All new parents need patience - and Netflix

Raising a newborn? Eschew Pinterest in favour of my survival-oriented tips

Before I became a parent, I used to review Pinterest lists with titles like, Things You Must Have for Your Newborn and Without These Items, You Will Suck as a Parent.

Most of the tips are expensive nonsense lists with items like a bamboo crib, lovingly handcrafted in the rainforest by vegan chimpanzees. Some of them are common sense — car seats with high safety ratings. Although my mom has raised six kids and doesn’t even know how to use a car seat, so go figure.

Having been there a brief 26 months ago, here’s a few things I recommend for new parents:

Having a baby is delightful and fun, but it is also hard.

To de-stress during the day, I recommend a Netflix account. On a tough day, I would select a series and then watch it all the way through.

Orange is the New Black got me through my breastfeeding travails, the gentle humour of Grace and Frankie distracted me from the wildfire smoke billowing outside our condo, and Scarface sustained me during a long night with a fussy baby: “Say hello to my gassy little friend.”

Pampers Swaddlers have a stripe on the front that turns blue when the diaper is wet. This stripe helps you change the diaper before butt rot can set in. The bluer the stripe gets, the more of a reminder that you are failing as a parent. Although as you become more experienced you might find yourself saying things like, “Well, it’s not that blue.”

You need a fancy stroller that has baby shades that can be pulled up or down depending on the movement of the evil sun. I didn’t and so I walked around with a blanket draped over the stroller to keep the sun off his skin.

Then an article was shared on Facebook about how that quadruples the heat of the sun and omigod-you’re-killing-your-baby, you-monster. And so I took the blanket off and started walking with my face into the direct sunlight to keep it off my baby vampire. I had to turn the stroller every time the sun changed its position, so I looked like a human sundial or a lunatic — take your pick.

Before motherhood, I thought a baby wipe heater was the most decadent thing I’d ever seen. But now I know it is the smartest invention ever invented. Because although I swore up and down that I wouldn’t be an overly protective mom — I didn’t know babies are born with soft, perfect doeskin. So every time I wiped his butt, I blew on the wipes to warm them up. This extended the length of a diaper-change from one minute to four.

And as any pro-parent

Orange is the New Black got me through my breastfeeding travails.

knows, a long diaper change severely increases your chances of getting peed in the face.

Finally, invest in a good camera and take lots of pictures, preferably one per day. Then when you look at those pictures, you remember where you were and what was happening the day it was taken.

For the first year, I mostly followed my own advice, missing a few days here and there. But last week I was remembering the first time we took the baby to Fuddrucker’s (my first time, too, oddly enough). We placed our six-month-old in his car seat in the centre of the table and he drank a bottle while we ate burgers the size of his head (it might have been a bit intimidating to him now that I think of it.)

As I went through the memory, I realized that I cannot remember how he looked in his car seat: Were his legs sticking out or still too short? Did he move around or watch us curiously? And, what sounds did he make — was he cooing or laughing?

All these details are lost. So, strike the camera, it might be best to just hire a documentary crew to follow you around for a couple years.