I thought this would be a nice place to aggregate lists of miscellaneous parenting tips, organized by age. Maybe if this gathers lots of good input, I’ll post another age group in a few days. If nobody is into the idea, no big deal.
Let’s start with babies 4-6 months old, since newborns are way to fucking complicated!
Suggestion: post a single tip per comment, so people can up/downvote each tip, rather than long comments with lots of ideas. May the best advice float to the top!
All your advices and tips are true and great. I’d like to add two things on the mental side.
It’s not your baby’s fault. Parenthood, at least mine, has moments of doubt, frustration, exhaustion and anger. Baby won’t listen, will cry a lot, will demolish your face with amazingly fast growing fingernails, will break your favourite thing, shit in your car and puke on your new shirt. This may sound weird for some of you, but to calm down in some moments it helped a lot to tell myself, that this is not the baby’s fault. It’s not trying to be mean to me, it’s just a fking baby. Since it’s actions are not meant to be harmful, reject every impulse to be harmful too. Be the adult one. Be the calm one. And protect your eyes from that fingernails!
It will not always be like this. Try to enjoy every moment. You will forget the bad things and miss the good things of this very moment. You will be like “You remember when we had like zero sleep? You remember when we couldn’t really use the car, because he was freaking out?” Things will change. They will be even better.