[ezmobius]

I have a 5 1/2 month old boy named Ryland and he is just now finally sleeping all night long(9pm to 7:30am) The first 2-3 months were zombie time. I couldn't get any work done because of the sleep dep.

My one biggest piece of advice. SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS. or you will get NO sleep ever.

It will be the roughest thing you have ever gone through but one smile from your childs face up at yours makes it all better and reinvigorates you for another shot of energy for whatever you need to do.

Trust me though you will need to take at least 4 weeks off work for paternity leave assuming you are the father. Then once you go back to work expect to only work on the computer when you are at work. When you get home expect your wife to want some help with the kid and dinner etc. and don't expect to get any computer time at night for the first 3-4 months.

You will only get computer work done at work when you are away from the house and at the office. When you are at home your wife will have a constant stream of little things she will want you to do and you will feel like a slave, but then you will imagine what she goes through being alone with the baby all the time. and you will have mad respect for her.

Mostly try to be supportive and learn to not mumble under your breath when she asks you to do a million little things, Just do them and move along. It will pass soon once the baby hits 6 months or so and starts to have a real personality that you can interact with.

The first 4 months out of the womb is considered the 4th trimester and the kid is really still a foetus. Literally they cannot do anything for themselves until about 4 months. So its all up to you ad your spouse to do everything for them. They will be all floppy for a while not even able to hold their head up without support.

Trust me though it will all be worth it every time your little one smiles in your face and you will be re-invigorated.

Its the most incredible thing that has every happened to me and it made me re-evaluate my life and make major changes(like major changes). I resigned from my startup that I founded after 4 years(engine yard: really long story i'll write a book about someday ;)) to make sure i could spend this time with my son as much as possible. I cannot say what I am doing next but I am moving to Portland where my folks live in order for my son Ryland to be closer to his grandparents. And got a job that was understanding about working remote and weird hours. My new boss is the coolest ever he literally said "As long as you shit good code I don't care where your toilet is" :P

Don't worry, it will come naturally to you like it has to all humans thhroughout time. But remember this

SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS DURING THE FIRST 4 MONTHS

good luck! and congratulations!

[KoZeN]

I was keen to respond to this thread until I read the above response. Ezmobius has absolutely nailed it.

I'm an incredible proud Dad to a fifteen week old baby boy and his advice echoes every single thing I was going to say.

Then once you go back to work expect to only work on the computer when you are at work.

I'd like to elaborate on this point. Leaving Mum & baby at home will be difficult for a while, I still struggle with it immensely but it is hugely important to remember that your job is absolutely instrumental as you are now the main breadwinner and your family is relying on you to work hard every minute you are away from them. As hard as it may be to leave them at home, don't let it be a waste of time, make sure that you are giving 100% when you are away and please don't bring your work home with you if you can avoid it. Whilst at work, focus on it 100%. Don't spend all day at work wishing you were at home.

Be prepared to argue like crazy with your other half. Regardless of how strong your bond is, you will fall out. Her patience with the baby may be beyond comprehension but do not expect that patience to extend to you. As stressful as it may be for you, I can guarantee it will be worse for her, infinitely worse if she's breastfeeding. Maintain perspective and learn to let everything slide.

Final point: Routine. Routine, routine, routine, routine. Sleep will become a rare and priceless commodity so it is crucial that you establish a bedtime routine from the beginning. Find a routine and stick with it. Read to your kid every single night. Even if it's just for a couple of minutes. It may seem pointless in the beginning but stick with it. Babies bedtime is now my favourite part of the day.

Good luck mate. It's an incredible journey.

[barrydahlberg]

Routine. Routine, routine, routine, routine.

This. It took us 8 months to get it sorted but now our little boy just about begs to be put to bed and he sleeps 10 hours a night without a sound.

[mikecaron]

My experience 1 year into Fatherhood agrees with this. We put baby on a cyclic routine of Eat, Play, Sleep since about day 7. She was sleeping through the night at 8wks. Check out "On Becoming Babywise", Gary Ezzo.

Like all the other papas here say, BE SENSITIVE TO YOUR WIFE. Be aware that as your wife breast feeds (if she does) her hormones are still rocking to a different beat every hour. Let complaints roll off your back. Sometimes things won't make sense to you, but go with the flow. Afford her tons of generosity and selflessness. Clean the house for her, offer to take the baby so she can sleep, draw her a bath to soak in with candles and bubbles. Take her on a romantic date if she's up for it so she feels like she's still got it even though she may complain about her body often. Make her life easy and sweet and yours will be good.

Also, for a bit of relief... listen to Garrison Keilor's Fatherhood tale: http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media_player/popup.php?name...

Enjoy being daddy! It's absolutely wonderful. You will forget about working overtime. You'll want to spend any and all free time with your little one. Cheers!

[jtheory]

> Be aware that as your wife breast feeds (if she does) her hormones are still rocking to a different beat every hour.

Well, and never mind the hormones (though both parents will have a lot of these going on) -- breastfeeding quite literally takes a lot out of you. She will have more to do, but less energy than she's used to.

Just do everything you can, and then more, and look for the humor to put a smile on your face (and hers) whenever you can. It gets easier as you go along.

[pbhjpbhj]

>My experience 1 year into Fatherhood agrees with this. We put baby on a cyclic routine of Eat, Play, Sleep since about day 7. She was sleeping through the night at 8wks. Check out "On Becoming Babywise", Gary Ezzo.

Didn't your wife find that her breasts were painfully engorged by not feeding the baby all night?

[mikecaron]

@pbhjpbhj > Nope. In the early weeks, she did feed the baby about every 4 hours, but after about 8-9 weeks she woke the baby around 10pm and fed her and then again at around 6am. We considered it "Through the night" because it was solid sleep for us.

[rradu]

> Sometimes things won't make sense to you

Hilarious. I don't have a wife w a baby, but I can totally see how that situation would come up a lot.

[KoZeN]

It's absolute bliss!

We are incredibly lucky, since 10 weeks old, baby Cameron has been sleeping a minimum of 8 hours a night.

Sometimes it takes 10 weeks, sometimes it takes 8 months, either way, it's worth the effort.

Kids thrive on routine.

[mattcole]

We kind of took the other route, our daughter slept whenever there was time really. We took her backpacking across Europe for 2 months when she was 8 months old, she just slept whenever she was tired. At home she would go to bed if we were at home, but we didn't hesitate to go out for dinner or to a friends house or whatever and she'd just sleep whereever we ended up. In contrast some of our friends have kids who will only sleep if they're in their usual environment which can make things a bit tricky. We're expecting number 2 in 10 weeks, so hopefully the next one is equally easy going.

[jasonlotito]

I find kids adopt to their parents way of doing things. My wife and I are rather calm, and so are our children. They fall asleep easily enough, are happy children, and calm and relaxed.

The problem some parents have with their children is they try to change the way the children behave to something other than what they learned from their parents.

If they are the type to go out, party, invite friends over and stay up late, etc, then they should expect their children to emulate that. It's when the parents want their children to behave differently that you have a problem. This is all purely my own experience.

[pbhjpbhj]

This sounds a lot like our philosophy on sleep.

My sister gets in a panic if the kids aren't in the bath at a particular time, aren't in bed on routine haven't finished a meal at the set time, etc.. PITA I say.

We've had problems now that J has gone to school. We couldn't keep the same sleep regime as we had to be up to get to school.

[steamer25]

>SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS

Agreed. Check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Sleep-Habits-Happy-Child/dp/04... .

New borns sleep 18-20 hours a day but the few waking hours are distributed throughout the 24 hour period. This means your sleep will be disturbed in the middle of the night and you will need to make up for it with naps during the day.

Sleep is critical for brain growth and function. Tired dad/mom/baby == crabby dad/mom/baby. It can even lead to a negative feedback loop called being over-tired where one becomes too agitated to enter sleep easily.

After a couple months, you'll want to consider sleep training. This means allowing the kid to cry for increasing periods to unwind and adjust to the solitude/quiet needed for sleep.

[jtheory]

Generally agreed, though sleep training is still somewhat controversial. If you and your baby have found sleeping habits that work for you all -- you are getting enough sleep to be functional and be healthy -- then skip it.

My daughter is 14 months, and still wakes during the night to breastfeed (she also eats solid food by now, but still nurses), but she doesn't make any significant noise and doesn't even necessarily wake my wife, and we're both fine and rested in the morning. This has pretty much been the pattern since she was a few months old.

Well... I'm fine and rested in the morning if I have gone to bed at a decent hour. I have trouble concentrating enough to get work done during the day, so I often do it at night. Last night I slept about 5 hours on the couch by my computer then worked as the sun came up. :)

It's not ideal -- I could use more rest in my life -- but I'd rather skip some sleep then cut out any of my involvement in my daughter's life... I'm really enjoying that part. She's learning at an incredible rate, and I'm finding myself pretty good at optimizing her experience (and man, now I really cringe when I see these parents constantly putting the most interesting things just barely out of their poor child's reach, or trying to "discipline" their children into, well, suppressing their essential and powerful natural curiosity).

[thegyppo]

Thanks for the kind insights, I guess this is exactly the reason I posted the thread. Right now as Hackers we're totally motivated by succeeding with our businesses, then all of a sudden the world is turned upside down & priorities get shuffled (in a good way of course!).

Best of luck with the next venture, maybe we all can do a followup thread in a few years on "Tips for ensuring your Kids grow up into successful Hackers."

[tyweir]

As the father of a 1 year old girl who owns a gym and has a start-up, I agree with everything in this post.

ezmobius, I wish I had more votes to give you, as this is one of the best comments I've read on HN.

And an emphasis on sleeping when your baby sleeps, you may need to encourage your wife to sleep, as she'll probably want to do other things.

A friend of mine with 3 kids often says, "Mom takes care of the baby, Dad takes care of Mom." I think that's apt in the first 4 months, just do whatever you can to allow your wife to be the best mother she can be.

[jtheory]

> Mom takes care of the baby, Dad takes care of Mom.

I'm pretty opposed to this idea, actually.

Breastfeeding is an obvious exception (I couldn't help much with that, though during the tricky part at the beginning I learned a hell of a lot about how to help the baby latch on), but in general I think you should be doing every single baby task whenever you can.

If you don't, after a few weeks your wife will be so much better at changing diapers, changing clothes, calming the baby when it's upset, taking the baby for a walk, etc. etc. that you won't be able to do it, even when she needs you to. It'll be weird for you, weird for the baby, and you'll just get screams until Mommy comes back, and that means you'll be fairly useless when your wife most needs your help.

If you're working from home, dive in (this was how I did it).

If you are away at work during the day, then when you get home you should take over the baby as much as possible. Change the diapers, even if you're slow & awkward at first (you'll quickly improve), give a bath (also hard at first!), dance the baby around the house and sing some songs. And if the baby has nursed recently, do NOT just hand if off to mom at the first sign of distress -- figure it out yourself. When the baby cries in the middle of the night, take it far away from the bedroom (once you've figured out that it's not hungry, that is), take a deep breath, and start experimenting to learn how you can calm it (it may be different from what mom does). And actually, if you've got bigger hands and a longer reach than your wife, some of these things will be naturally easier for you anyway.

Trust me, you'll be a far more valuable daddy this way.

[tyweir]

I'm not sure if you're attempting to imply that I'm an uninvolved father, but I do appreciate you snipping the context for the quote you chose.

[jacquesm]

Congratulations, daddy :)

You seem to have things worked out pretty good, and I so agree with you about the smiles.

[geeksam]

+1 million on sleep being the biggest issue you'll face. My daughter just turned 2(!) and she's been sleeping 9-10 hours a night for a good long while now, but it took about a year and a half for my IQ to get back up to something approaching what it was before I became a papa. Totally worthwhile to hear her say things like "I want cheese on my mat" or "all of the trains went bye-bye" or "that fell on papa's head" or "I'm a robot monkey", though.

OT to Ez: Welcome to Portland! There's a fairly active Ruby community here, embedded in an extremely active tech community: see calagator.org if you haven't already. I'm happy to share what little I know about parenting in Portland (geeksam at gmail).

[katovatzschyn]

  SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS DURING THE FIRST 4 MONTHS

Having known a few to have done just this; is this a possible evolutionary explanation for the short term ability of poly-phasic sleep? Does anybody know any information on the relation of the two topics? I am having trouble searching for this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

[jtheory]

It's not true polyphasic sleep; it's just the best way to deal safely with exhaustion. And just about every new parent goes through a period of exhaustion, because the baby will probably be waking them during their normal sleeping hours, every night... plus there's more to do during the day, so especially first time parents start out trying to do it all (but without the sleep to recover at night), and that catches up with you pretty quickly.

Plus the experience of giving birth to launch this whole adventure means that probably both parents went for a few days with no or very little sleep, and the mother has a lot of physical recovery to do as well (ever worse if it was a c-section), so they're starting off way in the red.

[cisba]

All true. If you cant reduce drastically your sleep time.

[will_critchlow]

Strangely, this was the thing that changed most dramatically for me work-wise in the months after my daughter was born (in March). The first few weeks are insane sleep-wise and I was a zombie. After that, I have found I don't need to go back to my old sleep levels.

My routine now (works for me, running a business in two timezones - GMT & PST) is:

London office: 9/9.30 --> 5/5.30

Home for bathtime (the baby's!)

Baby into bed ~7.30pm

No work or computer until after 10pm - when I now find I can do a good chunk of productive work (I never used to be able to do this and get up the next morning consistently).

Essentially, having a daughter did what all those years of trying to hack my sleep patterns couldn't do. I don't know if it was being thrown in at the deep end or a change of motivation, but either way...

The late shift also helps because our Seattle-based crew are online then.

[happyrichpinoy]

Perfect timing, your great insights will serve me well as I just became a father to an updated version of me 5 days ago :D