Baby resources

Pregnancy, delivery, and the first three months

I'm writing this because there was a lot of critical information that we learned serendipitously, from random conversations with friends and colleagues. Hopefully this list plays a small part in reducing the amount of serendipity you need.

My expectation is that at most a quarter of the bullets below will be useful to any given family (different families are pretty different!). No bullet relies on any other; you can safely skip anything that doesn't seem like it would apply.

If you do find the list useful, my recommendation is to come back to this page every 3-6 months once pregnancy starts. Set a calendar invite! There's far too much information to absorb in one pass.

Finally, if you know us even tangentially, feel free to reach out with any specific questions, including mundane ones like "how easy is it to adjust the height on the changing table you listed"? A lot was left out in the interest of space.

Legend:
🏀 = was a game changer for us

Expecting better (book) 🏀: From an Amazon review: "My #1 go-to pregnancy book! … This book was hands down the most useful pregnancy book I read, not because it tells you what to do, but because it calmly presents the data on every major decision you'll need to make during pregnancy". We concur! We liked this better than its primary competitor, Debunking the Bump. The updated 2021 version is very similar to the original 2014 book, so if you have access to the original no need to get the latest.

UpToDate (website) 🏀: UpToDate is a "point of care clinical decision reference". Among other things, it's the place doctors go to look up medical information. Multiple times during Tharu's pregnancy, we made a different decision than what was initially recommended by our OB based on the analysis presented in an UpToDate article.

And for smaller issues: I would claim that medical search on Google is basically broken, with the top results being driven by SEO ("search engine optimization" on the part of the successful websites) rather than the quality of the information. UpToDate fixes that for the areas it covers.

One downside is that an annual subscription can get pretty expensive. If a subscription feels out of reach, let me know and I can give some tips. A second downside is that for most articles, the audience is medical professionals, and so you need to be comfortable looking up medical terminology. They do sometimes have articles explicitly targeting "educated patients", which are labeled "Beyond the Basics".

Pelvic floor physical therapy 🏀: Tharu's #1 advice to pregnant people. We started it at 29 weeks, and went every other week or so until the end (4-5 times total). At 20-something weeks, most pregnant people are not that large, but may still have joint problems due to a hormone called relaxin. The reason to go every 2 weeks is that the problems change as your body changes.

Physical therapy was the difference between a third trimester of not being able to walk, back aches, etc and Tharu being able to live an essentially normal life. It is also plausible it had a material effect on labor and delivery outcomes, though it's hard to know for sure.

We went to Jess Fu in Belmont/Los Altos, who we liked a lot.

Climbing (top rope): Don't start this if you're already 20 weeks pregnant and have never climbed before, but Tharu was able to continue to climb fairly high grades through week 37, which is long after she stopped being able to go on long walks.

Exercise notes
  • If you exercise: continuing exercise through pregnancy seems a lot easier than starting a new exercise (after say week 20). So if you think you might want to exercise through pregnancy, I would plan to be in shape for that by week 20.
  • We planned to do ab exercises starting late in the pregnancy, under some theory that it would help with recti diastasis. That plan did not work, since Tharu's abs changed in some way early on in pregnancy.
  • Speaking of recti diastasis, it's worth looking it up if you're not familiar with it. We decided that being careful about it (starting late-ish in pregnancy) was worth the hassle, though don't know if that bet was correct.
  • If you are a serious runner, dancer, or horseback rider, I would very seriously consider the pelvic floor physical therapy recommendation. You can get into a situation where your pelvic floor muscles are super strong (from running/dancing), which can translate into them being super tight.

Gestational diabetes: If you're worried (e.g. because you failed the glucose challenge test), consider using a continuous glucose monitor. You can get one from Levels Health, and I expect there are cheaper ways to get one as well. Doing it for 2 weeks is sufficient. It will both tell you if you actually have gestational diabetes (much better than a one-off test), and also help you fix it if you do.

  • The big downside is they are expensive; ~$100 for two weeks.
  • If you're worried about the pain: Tharu rated the insertion experience as a 1/10 on pain. Rishi rated it as a 1.5/10. The pain subsided soon after insertion, and there is no pain during removal.
  • Another random tip is to fast for 3-4 hours before the initial glucose challenge test, which will significantly reduce the chance of a false positive.
Vitamins: If you choose to take prenatal vitamins:
  • The iron in them can cause nausea and related problems. You can get a multivitamin with folate and without iron (e.g. many prenatal gummies) if the nausea tradeoff is not worth it to you. It's worth noting that iron is one of the main touted benefits of prenatal vitamins, so if you go this route you may want to check you're getting enough iron from your food.
  • Vitamins are shockingly under-regulated in the US. They are less regulated than either food or medicine. My impression is that in practice, even large brands have problems with high heavy metal concentrations, and with active ingredient concentrations that are different from what is advertised.
    • We've decided to only buy "USP certified" for our vitamin needs, which is a certification I think I do trust. Nature Made is a reasonable brand with a wide selection of USP verified vitamins. They are sold at CVS and maybe other places, but have a wider selection online. The ones that are certified have a USP logo on them.

Minimum benefit threshold 🏀: There are many possible interventions one can do during pregnancy to improve child outcomes, ranging from food restrictions to not going on walks (since you might trip, fall, and in the process hurt the unborn child). Unlike post-pregnancy interventions, many of the interventions have reasonably quantifiable effect sizes (see Expecting better). Doctors, relatives, and well-wishers may each provide you with long lists of actions they feel you should take for the future well being of your child. In our calculations, most of these actions were not worth the effort.

We found it helpful to set a minimum benefit threshold as follows:

  • A basis point is a 1/10000 chance of something happening. So an intervention that changes the chance of a bad outcome X happening from 0.05% to 0.03% would cause a 2 basis point decrease in X.
  • We set two thresholds: one for "major outcomes" and one for "minor outcomes". An example of a major outcome would be a lifetime debilitating disease. An example of a minor outcome would be a loss of 3 IQ points.
  • We ignored all interventions whose benefits did not plausibly meet the relevant threshold.

Our thresholds were 1 basis point for major outcomes, and 10 basis points for minor outcomes. For comparison, as a random American 35 year old woman, there is an 11 basis point chance you will die in the next year. For a random American baby, there is a 55 basis point chance they will die in their first year of life. (I assume many of these deaths are happening to people with known health risks, but these numbers are high relative to our threshold even if you divide them by 10.)

In other words, the thresholds we set were very conservative. However, even that conservative threshold removed nearly every intervention we had to consider.

A good work from home setup, if you can swing it in your job. Being able to work from home meant Tharu could take short naps during the day, which meant she barely noticed any fatigue.

Spinning babies (website): Techniques for putting your baby in a good position for labor and delivery. Worth asking your OB/midwife about it, and taking a look yourself if they aren't familiar with it.

  • The opinion of the SF birth center was that it's not worth considering the exercises until week ~32, once you know whether your baby is already in a good position or not. We watched the "Parent Class" video ahead of time, which was helpful, but planned on not attempting any of the exercises until week 32.
  • At a high level, "a good position" means head down, and head facing the right direction.
  • It was surprisingly hard for us to tell whether the baby was in a good position without an ultrasound.

Giving birth at a birth center 🏀: We used the San Francisco Birth Center, which is awesome. Pacifica Maternity in Berkeley is in the same tier (in terms of size, longevity, organizational structure, accreditation, etc). There are no other birth centers in the Bay Area in that tier, though there may be smaller or newer ones we didn't look at. We planned to use the SF birth center even while we were living in Mountain View.

We spent some time thinking about whether to give birth in the SF birth center or a hospital. The primary considerations in our decision matrix were safety (🛀), sophistication of care providers (🛀), labor and delivery experience (🛀), cost (🏥), pre-partum and post-partum convenience (mix), and society/family support for decision (🏥), not necessarily in that order. 🛀 = birth center was better, 🏥 = hospital was better.

We have a draft document with extended thoughts; reach out if you're thinking about this and I can send the current version.

Doulas: We did not use a doula, though we would have if we had done a hospital birth. Most people we know used a doula, including for second children. The main benefits are: guiding the mother through labor, and ensuring the hospital system treats you well. I don't remember the numbers any more, but the difference in medical outcomes with and without a doula are astounding, especially if you are racially or economically disadvantaged. (Though I do think the measured effects go down significantly if you are the type of person the medical system already treats well.)

  • Some doulas come to your home, and some only meet you at the hospital.
  • We interviewed 5-6 doulas, and were able to form reasonably strong opinions after we had talked to a few. So I think it's worth interviewing a few vs just going with a friends' recommendation.
  • You need to book them far in advance. I don't know how far.
  • The cost in the SF area is ~2k (with a lot of variation).
  • Here are some of the doulas we considered, several of whom we liked. The person we liked the most was Grace Klein.

The birth partner (book) 🏀: Some context: labor and delivery is a long process (10-50+ hours), the majority of which happens at home. We found it critically helpful to have someone in the house with knowledge of what this first part of labor is supposed to look like. This book provides that knowledge.

If you have a doula who will be coming to your house, you can skip this entirely; the doula will have the requisite knowledge.

Two major mistakes we made:

  • Not practicing all the labor positions ahead of time. Once labor started, we were only able to use the one position we had practiced.
  • Not finishing the book ahead of time, in particular, not finishing Part 2 (Labor and Birth).

I'd say it is more important for the non-birthing person to read the book than for the birthing person to read the book. If the non-birthing person is not the reading type, I would strongly recommend either having a doula or taking a birth class before 36 weeks.

Evidence based birth (website): I found their articles to be trustworthy and reliable. I never figured out how to navigate their website, but googling "evidence based birth <thing they might have an article about>" seems to work.

GBS: GBS is a bacteria that (sometimes) lives in your vaginal canal. It can infect the baby during delivery, and GBS infections can be very bad. You can reduce the chance of an infection by taking antibiotics during delivery (via an IV).

The US currently uses the following heuristic to decide whether to recommend antibiotics: test for GBS at week ~36. If you test positive, give antibiotics, otherwise don't. This makes sense as a national recommendation optimized for simplicity and easy compliance, but it is not hard to do significantly better: https://neonatalsepsiscalculator.kaiserpermanente.org. (Kaiser is a major hospital system concentrated on the west coast).

What we did:

  • Pick a probability cutoff ahead of time. You're trading off the probability of neonatal sepsis with the cost of taking antibiotics. Some of the antibiotics do make it into the kid, though probably not much. In case it helps, our cutoff was 0.2/1000 births; i.e. we would take antibiotics if it reduced the chance of sepsis by 0.02%, and otherwise we wouldn't. But it's easy to imagine different people having different tradeoffs, e.g. depending on your personal estimate of the cost of taking antibiotics.
  • Game day: pull up the website on your phone, and enter in the various numbers like maternal temperature. Set "type of intrapartum antibiotics" to "antibiotics > 4 hours prior to birth", and then to "no antibiotics", and look at the difference it makes to "EOS risk @ birth". If the difference is higher than your cutoff, take the antibiotics, otherwise don't.

For any possible cutoff, there will be many scenarios where this method will result in you taking antibiotics when it is not recommended and/or not taking antibiotics when it is recommended (i.e. the default recommendation makes a lot of mistakes in both directions). As usual, going against a stated recommendation can result in heavy pushback from medical providers, so be prepared for that if you end up deciding to use the 4-variable Kaiser calculator over the 1-variable national recommendation.

Advice from elders: Birth technology has made huge advances in the last 30 years. I found that the intuition of people who gave birth in the 80s and 90s is sometimes a bit out of date. In particular, cheap and high quality ultrasounds are a total gamechanger (and a useful filter for advice is: "would that story have been different if the mother had had access to cheap and high quality ultrasounds?")

Mistakes or things we would do differently in hindsight:

  • Finish reading The Birth Partner by 36 weeks, and finish practicing all the positions.
  • Finish packing our birth center/hospital bags the moment labor started (vs packing 90% and doing "the last 10%" during active labor).
  • Getting good sleep starting at 38 weeks. We went into labor a bit sleep deprived, which was not fun.
  • We had 3 people in the house during early labor, and I would say it was barely enough. Next time I think we'll either have 4 people, or have 3 people but with one of them being a professional doula.
  • Maybe we would get a doula for the home portion.

Other fyi

  • You may throw up during early labor; one of our friends was caught by surprise. Keep a bucket or garbage bag handy.
  • I didn't think I would care to track the contractions, but it helped immensely once they got less than 10 minutes apart. If you aren't getting a doula, I would figure out which app is best and set it up ahead of time. It doesn't need to be fancy, but it should be easy to check the interval and length of all the contractions so far.

Lucie's list (website) 🏀: Provides two things:

  • Lists of things you might want to buy. Lucie's list removed most of the "unknown unknowns" in terms of product categories we should consider getting but didn't know about.
  • Wirecutter-style recommendations for specific products

They also have other things on the website (articles and such) that I can't speak to.

I found their Wirecutter-style recommendations very helpful when buying things pre-partum (for the first few weeks of the baby's life). Note that the helpfulness of the recommendations was concentrated in the newborn phase for us; by month 3 or 4 I found that I rarely ended up going with one of the listed recommendations.

Cribsheet (book) 🏀: Sequel to Expecting Better. This covers a wide age range, and I found I needed to re-consult the book at each milestone. Once I didn't have the book handy and tried to get away with looking at the internet instead; I don't plan to make that mistake again.

Parent data (website): Articles answering several of the questions we struggled with until we learned about the site. Behind a paywall, but totally worth the $6/mo. This is Emily Oster's substack (author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet).

Secrets of the Nanny Whisperer (book) 🏀: A must read if you're planning on hiring a nanny. Walks through each stage of the hiring lifecycle (putting out an ad, phone screen, on-sites, ending the relationship, etc), as well as what nannies value in employers. Based on the nanny ads I saw, following the advice in this book will immediately propel you towards the top end of family/nanny relationships.

Childcare costs: This was tedious and stressful to figure out, so compiling our intel from late 2022 in Berkeley. I don't know how much this generalizes. These numbers are for experienced providers who are able to communicate in English.

  • Daycare: ranged from 25-36k/yr. Almost no daycares took very young kids; it would have been tough to try to find one in Berkeley that took a 3 month old. All the daycares we looked at had a capacity of 6-12 kids; I'm not sure if larger centers would be cheaper or more expensive.
  • "Home care", or informal daycares of 3-4 kids: We weren't sure how to find these.
  • Nanny share: $16-20/hr for 2 kids, could go down to $15 for 3 kids. This is for "full time", or something approximating 40 hrs/wk.
  • Solo nanny: $22-25/hr. Generally people quoted $25-28, but were very amenable to being negotiated down. Also for "full time" engagements.
  • Nanny from agency: These were way higher, e.g. starting in the $40s/hr. We did not pursue this much.
  • The 2021 Nanny Survey: Pay & Benefits from the Berkeley Parents Network provided some useful context.
  • There's also something called a "mother's helper", which is more part time. My sense is mother's helpers don't help with the baby directly, but help with tasks around the house. (For some reason the gendered term is still the one primarily used, even in Berkeley.)

Other nanny fyi

  • We found 1-2 reasonable-seeming people on urbansitter.com, but they were only available starting several months out.
  • care.com and sittercity.com felt pretty scammy, but others have had luck there I think.
  • We found no correlation between cost and goodness of nanny, along the dimensions we cared about—childcare knowledge, attention to detail, ability to learn from feedback, and willingness to help with household chores. (Note: we had already restricted to experienced nannies who could communicate in English. I do expect those two qualities are correlated with cost.)

Night nanny 🏀: Night nannies (aka postpartum doulas) provide help at night for the first few months. It is a completely different job from the "day" nannies we've been talking about so far. Expertise and training matter a lot more. If you can afford it, you can get a newborn care specialist, which feels like a more accurate description of the job.

My feeling going in was something like "a lot of people in a lot of places have figured out how to raise a baby. Probably it'll come naturally??". My feeling now is closer to "despite doing a bunch of reading ahead of time, we didn't hold a candle to expert help". The first 6-8 weeks are probably the most important, though we were glad to have our nanny for a bit longer. A night nanny also helps parents sleep more at night, which is a huge boon in itself.

Our night nanny was Grace Klein, who we highly recommend. Night nannies are not cheap (expect ~$400/night), but it's on the same order of magnitude as childcare in general. If you're choosing between more weeks or more nights/week, we would choose more weeks, with maybe a few extra days in the first 2 weeks.

On having help 🏀: A consistent observation we've made of our friends is that two people is not enough people to raise a 0-2 month old in a low-stress way, even if both people are at home full time. The first few weeks are particularly rough, because one person is likely still recovering from giving birth.

Exercise ball 🏀: We got Trideer which is marketed for pregnancy and post-partum, but I expect any reasonable quality ball will do. I resisted getting one at first, but the ball was the only tool that consistently got our baby to calm down in the first 3 months, and it did a materially better job than me bouncing without the ball. Combined with a baby carrier, I could soothe the baby and work at full capacity at the same time.

The sizing of the ball is important; it may be worth getting two of these if you have two parents that need two different sizes.

Accurate baby scale (if breastfeeding): A sufficiently high quality scale can tell you how much your breastfed baby is eating at each feeding. We only end up needing this once every few weeks, but when it's useful it's very useful.

We got this scale after considerable research. It represents some tradeoff between accuracy and cost; if our baby had had eating problems we could have considered buying or renting a more accurate one.

In general, I would be extremely suspicious of any scale that doesn't mention concrete specifications like repeatability or linearity; most scales are very inaccurate, even if they show a lot of digits in the display. This is fine if you're just using the scale to track weight gain over time, but the noise in any uncalibrated scale will drown out the signal if you're using it to measure feeds.

Music: At some point (after the first month), music became unreasonably effective at calming the baby. Higher pitched stuff seemed to work better, but we didn't experiment too carefully.

Holding the baby: A lot of people have the instinct to use a cradle hold, where the head of the baby rests in your elbow. This works great for infants (~3mo+), but I found it a lot easier to carry the newborn baby with one hand behind its head.

On advice from others: 0-2mo babies are very different from 3mo+ babies. A lot of advice we got was well meaning and correct for older infants, but the opposite of the correct advice for newborns. An example might be "you should tire the baby out during the day so that it sleeps well at night" (which does not apply to newborns). And none of the nannies we interviewed had worked with infants younger than 3-4 months.

I think the only way out of this is to work with a newborn care specialist, experienced night nanny, or to do a lot of reading yourself.

Feeding, pooping, and sleeping: Some miscellaneous pointers to things to look up on YouTube or Google.

Feeding

  • Paced feeding. Considered standard practice by professionals, but none of the five day nannies we interviewed were familiar with it, despite each having many years of experience. Paced feeding helps the baby go back and forth between breastfeeding and bottle feeding (if relevant), reduces spit up and gas, and reduces the chance of ear infections.
  • Bottle feeding. If you're going to bottle feed at all, you want to start between 4-6 weeks, or risk bottle refusal issues. If you're going to breastfeed at all, you ideally want to be only breastfeeding the first couple of weeks, until breastfeeding is established.
  • Breastfeeding. Worth looking up YouTube videos once you're actually trying to do it. Here is a good one (among others).
  • Cluster feeding. Sometimes newborns are ready to eat as little as 30 min after they last finished eating, which can catch parents by surprise. Cluster feeding also helps increase the mother's (future) milk supply.
  • Seated burping position. Way easier and less scary than the "over the shoulder" motion.

Pooping

  • Bicycle legs. Helps get the gas out.
  • Colic hold. Helps with upset tummies.
  • Pooping transition. Babies can instantly transition from pooping several times a day to once every several days. This can feel alarming but is normal.

Sleep

  • Newborns are noisy. Wait a minute before picking up or soothing a newborn that cries out in its sleep; the act of doing so may itself be what wakes the baby up.
  • Precocious night sleeping. If your 2 week old baby is sleeping through the night this is bad not good. There's a good chance the baby is not getting enough calories and you need to wake it up to feed it.
  • Sleep training. Young infants (0-2 month olds) are totally different from 4+ month olds. It's worth reading (a summary of) at least one method for each stage. Cribsheet has a reasonable overview of the options for older infants. Several people told us about Taking Cara Babies (paid program), but we can't speak from experience.

App for tracking stuff: We didn't expect to care about tracking stuff, but knowing what happened in the last few days greatly helps predict how the next day is going to go. It also simplifies handoffs between ourselves and other caretakers. We were recommended Baby Daybook, which we used without further research. We still use it 4 months later.

Laundry tips: We went from doing laundry once every multiple weeks to doing it 3+ times per week. One detail is that you want to use relatively cold water for removing protein-based stains, like breastmilk. Modern detergents work more than well enough in cold water; probably ~80-90F is the sweet spot for most people.

Splitting the work: This applies if you have a birthing parent and a non-birthing parent, and are breastfeeding, and care about both parents putting in a roughly equal amount of time into childcare. I'm going to use "mom" and "partner" for "birthing parent" and "non-birthing parent" here.

The first observation is that nearly all of the work in this phase relates to feeding and soothing. If the mom is substantially better than the partner at soothing, it will be very tempting for the couple to have the mom do all the soothing in addition to all the feeding.

The second observation is that breastfeeding takes something like 8 hours a day for the first few weeks, and cannot be split between parents. This means that by default, the mom gets 10x the "hands on baby" time that the partner does, and ends up with substantially better baby-handling skills.

I don't have a full solution, but some things that both mitigated the issue for us and that I've observed in other couples:

  • Have the partner do as much feeding-adjacent work as possible, in particular: burping, diaper changing, and keeping the baby awake while eating. It is surprisingly reasonable, if counter-intuitive, for the partner to end up doing nearly 100% of the diaper changes.
  • Have the partner do any relevant research tasks, like buying products, reading this doc, and so on.
  • Tharu says it can be tempting for the mom to not lean on the partner enough. For example, it can feel silly to wake the partner up at 3am for a five minute diaper change, when you are perfectly capable of doing it yourself. So you may need to explicitly accept a tradeoff like "it's worth the partner spending 20 minutes of effort to remove a 5 minute task for the mom".

Financial matters: From a financial planning perspective, we found it useful to have a sense of how much having children costs. In the Bay Area, the primary costs of having children are childcare and housing; everything else is a rounding error. I'm including private school and college under childcare 😆. So once you figure out childcare, school, and housing costs, you're basically set!

There are two kinds of products listed below:

  • Those that brought us joy.
  • Those that were super helpful, and it wasn't obvious to us at first that we would want it. However, I don't have a strong reason to believe that the particular product we used was better than its competitors. Or, it may be better than its competitors, but not amazing in an absolute sense. These are marked with (C) for "product Category recommendation".

This is not meant to be comprehensive; I left out anything I assume you'll already know about or buy from reading Lucie's list.

Places to put the baby

  • Waterproof, washable pad. We have 5 of these, and may get more. This one is a good size, is thin, and has no toxic stuff like flame retardants or PVC.
  • Changing pad liner from Cloud Island. We have 9 of these, and use all of them.
  • Fisher-price swing. There were several months where this was the only thing that could hold the baby's attention. Note the size before buying; it is huge.
  • Nuna pipa lite lx car seat. It's ~5lb instead of ~10lb, and the "Sky drape" is very nice. See if you can find one on facebook marketplace. A major disclaimer is that this is incompatible with nearly every frame stroller. Read the Lucie's List article carefully before committing to this. We ended up not getting a frame stroller, partly because we bought this car seat.
  • Snoo bassinet: This is not a strong recommendation, though we would get it again. Consider checking Facebook Marketplace before buying new. In the Bay Area there is a highly active secondary market, and with a little effort you can probably get a snoo and sell it later for approximately the same price. We had a reasonable experience, though if we had to do it again we'd probably turn the volume down (it's very loud near the baby's head), and also wean the baby off after ~3 months vs 4-6 like the marketing suggests.
  • Soft carrier, rather than a stroller (C). With a soft carrier it felt like we could go anywhere, vs just the places a stroller could go. In the house, the soft carrier allowed us to keep the baby calm while having both hands free. We mostly used the BabyBjorn mini in 3D Jersey. We also tried a variety of slings and wraps, but not the baby k'tan (which we hear good things about).

Changing

  • Portable changing table. So far this has felt way better than using a dresser. The main features we like are the high (semi-adjustable) height plus the side tray providing easy access to diapers and wipes.
  • Millie Moon diapers. Good absorption and leakage control. Does a great job of keeping the wetness off the baby's skin. Also not overly expensive, despite "luxury" branding, due to it being a store brand.
  • Honest wipes. I went through several brands before settling on this one. What it does well: the ridges make it easy to scrape the mess off, it's relatively easy to separate the wipes from each other ("relatively" is doing a lot of work there), and it has ok-seeming ingredients.
  • Vaseline (C).

Toys

  • Wireframe ball. Super well-designed even though it's not obvious till you see a 3mo play with it. This is the first thing our baby was able to grab.
  • RhythMix egg shaker. Very satisfying (as an adult). Worth the extra $ in my opinion.
  • Mortimer the Moose. A classic, but don't let that stop you. Packs a lot in a small package.

Clothes and swaddles

  • Receiving blankets (C). Our baby was born in August, and we basically didn't need clothes until winter set in (late October?). Also empirically our preference was to swaddle the baby in receiving blankets over the several other swaddling products we had bought. Given how much we used these, I think it's worth splurging and getting something soft and nice.
  • Magnetic me. The magnets in the ones for younger babies (up to 3mo) go all the way down to the foot, which is great. These are pricey, but you can buy used on Facebook Marketplace. We tried getting some knockoff magnetic clothes, and those were bad.
  • Anything with a double zip (C). The Carter brand at Target seems totally fine; there are also pricier brands like Loulou Lollipop. Single zip is ok, but not as great. Snaps are bad.
  • Ollie swaddle (C). This worked very poorly initially, so we almost wrote it off. But it worked great starting around 2-3 months.
  • Merlin sleepsuit (C). Started working well starting around 4 months.

Feeding

  • Blessed Nest nursing pillow. This is a non-traditional choice, but the pillow is versatile and continues to be useful beyond its life as a nursing pillow. Can also be used as a pregnancy pillow, though we didn't do so.
  • Disposable nursing pads, rather than washable ones (C). These worked fine. Washable ones seem nice in theory, but it would have been one more thing to deal with.
  • Nipple cream (C). We were gifted one from Motherlove.
  • Dr. Brown's bottles. They also sell a plastic version. These are irritating to wash, but are one of the few bottles that are serious about reducing gas. From what I can tell, the breast-shaped nipples on other bottles are mostly a marketing scam, though I'm sure they work fine for many people.
  • Preemie nipples (C). Whatever bottle you buy, seriously consider getting matching preemie nipples, especially if you plan to continue breastfeeding. They should have a P on them, instead of a 1.
  • Large box of microfiber rags (C). These say disposable but go through the wash just fine. Our baby spit up a lot, and I was glad to have 50 rather than 10.
  • Larkin pumping bra. From Tharu: Soft and stretchy, compatible with nursing, and you can realistically wear it under your shirt all day. However, not super discreet; the straps don't hide under all shirts. Way better than no pumping bra (if you are pumping).
  • Nursing bra. From Tharu: Was looking for a nursing bra that was similar to no bra; this one from Storq is the closest I could find.

Other

  • Blue chux pads (C). Bodily fluids abound in the first few weeks, and these help keep things clean.
  • Baby monitor (C). The main feature we use on the one we got is its "loud pass" filter, which only passes through noises that are sufficiently loud.

Products listed in previous sections. These link to the relevant section:

Date: January 2023
Author: Rishi Gupta