was, but he also liked the Stokke better.)

The deciding factor for me was the ease of “driving”. The Bugaboo started misbehaving as soon as the road sloped sideways. The pushchair was pulling me off the road, and the struggle to keep it straight left me with achy wrists every single afternoon. Add a heavy load of groceries and I was near tears at times. I never had that kind of trouble with the Stokke. I think the frame of the Bugaboo has a fundamental design flaw, at least for my body: the angles at which I can apply force (determined by the angle, attachment points and shape of the handlebar) were very inefficient given the direction I wanted to push or turn it.

Also, the handlebar on the Bugaboo can be raised and lowered, but its angle cannot be changed. When I had it at a comfortable height, I was walking way too close to the pushchair, so my toes kept hitting the rear axle. I had to either walk with my arms outstretched, or the handlebar too high, in order to avoid that. The Stokke doesn’t have a rear axle – the lower section of its frame is sort of x-shaped – and both the height and the angle of its handlebar are adjustable, which made it much easier to adapt to how I stand and move.

The two pushchairs are quite similar in many ways – robust design, well constructed, adaptable, expensive – and if you haven’t tried them you might well think that they’re pretty much the same. But once you take a closer look, it turns out that there are a lot of differences.

• The Bugaboo has suspension on its front wheels. It’s also got foam rear wheels, while the Stokke has hard wheels with a layer of rubber. So the Bugaboo offers a smoother ride, especially on uneven roads, and is slightly easier to push up and down over pavement edges. But I think the suspension contributed to its headstrong behaviour on sloping roads.
• The Stokke has better options for adjusting the handlebar. The Bugaboo only allows you to adjust the height, and changing it means unscrewing and then rescrewing two screws. Which means you wouldn’t adjust the handlebar every time you hand over the pushchair to your partner when you’re out walking together. With the Stokke we definitely do that. In fact adjusting the handlebar is so easy that I change it for a 100 metre uphill stretch, when I want a slightly different angle, and then put it back when I reach the top.
• The Bugaboo allows you to reverse direction by just flipping the handlebar to the other side, so you end up with the large fixed wheels in front and the small swivel wheels at the back. Their instruction manual says it’s good for tricky terrain, snow and sand and such. The Stokke has nothing like that.
• The Stokke has a more convenient basket. The Bugaboo basket has a curved bottom which makes it harder to pack (especially with boxy things like cartons of milk and juice) and it’s a bit difficult to access (almost impossible with the carrycot in place). The Stokke basket/bag has a flat bottom and is perfectly accessible with the seat facing backwards, and relatively convenient with the seat facing forwards, too.
• The Bugaboo is lighter: 9.3 kg vs. Stokke’s 12.5 kg according to the official stats. Which was a real surprise to me, because the Stokke feels lighter when I’m pushing it.
• The Stokke can go up and down stairs: you don’t need to lift it, you can pull it up step by step, i.e. less strain for your back, and no need to wait for someone to help you. This is less important in Stockholm where all train and tube stations have lifts, but in London this feature made all the difference.
• On the Stokke you can raise and lower the seat, and at its highest, the seat comes much higher up than on the Bugaboo, or any other pushchair I’ve seen for that matter. I like that a lot, especially when Ingrid was a baby.
• The Bugaboo carrycot has a carrying handle and can be used as a Moses basket. The seat can also be lifted off the pushchair and used separately. The Stokke doesn’t give you that option.
• The Stokke comes with an infant insert for its seat, so the seat can be used from about 3 months’ age. (We never even bought a carrycot and got by with just the seat, since we didn’t use the pushchair much in the first months.) The Bugaboo has quite a deep seat so when it’s upright, small children tend to sink down into a “sack of potatoes” position.
• Releasing the seat for reclining can be done with one hand on the Stokke, so the other hand can stabilize the seat and slowly lower it down. On the Bugaboo you need two hands to push two buttons on either side of the seat, so the seat always reclined with a jerk. Or perhaps there is a trick that I just didn’t discover yet.
• The Bugaboo has a more “normal” shape, while the Stokke has a central axle which means that you need a special “split” foot muff and can’t use any old sleeping bag. It’s also a bit tricky to wrap a sleeping kid in a blanket when there’s a stick in the way.
• The Stokke has a removable plastic footrest. Especially in autumn and winter, I often removed the footrest to shake off the gravel and dust. On the Bugaboo, the footrest is part of the seat, i.e. made of fabric and not removable, i.e. it gets pretty gunky pretty fast.
• The Bugaboo has much more convenient brakes: the brake handle sits on the handlebar and is easy to put on and off. On the Stokke, the brake is operated by a little lever that sits down by one of the wheels, so you can only reach it with your foot, and sometimes I need to jiggle it a few times before I get the brakes on or off.

Edited on October 4th to add another paragraph (on brakes).

• Sluta! (Stop that!)
• Skärp dig! (A direct translation would be “Pull yourself together!’ but I guess in English you’d say something like “Behave yourself” instead.)
• Vad är det för fel på dig?! (What’s wrong with you?!)
• Nu lägger du av. (You will stop that right this moment.)
• Varför ska du vara så jobbig? (Why do you have to be so difficult?)

Every time I hear a variation on this theme I can just imagine the toddler thinking, Thanks for the reminder – I had totally forgotten that crying is not the accepted method of argumentation in this setting. Of course I will stop. Not.

(Ingrid has not discovered McDonald’s yet, so the IKEA restaurant is her idea of fine dining. Meatballs! With jam! And you can watch TV afterwards!)

Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers

and

In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

There’s also an essay at Babble.com, which has as its starting point Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. The essay features this chart which also seems to say that married people without children are happier than those with children:

Stumbling on Happiness also mentions a study trying to ascertain which activities women enjoy most, and reporting that “taking care of children” is rated lower than grocery shopping, sleeping, or socializing.

The initial angle for both stories is that parents lie to others (perhaps because it isn’t socially acceptable to say that you were happier before you had children) and maybe even delude themselves:

“Perhaps parents find it psychologically advantageous to talk themselves into thinking this is a great thing,” theorizes Oswald, who has two daughters. “It would be psychologically difficult to come to the view early in life, I’ve made a huge mistake having these children. I imagine that humans are good at the flexibility of thought that stops them from taking that view.”

I don’t find that explanation very convincing. If parenting consistently made us unhappy, then we’d have died out long ago. So there must be more to this.

Firstly, this might be a new phenomenon, as Newsweek recognises: changes to family and work patterns may have made parenting a lot more stressful than it used to be. We don’t live with our extended families, we are stressed and hurried. (Perhaps even more so in the US, where these studies have been performed?) And our expectations have changed as well: rather than having kids so they can help you on the farm and one day inherit it, people now expect parenting to be a fulfilling experience, a way to realise themselves. And indeed people in the Western world are having fewer and fewer children. Perhaps they have indeed concluded that children aren’t worth the bother, the money, or the loss of freedom.

Another explanation is that the studies may have asked the wrong questions. Parents may not enjoy “taking care of children” but that doesn’t mean their children don’t make them happy. You wouldn’t conclude that beautiful clothes don’t make women happy because women don’t enjoy “taking care of clothes”, to pick a random example.

But even more importantly, I think the studies have looked at the wrong measure of happiness. Average happiness is not how we judge our lives, and not what we remember afterwards.

“How do [the experiences of parenthood] balance out?” Gilbert asks. “It turns out that if you average all the moments, they balance out a little on the negative side. Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn’t all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn’t what we’re trying for. As human beings, it’s not our aim. It shouldn’t be our goal. What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average.

This is what a childless / child-free adult’s happiness levels might look like over some arbitrary time period unmarked by any major life events:

And this is what they might look like for a parent:

The little ups and downs of normal life have been replaced by a rollercoaster. The lack of flexibility and freedom and time have dragged down the average, and there are more troughs than before. Those are the troughs of teething, sleepless nights, and tantrums, and later on “I hate you mummy!” and so on. But you also get more peaks, of the kind that make your heart melt and that you wish you could remember forever: the early morning snuggle, the happy child running to greet you with a hug.

Finally, long-term happiness is different from short-term satisfaction. Satisfaction is about the balance between feeling good and feeling bad. But for durable happiness, something more is needed. I myself think of it as growth. Gretchen Rubin, one of my favourite bloggers, has a slightly different angle and describes it as feeling right: “to be happy, you must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right”.

Parenting makes you grow as a person. It’s corny but it’s true. You learn things about yourself, and you change, and you become a more mature person. You aren’t fully adult until you have taken care of someone else.

Links:
Newsweek: True or False: Having Kids Makes You Happy
Babble.com: Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
The Happiness Project: Do your children make you happy?
Momaroo: Do Kids Make You Happy?
Walrus Magazine: Parenting makes you miserable. Discuss.
National Post: Do our kids make us happy? Answer: It depends what you mean by ‘happy’.

Things would have been different even just a few months ago. Breastfeeding has been an important source of comfort and security for her. Whenever I have tried to cut out night feeds (and I’ve tried this every few months or so) she has been very upset. Sometimes she understood what I wanted and tried her best, really tried, but she couldn’t go back to sleep – she just lay there, tossing and turning and whimpering, for close to an hour. (After which I gave up, fed her, and we were both asleep within minutes.) As a result, both of us got even less sleep than usual during those nights, which is why I didn’t repeat the experiment too often.

This time she was upset the first night I wasn’t there, and then she accepted the new deal. For several nights she still woke once or twice, but didn’t even ask to breastfeed: just rolled closer to me, confirmed that I’m still there, and went back to sleep. The last 2 nights she’s had a cold, slept worse, and missed breastfeeding again, but now that I know she can do it, it’s a lot easier to refuse.

I was slightly concerned that this might be the end of breastfeeding for us. I feared that a 2-day separation plus no more night feeds would cause supply problems, and then she’d be less interested, leading to even lower supply, and thus even less interest. But that hasn’t happened – she’s still breastfeeding at least once a day, and generally both morning and evening.

You might think that 2 years of breastfeeding is enough, even more than enough. Somehow it’s become the cultural norm to wean as soon as you can, and definitely before the child’s a year old! (I have my theories about why this may be so, but that’s a separate topic.) Had you asked me two years ago how long I’d breastfeed, I would never have guessed that I’d go on for this long. But that was then. That was before I knew how enjoyable these moments would be for both of us – and before I had seen how natural and right this feels.

At root I’m not a particularly patient person. I twitch with impatience when I cannot walk up the escalator because people are standing in the way, or when the people in the queue in front of me cannot find their way around their own wallets because the wallet is stuffed with junk.

But now I have learned to sit quietly in a dark bedroom for 20 minutes (or longer, on a bad day) doing nothing but waiting for Ingrid to fall asleep. And that’s after 10 minutes of bedtime story + lullaby. It was hard in the beginning, but now I manage to wait it out without any real frustration, night after night.

Hmm, I just had an idea – audiobooks! Why haven’t I thought of that before? Thank you, blog.

In London all we had was one large room that served as kitchen + dining area + home office + living room, plus a separate small bedroom. In our new house we actually have multiple rooms. This is a novel experience, and one I will have to get used to. (We intend to fight it, though: the wall between the kitchen and the living room will come down soon.) This means that we suddenly need to think about what room we put things in.

We used to store bibs in a dresser with all the rest of Ingrid’s clothes. But the dresser is in the bedroom, which is at the other end of the house from the kitchen. So before every meal one of us would walk all the way to the other end of the house to get a bib for Ingrid. Until finally a light went on, and I moved the bibs from the dresser to the top kitchen drawer, next to the cutlery.

Parent hack #2: Use empty cereal boxes as drawing paper.

Ingrid likes drawing. Actually mostly she likes to watch me draw, and occasionally she does some brief but energetic scribbling. We used an ordinary A4 pad of paper to begin with. But her scribbles often ended up outside the paper, or the paper got wrinkled by her vigorous actions, so I figured we needed something bigger. The only large piece of paper I could find was an empty box of HavreFras, that I split open and flattened. It keeps its shape a lot better than plain paper – not only during drawing but also when I fold it up and tuck it away between our drawing sessions. Now I keep all our cereal boxes, and sometimes find myself thinking that I should finish that cereal so I get a new box to draw on.

Parent hack #2b: Draw on a carpet.

Despite the larger surface, Ingrid’s scribbles still often veered dangerously close to the edge, and I had to scrub crayon marks from the floor. Then a few weeks after we’d moved we finally unpacked and unrolled the carpet, which covers most of the free floor area in the living room. Naturally we ended up sitting on the carpet and drawing on our cardboard box (something you couldn’t do with a plain sheet of paper). And I realised – crayons don’t leave any marks on a dark carpet! You’d have to really work hard to make a mark of any sort with a crayon on a soft carpet. As an added bonus, dropped crayons don’t roll as far on a carpet as they do on a bare floor.

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

Even more interesting is this graphic that Bruce links to, showing (anecdotally) how children’s freedom of movement has decreased over the past 4 generations. While I think some of this decrease is sensible (the 8-year-old in 1919 did not have to cope with cars doing 70mph on busy roads), much of it is due to excessive anxiety.

I am also reminded of this TED talk about 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.

A commenter said she is immune to her child’s wailing if it’s not because he is sick or hurt. But then I thought about what would make me sad, and I can think of many things that would upset me more than plain physical pain. Disappointment, frustration, loneliness, anxiety, loss, fear… I am sure these all are as upsetting for a child as for an adult, if not more. Frustration and disappointment in particular must be a big part of a toddler’s life. They are just starting to understand the world and want to do more with it, but still have very limited power to express their wishes and to affect the world around them.

Sometimes the root cause of the unhappiness is something that can be solved. Lonely and tired and don’t want to sit in the pushchair? OK, we’ve got a baby carrier for that (a whole stash of them in fact). Other times I either cannot or will not solve the problem. Upset because I don’t allow her to stab the kitchen table with her fork? Too bad, I still won’t allow it. Disappointed because the playroom we were going to visit is closed? Well, so am I, but there’s not much I can do about it.

But even if I cannot fix the problem, I don’t want to ignore Ingrid’s crying. She has no other way of expressing these emotions, after all – I can hardly expect her to sigh and say “I’m really disappointed”. She has had so little experience of disappointment in her short life, of course she’s going to be bad at dealing with these feelings! Over time she will learn to recognise these feelings, understand, express and control them. At the moment, however, she needs adult help. So I do it for her: I talk to her, and say the things I think she might want to say if only she knew how.

Of course she would eventually stop crying if I ignored her as well. But I believe it is more productive in the long run if I help her handle the situation.

PS: Things may change when Ingrid grows older and we get to real attention-seeking tantrums, exaggerating the unhappiness because of the reaction it provokes, making noise because it might get you things. But that’s not what’s happening now.

The first time Ingrid stood without support, she didn’t realize she was doing it. Same for the second, third, and fiftieth time. But then one day she understood that she can stand, and from that moment on she can stand.

Her first steps happened one or two at a time, but again she didn’t realize what was going on. Although she was taking steps, she wasn’t walking – she was standing but happened to move forward. And again, one day she understood that she can walk, and from that moment on she walks confidently (though not effortlessly or faultlessly) and probably won’t be doing much crawling at all.

I imagine the same applies to language. First words are irrelevant. For many months now she has been able to say a few words and put them in context, i.e. she knows to say heja when coming home or leaving home. But for a long time that looked like simple mimicking without understanding the meaning, the purpose of language. Only recently she started showing signs of really understanding that words belong with things, that things have names – she likes pointing at objects around the house and hearing their names. Just like with learning to walk, this happened quite suddenly. So one part of that quantum leap has probably taken place. I’m not sure about the other part – actively and purposefully using words in order to achieve something. Maybe she already knows how to do it but cannot twist her tongue into the right shape, or maybe she hasn’t understood that yet.

I don’t like that. In fact it really annoys me. Alfie Kohn says it even better in Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!”:

Once you start to see praise for what it is – and what it does – these constant little evaluative eruptions from adults start to produce the same effect as fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. You begin to root for a child to give his teachers or parents a taste of their own treacle by turning around to them and saying (in the same saccharine tone of voice), “Good praising!”

Still, it’s not an easy habit to break. It can seem strange, at least at first, to stop praising; it can feel as though you’re being chilly or withholding something. But that, it soon becomes clear, suggests that we praise more because we need to say it than because children need to hear it. Whenever that’s true, it’s time to rethink what we’re doing.

I see several problems with the “good girl” approach. Firstly it’s the way the phrase is standardised and becomes an almost mechanical response. To me it means that you’ve let your praise become routine, an automatic response. You may care about what your child did, but you’re certainly not showing your interest particularly well. “Good girl” feels, well, impersonal. It’s like handing out mass-produced store-bought candy instead of a home-made cookie. There is no real connection. Robin Grille puts it well in Rewards and Praise: The Poisoned Carrot:

When giving a positive comment, are you trying to seduce the child into pleasing you again, into making Mama or Papa proud? Or are you genuinely glad to see the child accomplish something that pleases him, or genuinely delighting in her being? Therein lies a paradox: that which is not intended to reinforce, but merely to “connect”, is the most reinforcing.

“Good girl” is also not helping the child understand what she did well, or why it was good. I’d much rather say “Thank you for giving the spoon back to me” (instead of throwing it on the floor) or “Yes, let’s put the socks back in the drawer, nice and tidy!”

But what I like least about “good girl” is how it is used to praise achivements that don’t need to be praised, and shouldn’t be praised. The best reward for learning something new, or doing something fun – running, jumping, climbing, throwing a ball – is the joy of doing it, not being praised by someone else. Praise turns play into work. Something that was simply fun is now being judged as good (on some sort of scale). If you’re a “good girl” for taking your first steps, does not walking make you bad?

(The English “good girl” is the most egregious example, because of the immensely loaded word “good” in it. The Swedish “duktig” and Estonian “tubli” are somewhat less judgmental, but still mean that the child is being evaluated and praised for living up to parents’ hopes and expectations.)

Earlier this week I went to a toddler play room with Ingrid. Two other small girls were running and climbing around – the younger one about 2 years old, the older maybe 3 or 4. The little girl climbed all the way to the top of a big slide, and immediately I heard her older sister say “good girl” with that special sugary tone that parents use, obviously learned from hearing it many many times from their mum. Already at the age of 3, she had learned to respond with canned praise rather than shared joy… I found that quite sad.

If I had any doubt about this at all, if I felt the least bit tempted to call Ingrid a good girl, my golden rule (“As above, so below”) would dispel the last of my doubts. You wouldn’t do so to an adult, so why do you think it’s OK to do so to a child? Would you say “good girl” to your wife, other than as a joke? Would you want to hear “good job” after you’ve proudly managed to make your way down the slope on a snowboard for the first time? Personally I’d feel rather insulted.

Ingrid was not even 6 months when I went back to work. She breastfed exclusively until a week or two before I had to go back to work. Our breastfeeding relationship was far too important for both of us to stop at that point, or even cut it to just mornings, evenings and nights. Now over 3 months later the situation hasn’t changed much… The first thing she wants in the morning is the boob. The first thing she wants when we get home from nursey is the boob. I barely have time to get us both free from coats and slings and bags and shoes, and she’s already making her “want boob now” noise (which is a throaty kind of cry, almost like a cough – very distinctive). I sometimes suspect that she spends her entire afternoon looking forward to that moment. And of course there’s the evening wind-down boob-in-bed session, and the cosy quiet night feeds.

At nursery she gets expressed milk from a trainer cup. (She never used a bottle. First there was no need, and at 6 months it would have felt silly – that’s the age when some babies start to wean from the bottle – so a cup it was.) Very conveniently for me, there’s a quiet room at the nursery at work where I can express and store milk. It has a comfy chair, a door I can lock, and a fridge. So for the past 3 months I have been a very steady visitor to the nursery. Twice a day, every day, and no meeting is important enough to make me skip this appointment (although I do flex the times) because if I do skip it, (a) my boobs will explode, and (b) Ingrid will have no milk for the next day.

For the benefit of those of you who haven’t been involved with babies recently, the most common way to express milk is to use a breast pump. There are electric ones and manual ones. If you want to see one in action (sans breast), head over to DadLabs for a video!

However I never got along with either the electric pump we bought, or the manual one I tried. Both hurt me, and the results were puny. So I do it the old-fashioned way, the way cows have been milked for thousands of years: by hand. And it’s given me a whole new appreciation of how much hard work milking is – and a new respect for the milkmaids of earlier times. I wonder if those milkmaids got RSI? I certainly get stiff shoulders and tired hands. Let’s assume, conservatively, that during each 15-20 minute session, I spend 10 minutes actually expressing milk. And let’s say that I do 2 squeezes per second. Well, probably a bit less – say 3 squeezes for every 2 seconds. That’s 10 * 60 * 3 / 2 = 900 squeezes, twice a day. A good workout for the fingers!

BB (Before Baby) I knew in an abstract way that babies eat and drink breast milk, and that it’s good for their health and digestion and all that. So of course I was going to breastfeed. But I somehow imagined that once you introduce babies to “real food” they would prefer that, and maybe just go on breastfeeding a bit for comfort now and again. The reality, as any mother could tell you, is quite different. Most babies are happy to live mostly on breast milk for far longer than the first 6 months. It is possible to wean them despite this, of course, but it takes an effort. Online mothering forums have tons of questions about how to stop breastfeeding.

I used to think that extended breastfeeding (past a year or so) was for extreme mothers, barefoot and with dreadlocks and batik clothes, who carry their babies in cloth slings and sleep in the same bed with them. (Slight exaggeration, but not by much.) Now continuing to breastfeed seems like the most reasonable, natural thing to do. Oh, hang on, I am one of those crazy hippie mothers, wearing my baby and sharing a bed with her… and giving birth at home… missing the dreadlocks though. Do you think I would look good with dreads?

Thinking about these things helps me make the right decisions. In particular, being clear about the principles is useful in situations where it’s easy get tempted to apply a quick fix in a way that I might later regret.

These principles are about the relationship between the parent and the child. They are not about how I want my child to be or behave, or what I want my child to grow up into, or how to get there – those are separate issues. These are the real fundamentals, “this is fundamentally right, that is fundamentally wrong”.

1. As above, so below. This can be said in many ways… Be an example. If it’s not OK for them to behave in a certain way, it’s not OK for you to behave that way, either. And vice versa: If it’s not OK to treat an adult that way, it’s not OK to treat a child that way.
2. No violence. This is a corollary to #1, but it is important enough to repeat as a separate point. It is never OK to intentionally hurt another person, no matter what good excuses you have.
3. Don’t reduce the baby to an object. Remember that he is an individual. Be careful about proposed “methods” to “fix” things, and think about whether they fit in your relationship.
4. Err on the side of loving. If in doubt, say yes. You cannot spoil a child with too much closeness and love.
5. Needs go before wants. The younger the child, the more needs it has, and the fewer wants. Even things that later become wants (cuddles and closeness) are needs in a baby.
   A baby’s needs go before mum’s wants, but a baby’s wants do not necessarily go before mum’s wants.
6. Don’t confuse your wants with the baby’s. Don’t hurry their development. Few parents err on the side of being too relaxed; far more parents want the baby to sleep on her own, eat on her own, change her own diaper and have a summer job before the baby is a year old.

How do you think about parenting? How do you make your decisions?

AP parents are often also ecological parents so AP discussions frequently involve cloth nappies and organic foods etc.

But then, for some reason, some parents add another element: avoiding vaccinations. And that really baffles me. What does it have to do with attachment and closeness? How can you intentionally expose your baby to the risks of catching a serious but fully avoidable disease – and claim that it is good for your baby? Natural is not always necessarily better.

• Borrow as much of possible for your newborn. And the baby may outgrow the first items within a few weeks. Also, you can’t know what types of clothes you will find practical. Opinions do differ: some of the clothes my sister-in-law liked best, I found impractical and put away after one use. When we started buying clothes for our baby, after about 6 weeks or so, we were a lot better informed and prepared.

• Skip the “newborn” size and go straight to “0–3 months”. The newborn-sized hat we got was too small for our girl on day 1, so she never got to use it. And the newborn-sized body was too small after 3 weeks. Unless your baby turns out to be really tiny, the 0–3s will fit well after just a week or two. And if you do get a tiny baby, you can always buy some newborn clothes when the baby has arrived, and keep the 0–3s for later.

• Don’t buy too much. Assuming your baby can wear the 0–3s for 3 months, and you have 7 sets of clothes, each set will only get worn 13 times. Buy 10 sets, and the baby will outgrow them before s/he’s even worn them 10 times. The same will happen if the baby outgrows the clothes in less than 3 months, which is what happened us. Around 6 sets of indoor clothing worked well for us: this means we wash baby clothes every 4–5 days, because occasionally she goes through more than one set per day because of various “accidents”.

  Because babies don’t sweat much (unless they are wearing too much), baby clothes don’t get dirty unless they are exposed to said accidents, directly or indirectly. Socks, for example, can be worn for 2–3 days before changing, so we get by with 3 pairs. Outerwear hardly gets dirty at all, as long as the baby is pram-bound: one set is enough. When you do need to wash these, they usually dry overnight.

• Make sure the clothes are easy to wash. That also applies to any other fabric items that come in contact with the baby: play mats, bouncy seat covers, blankets etc. Everything will inevitably get pooped and burped on, and I really wouldn’t want to scrub poop off the chair cover with a sponge. If it can’t be washed – for example, if you have the baby sitting in the corner of your sofa – cover it with a muslin.

• Choose things that are easy to change, and allow easy nappy changes. This is less important for outerwear, and ultra important for night clothes. When you’re changing a nappy in the middle of the night, you do NOT want to spend time on fiddly clothes. Skip anything that has buttons; go for poppers instead.

  For this reason we abandoned sleepsuits (all-in-ones with long sleeves and legs): the long rows of poppers along the legs were too much work in the dark in the middle of the night. Almost inevitably I would miss one in the middle, and run out of buttons before buttonholes, or the other way round. Instead, Ingrid only wears bodies. She gets a new clean body every evening after her bath, sleeps in it at night, and has it throughout the next day as well.

• Go for soft and stretchy clothes: stretchy fabrics and elasticated waists, and no scratchy decorations. Non-stretchy clothes will either not fit, or be uncomfortable when the baby has just eaten. Most baby clothes are in stretchy cotton jersey, other knitted materials or fleece nowadays. But I have seen jeans with a buttoned waist, sized for 3-month-olds…

• We found cotton bodies / vests / onesies to be the all-round most practical clothes. Ingrid hardly ever wears anything else at home (except for socks). If you have a reasonably warm house, a long-sleeved body may be enough to keep the baby warm. In a colder house, add trousers. The trousers + t-shirt combination inevitably leaves a gap at the waist (the t-shirt will NOT stay tucked in, as long as the baby is crawling around on the floor) so you’ll almost certainly need a vest underneath, anyway, to keep the little tummy warm. Keep trousers and tops for special occasions. Skirts and dresses are even less practical: they will just get bunched up when the baby moves, and won’t cover anything.

• Consider wrap bodies instead of pull-on-over-the-head bodies. Some babies object strongly to having their face covered, so pulling clothes over their heads can be a struggle. Even if the baby doesn’t mind, I’ve found wrap bodies easier to put on: they don’t get so tangled up, somehow.

If you’re buying baby clothes as a gift, I’d add one more point to the above:

• Buy 3–6-month clothes, unless you will hand over the gift as soon as the baby is born, or before. If you buy 0–3 clothes and visit the baby when s/he is a month old, and the baby happens to be a large one, s/he will outgrow your gift before she’s had a chance to use it much.

Here’s isa more general baby needs list.

Here, then, is a list of all the things that we considered buying (based on various sources), and what we thought about them.

Buying for your baby.xls

I’ve sorted everything into 3 groups: ESSENTIAL, YES, and NO, based on how useful we found them.

• ESSENTIAL are the things that we couldn’t have done without. The essentials include such basics as clothes, pram, sling, cot.
• YES marks things that were useful but that could probably be replaced with something else, or you could manage without. This includes a changing bag, bath thermometer etc.
• NO marks things that we bought or got, but didn’t end up using much at all. For us, this included scratch mittens and a breast pump.
• There are also some items marked “Didn’t have one” or “Haven’t bought yet”; those are things that have been recommended somewhere but that we haven’t actually tried out, so I don’t have much to say about them.

I’ve also commented briefly on most items. The comments are of course my personal view only. If your habits or preferences differ from mine, or your baby has different needs, you may not agree at all.

Finally, I’ve guessed at roughly when you might want to buy these things. The things I suggest buying at 0 months are the ones you should probably sort out before the baby is born (and with a few weeks to spare). The ones marked “0-1 months” are those that you can live without in the first few weeks, and may want to buy a bit later, when you know more about your baby’s habits and preferences. But you could also buy these in advance.

Our best buys:

• Pushchair. Don’t skimp; buy a good one. You are likely to use it many hours every week, so get one that you find comfortable and convenient to use. BabyCentre has good tips to help you choose a pram or pushchair. The right choice depends on your lifestyle: I’m very happy with our Stokke, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re going to be packing your pushchair into a car on a regular basis, or spending a lot of time on the Tube.
• Moses basket. You can buy a cot straight away, but we found a Moses basket very handy to begin with. It’s light and small, so you can carry the baby with you from room to room. It also allows you to have the baby sleeping next to your bed, where a cot might not fit.
• Sling. I love my slings. Many books and web sites recommend a Baby Bjorn-type baby carrier, but a sling is much more versatile and comfortable, for both you and the baby. Some men have been known to describe slings as somewhat “unmanly”, but if you buy one in black or denim, you can probably convince them otherwise! The Baby Wearer has a lot of advice on choosing a baby carrier.
• Activity mat / play gym. Ingrid spends most of her day on the play mat. It protects the carpet from the baby, and lets the baby have fun looking at interesting things from a very early age. Get one with lots of loops and removable toys, so you can switch to new ones and keep the it interesting.
• Bath seat. Cheap, easy to use, less faff than a baby bath, and takes up less space.
• A good nursing pillow. A tiny baby is floppy and needs good support, and mum’s arms and back can get very tired without a pillow.

Baby clothes are a whole separate topic and deserve a post of their own, which I will hopefully be able to post later today or tomorrow.

Update: here is the post about baby clothes.

When it comes to babies’ sleep, I keep reading and hearing that it’s important that the baby learns to fall asleep in the cot, and not in dad’s arms or while being rocked by mom. “Baby should be put down drowsy but awake.” Any help you give is labelled a “prop” and is BAD. The underlying message is always “once you start a habit, it’ll stick, and you’ll be sorry a year from now!”.

But no one says the same about other aspects of taking care of a baby. No one says “Don’t feed him – he needs to learn to eat on his own” or “Don’t change her nappy, or she’ll get used to it and then you’ll be doing it forever”.

Why do they have such a different view on sleep, then? (“They” being all those people who dole out advice in books and on the internet.) I guess parents’ comfort is the only reason. No one minds changing dirty nappies 7 times a day, but parents do mind being woken in the middle of the night. So they hope for a quick fix.

(Besides, a book that says “don’t worry, things will sort themselves out” is not going to be a bestseller. If, on the other hand, the author claims that the baby’s current behaviour can and should be fixed using their unique method, this can sell lots of books. And of course first-time parents are easy targets… it’s easy to make us worry that we’re doing things wrong.)

But the more I see Ingrid develop, the less I believe in this view. She is small and needs help. Just as she cannot change her own nappy or put food in her mouth, she cannot go to sleep on her own. And that’s OK.

Nothing is fixed, and no habit will be hard to change, because everything about her changes all the time. There is almost nothing about her that is the same now as it was three months ago. In fact I can’t think of a single thing. She eats differently, sleeps differently, poops differently, cries differently, plays differently.

So I’ve finally pretty much stopped listening to all this advice, and stopped worrying about her sleeping habits. (Don’t tell me “I told you so”! I know. But I’m good at worrying.) While we’re not as rested as we could be, none of us is collapsing from exhaustion. And things are getting steadily better, with the help of time, practice, love and common sense, without the need of any methods.

I looked at her The New Contented Little Baby Book before I’d heard about Gina, found the book terrible, and put it back on the shelf. Eric bought it because “everybody knows Gina Ford, so let’s see what all the hoopla is about”.

So what is the hoopla about? Her main point is that babies need routine. Things should be done in the same order and at the same time every day. A large part of the book (50 pages) is filled with detailed schedules setting out feeding and sleeping times with 5-minute precision. Another 30 pages are dedicated to discussing the different parts of the routine. This is supposedly “the secret to calm and confident parenting” (as the front cover blurb promises) and will lead to a contented baby.

This is the complete opposite of the “feed-on-demand, baby-knows-best” approach which seems to flourish in some places (notably among Swedish midwives, from what I read on Swedish parenting sites). In Sweden the common view seems to be that you shouldn’t meddle with small babies’ sleep rhythms but leave them to find their own rhythm. But I don’t see how a baby is supposed to figure out that night is for sleeping and day is for playing, if parents don’t teach this.

And the followers of each approach are often fully convinced that the others are mad, misled, and probably horrible parents. Gina’s book, therefore, gets very conflicting views from readers: of the 478 reviews on Amazon UK, 76% give it either 1 or 5 stars. Gina has even been compared to terrorists, and sued an online forum.

I started out reading The New Contented Little Baby Book mostly out of curiosity (and because it was there). I was inclined to discard much of the talk about routines. It just sounded ridiculous – and insensitive and unworkable. In the first few weeks I fed on demand, and Ingrid slept most of the time when she wasn’t eating. But then as she became more alert, I gradually felt the need for some more order, and started using a simple sleep-eat-play routine (i.e. doing things in that order, all the time) based on Tracy Hogg’s advice. I found it helpful, but at the same time it was hard to figure out how to adjust this as her sleep needs changed. And I was still spending a lot of my time guessing – is she tired? hungry? in pain? simply cranky?

I came to refer to Gina’s book more and more frequently for a more carefully considered routine. At first I was thinking to myself, “I can’t believe I am following this horrid book,” and yet I was gradually won over. Ingrid took well to having a routine, and I liked having one. It simply works very well for us. I have made a 180-degree turn: I now find Gina’s routines very helpful, and I am glad I have this book at hand. In our household we’re now on first-name basis with Gina: “Gina suggests…”

But I still can’t say that I like the book. I’ve got the hate-Gina and the love-Gina camps both right here inside my head, because the book manages to mix very good things with very bad ones.

This is what Gina gets right:

• I totally agree that having a routine is good and leads to more confident parenting. I find it much easier to read Ingrid’s signals when I can immediately exclude several reasons for crying. Ingrid never gets overtired; she is happy almost all the time and rarely cries without an easily discernible reason. And she definitely never cries for long (unless she is in pain because of reflux) because I can figure out what she needs, and help her.
• A routine makes it a lot easier to distinguish baby’s habits, and to tell chance from a changing habit. Because we do things at roughly the same time every day, I notice quite easily when Ingrid is able to stay up longer without bad effects, and when she is getting too much daytime sleep (because she is awake for a longish stretch during the night).
• A routine means that I know when Ingrid will sleep, which lets me plan my own day as well. (And it ensures that I get my daily feeds as well!) And since we have a well-functioning basic routine, I can adjust it when necessary to fit in outside activities.
• Gina provides not just a routine like some other books, but a routine that changes over time. There is guidance about which naps should get shorter, and which waking times longer? This is probably the most important and useful part of the book.
• Gina’s advice to limit daytime sleep by waking baby from naps was counterintuitive, but turned out very helpful. Ingrid learned the difference between day and night quite early, unlike some babies I read about.

This is what Gina gets wrong:

• She assumes that all babies and all mothers are the same. “Baby should eat x minutes on the first breast and y minutes on the second breast.” One day Ingrid may need 10 minutes for a feed, and the next day it takes 25. And this is just a single baby and a single pair of breasts! Imagine the variation, then, among millions of combinations of babies and breasts. A baby should eat until she is full.
• While she does say that her schedule is a guideline and should be adjusted as needed, the wording of the schedule flat-out contradicts this (“He needs a sleep of no longer than 45 minutes”) and there is hardly any advice in the book on how to adjust the schedule if you think it isn’t right for your baby. I get the impression she really means that the schedule should be strictly followed, but then everybody would get all upset, so she says (without much conviction) that it’s just a guideline.
• She pays too much attention to minute details and ignores more important questions. The schedule micromanages the day (down to telling you what to have for breakfast: “8am: try to have some cereal, toast and a drink no later than 8am”). But at the same time there’s no help for dealing with mishaps. If the baby woke up an hour early, do you stretch each nap a bit, or just the longest one, or do you put in an extra nap? You’re on your own there.
• The book commands instead of explaining. Why is this nap longer than that one? Why is the third nap dropped first? You can figure this out by experimentation and observation, or (more likely) see that it just works that way, but but more explanation would certainly be useful.
• She strongly discourages doing anything that upsets the routine, most of all getting out of the house. If you listened to her you wouldn’t even be able to go to the doctor, not to mention shopping or coffee mornings! Mothers need a life, too!
• Much of the book is written in an unpleasant tone which I found quite offputting. It’s all about “should” and “must” and “must not”: I picture a nurse in a starched white uniform who will not listen to anything you say. There is no joy. She is also far too fond of doling out guilt and disappointment: a baby should be able to do x at 3 months, and so on, and anything that goes wrong is because you haven’t done everything exactly as she says. As another reviewer put it:

  I would say that this book actually should come with [...] a volume controll- to turn down Gina shouting at you for being a very bad parent.

• Finally I think the book is badly organised. It is hard to find the important bits, and even the schedules are not so easy to read. The book would definitely gain from a better editor.

As I said, I do find Gina’s advice helpful. But following it to the letter, as she insists, would be a nightmare. I’d need an alarm clock. My whole life would be taken up with her schedule. As it is now, we often deviate up to half an hour in either direction from the schedule, depending on what seems to be needed. Yet the only reason I can fiddle with the schedule (for example to fit in a swimming lesson at a time when Ingrid would normally be getting sleepy) is that we have a schedule to begin with. In order to break the rules, you first need to know what the rules are.

And Ingrid would most certainly not be contented with Gina’s standard routine. She has always needed more sleep and more food than Gina’s “average” baby. At the age of 3 months her routine most closely resembled what Gina suggested for a 2-month-old. At 3.5 months she still wakes up twice every night for feeds – and it’s not just snacking, she takes a proper meal. And she definitely cannot be just put down in her bed awake, in the dark, to fall asleep on her own.

Buy the book. Find the best bits and ignore the rest. Add a large dose of common sense, and relax about the schedule. Then Gina’s book truly is useful.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.