Decent tips and experience The Albatross , but I do think everyone's experience can be quite different.
In our case my wife was pretty badly injured from the delivery and needed a walker for the first two weeks afterwards. She couldn't move the baby anywhere. We had to move our life to our first floor of our house. I personally had to be there 100% of the time to help get the baby from bassinet to breast feeding and back. I also had to do every chore we've got including animal care and such all while also working some hours to keep things afloat at my job. During the first week I got, no shit, 20 hours of sleep at most. We didn't get to even attempt to sleep in our own bed for two weeks. Then after getting into a decent groove we had to take him to the hospital where we had to stay for two weeks. So we had to adjust to that. We have a baby with pretty severe gas issues and reflux so he needs meds twice a day and can get pretty fussy for no real reason. I know all babies can be like this, but that adds to it.
Not trying to say parenting is impossible. We actually have a pretty great thing going now and have got into the swing of things pretty well. Just that you can't really take your experience as the be all end all. A lot of the women I know actually got injured and had some pretty hard times healing. Getting time off work can be a major hassle. Some babies are legit fucking nuts.
Life does change a lot after a baby though. If you are able to play video games a ton beforehand you can kiss that goodbye. Going out is a hassle. Doing things with friends can be nearly impossible and/or dangerous for immunity of your baby. It's hard to find time to do things you love other than the baby. Hell, we spend from 8PM at night until 9AM the next day preparing for bed, trying to sleep, and getting things started in the morning. That's 13 hours every day and we still don't get even 7 hours of actual sleep. I work from 9AM until 5 or 6PM then get dinner ready and eat but that's obviously an endeavor that can be easy or hard depending on his nap. Then right afterwards we try to figure out how to get his meds in and it's basically 8PM time to get the wind down to sleep started.
In our case my wife was pretty badly injured from the delivery and needed a walker for the first two weeks afterwards. She couldn't move the baby anywhere. We had to move our life to our first floor of our house. I personally had to be there 100% of the time to help get the baby from bassinet to breast feeding and back. I also had to do every chore we've got including animal care and such all while also working some hours to keep things afloat at my job. During the first week I got, no shit, 20 hours of sleep at most. We didn't get to even attempt to sleep in our own bed for two weeks. Then after getting into a decent groove we had to take him to the hospital where we had to stay for two weeks. So we had to adjust to that. We have a baby with pretty severe gas issues and reflux so he needs meds twice a day and can get pretty fussy for no real reason. I know all babies can be like this, but that adds to it.
Not trying to say parenting is impossible. We actually have a pretty great thing going now and have got into the swing of things pretty well. Just that you can't really take your experience as the be all end all. A lot of the women I know actually got injured and had some pretty hard times healing. Getting time off work can be a major hassle. Some babies are legit fucking nuts.
Life does change a lot after a baby though. If you are able to play video games a ton beforehand you can kiss that goodbye. Going out is a hassle. Doing things with friends can be nearly impossible and/or dangerous for immunity of your baby. It's hard to find time to do things you love other than the baby. Hell, we spend from 8PM at night until 9AM the next day preparing for bed, trying to sleep, and getting things started in the morning. That's 13 hours every day and we still don't get even 7 hours of actual sleep. I work from 9AM until 5 or 6PM then get dinner ready and eat but that's obviously an endeavor that can be easy or hard depending on his nap. Then right afterwards we try to figure out how to get his meds in and it's basically 8PM time to get the wind down to sleep started.
