I'm 6 days into a newborn. Lots of advice I receive was about getting enough sleep before hand and having lots of sex. That's really it for advice from the masses. I think the sex part is good, there's no time or energy for sexy times in the weeks following a baby. But the sleep advice is pretty bad.
You should be well rested going into delivery. All nighters and burning the candle at both ends should no longer be in your routine. But you can't bank sleep. You can't sleep so well the week before that you can stay up for days afterwards. Why is this such popular advice?
The best things I did before my boy arrived were to buy and prepare food and freeze it. A CostCo run a few weeks before means that we have food ready to go without much prep. My wife made and froze some soup and curry. Having food on hand is probably the most annoying and difficult to worry about while caring for a newborn.
The other thing we did was all the errands and chores on our list. We made a couple lists with degrees of criticality:
- Most critical - absolutely had to get done
- Things that really should be done
- Things that would be nice but not critical
- Least critical - not important to get done.
Then we started at the top of the list and worked our way down. So far, having those critical items complete has made the biggest difference. It was challenging to get all that stuff done, some of those things have been waiting to get done for almost 2 years. This is part of being an adult though, right?
The best preparation I have for this experience comes from a youth spent at UU cons. Running around all weekend with no sleep, sleeping on any surface and waking up after only an hour or two. These experiences provided the best training I could have. Losing a sleep routine is not new for my body and I'm able to match my boy's a lot better.