NEWBORN BABY HACKS Tips Tricks for First Time Moms

Hi everyone! Marian here. Welcome back to my channel. Today I have a newborn hacks video for you guys. I am the mother of two little boys, a two and a half year old and a newborn, who's actually very shortly growing out of the newborn stage. He's almost three months, two and a half. So I figured now would be a perfect time to film this video because we are right in the midst of it and soon growing out of it and if you hear his little cues, he's right over there so he'll probably be in this video in just a minute. I hope you guys like it. If you do, please make sure to give it a big thumbs up and I would love it if you subscribe to my channel. I make videos about being a Jewish mom and I upload on Mondays and Thursdays. Okay, so let's jump into the hack. So the first tips I want to talk about are sleep because newborns are not wired to sleep through the night and it is a very hard adjustment when you come home to a baby waking up every few hours. But that is totally normal. So I want to talk about some tips that help with newborn sleep. The first tip I have is a white noise machine. This one is Sleep Sheep. That's what we call him. Yeah, that is his name. And it's just a white noise machine. It has a few different noises. Whale sounds, bird, rainbow, et cetera. So I really recommend one of these products. You'll notice that babies sleep really well when you're out and about, like at a restaurant, at a party, like where there's tons of loud noise or just ambient noise going on. And it really helps to have one of these at home. It really just muffles those like minor sounds that comes up when baby's sleeping. And it's just a great noise machine. And it teaches them to not have to be in a 100% totally quiet space to sleep. The next tip I have is when you're feeding at night, to swaddle before you feed. So this is my favorite swaddle blanket. I will talk more about it in a little bit. It's from Aiden and Anai. But basically when you're feeding at night, you just want that baby to go right back to bed when you're done. So what I recommend is when they wake up, change their diaper, settle them down, and then put them in their swaddle, then feed them, and hopefully you can put them right back down in their crib afterwards without having to swaddle them, which wakes them up a lot. By the way, this right here is the Snoo. I have a whole separate review on it. I 100% recommend it for sleep. We have a two-month-old Cory who is now sleeping through the night, which is truly a miracle. And the swaddling for the Snoo is super easy because we're on the topic of sleep. I'll just mention it. If you are struggling with newborn sleep, you might want to think about buying one of these or even just renting one. But it comes with its own swaddle, so you just zip the baby in. It's called the 5-Second Swaddle. It's really nice. But if you don't have the Snoo, using this and just swaddling the baby before you start to feed them at night, I think, really helps the transition. Speaking of helping your sanity for sleep, I also want to show you guys what I keep right over there next to the bed. So at night, next to my bed, every night, I just put a handful of diapers, some wipes, and again, one of these cloths, even though we don't swaddle our baby in it, I use this to change his diaper. All that I do is I do not take him over to the changing table in the middle of the night. I just put this on my lap, on top of the sheets, and change his diaper right in front of me. I've got the wipes. The diaper is right there. I literally don't move from the bed, as you can see. If he's got a poop explosion or something, of course, that's a different case, but generally at night, it's just pee. It's just an easy diaper change. So I do it right on my lap, sitting in bed. I put the dirty diaper in the little trash can over there, and that's it. I'm done. It makes nighttime changes so much easier, and I think it's much less disturbing for the baby, which helps them get back to sleep right afterwards. My next few tips are for crying. Babies cry. It's just one of the things they do, but I want to show you guys how I like to calm babies down. So this is my baby Cory, and we're going to demonstrate some baby holds for you. The first one is the colic hold. It looks like this. You put your arm in front of the baby's chest, and your hand right under their bottom, and you just hold them like this in a slightly downwards position, and it really helps soothe them. You can also pat their stomach. This can be a great position for burping as well, but I found this is the best one for just walking around the house and calming them down. The next position that works great, you might have seen this one online. It's famously touted as the position that makes every baby stop crying. You want to be a little bit careful before they can hold their head up, but you want to place your hand right there on their chest, and then put your other hand under their bottom, lean them forward a little bit, and you shake their touch like this. It's super strange, right Cory? It's super strange, but it really does work to just calm them down. Yeah, but again, you just want to have your hand here and be careful before they can support their neck. The next tip I have for crying and calming baby is this, a giant exercise ball. Not only is this a great investment when you're pregnant, because it really helps to sit while you're pregnant on this, and to get labor started, and during labor, but it also is great to calm a baby. Sometimes they really need that bouncing motion to calm them down. Now he's like, you started to hold me, don't put me down again. Another great tip for helping a baby calm down is to go outside. If your baby is just screaming and in one of those can't take it anymore moods, sometimes the best thing you can do for them is just step outside of your house. Even if it's cold outside or really hot outside, that sudden change in the ambient air and temperature and just feel sometimes is enough to just startle them and get them to calm down for a minute, and it's just very soothing for a baby to be outside. I find babies to be a lot calmer when they're outdoors than indoors. The last recommendation I have for a crying baby is to wear the baby. If you've watched any of my YouTube videos in the past few months, you've probably seen Cory in his sling. I wear him all the time and it is really, really nice. Cory is a super calm baby. Watch, he's going to start crying now, but I think a lot of that is because I spend a lot of time wearing him, which is very comforting for him. Also, if you're going out to a restaurant or something like that, it really helps to wear the baby. I find Cory, if I want to make sure he goes straight to sleep when we're out in public, if I put him in the sling, he just drops off and it's so nice. Okay, my next tip is for bath time. You might not know this, but babies, especially newborns, are not good at retaining their body temperature, so a bath can be a really tough transition experience for them. One of the things that helps is to place a cloth of warm water right over their chest, which is generally the exposed part of their body on a bath, and to just keep warming that cloth up with warm water. You can just splash warm water on top of it and it really helps to keep them warm and maintain their warm body temperature while you're doing the bath, which you should keep pretty short, especially for a newborn. Also, right after the bath, the best thing for them is skin-to-skin contact. Just take off your shirt, put them on your chest, and then nurse them. That's the best way for them to get their body temperature back up and to calm them after the bath. Even if they enjoy the bath experience, that's the best. My next tip is a little bit of a money-saving one. Newborns are born with really sharp fingernails and it's really hard to keep them not sharp, so it's really nice to have a pair of newborn mittens so that they don't scratch their face or anything or their eye when they're upset. Generally I use these for car rides when I have a newborn because that's the time where they might be crying for a few minutes and I'm not going to be able to pick them up straight away, so I always put mittens on my baby when we're in the car or if he's upset. However, newborn mittens get lost. They're not that expensive, but they're just an extra thing you have to buy, so what I tend to use instead is newborn socks. It's always nice to have an extra pair of socks with you anyways because the ones on their feet tend to fall off, so I love having newborn socks to put on their hands when we're in the car when I want to cover up their hands because then I have an extra pair of socks and I don't have to invest in a ton of newborn mittens. My next hack for you guys is to buy onesies with zippers. So this is a perfect one. This is one of my favorite ones from The Gap and it just has a zipper to take on and off from the baby. As you saw, that took me .2 seconds to do versus something like this, which is an adorable outfit, but this is buttons. I seriously don't know why these snap buttons were even invented for baby's clothing. You'll see they're all over the place, but they are so hard to do. I swear. Like, can we time me buttoning this up? And there's not even a baby in it wiggling around. Okay, so it's probably been about five seconds. I'm not even halfway there and I haven't even done the tough part, which is around the diaper area. If you see clothes with snaps all the way up and down, do not buy them, people. My next tip is for nursing. It is very hard to remember when you last nursed the baby, which side you nursed him on, etc. And there are tons of apps online that will do this for you. However, I find that none of them are exactly what I need, so I just use the notes section in my phone. I'll show you guys how I do it. And the reason I do it this way is because it's totally customizable to what I want and not what some app tells me I should want. So this is a little screenshot from one of the first days when Cory was born and I just have the time, if I nursed him, if he pooped, if he peed, etc. And it's all just like that. I can see it really clearly and it's exactly what I want to mark down how I want to mark it. Now that he's two months old, I'm not recording every dirty diaper he has, but I do still record the nursing times because I tend to forget. So I just use this. I've got my symbols of the mom being like, I don't know, or the bottle if I pumped milk, etc. And sometimes I'll put his nap time in there if I just want to remember like how long his naps were, if I'm trying to see what his schedule like, etc. So again, I just use the notes section on my phone and different emojis because it's fun and easy to see and I don't worry about any of those apps. So the last thing I want to talk about is just how to have a calm and peaceful household with a newborn. So I tend to think that our home is pretty calm, even with two dogs and two kids running around. And I think that's because I try to have a calm attitude in the home. And one of the ways I achieve this is just to understand that it's okay for a baby to cry. Babies cry. That's what they do. I'm in no way recommending that you let your baby just cry and be upset without you attending to them if they need them, etc. But for example, if you're in the shower, you've got your conditioner in, you can see your baby and all of a sudden they start crying, but they're totally safe and fine. It's okay to finish washing your hair and let the baby cry for a minute or two while you get out of the shower, dry off, put on your robe, etc. When I was a brand new mom, I would have just ran out of the shower with my wet hair and then just been totally stuck trying to like nurse a baby without any clothes on with my hair conditioner, etc. It's totally fine to take an extra 30 seconds and pull yourself together before you attend to the baby. Again, this is with the caveat that they're safe, they don't, um, that they're not in any danger, etc. and that you're not letting them cry for a long period of time. I'm not suggesting that at all. I'm just saying take a few extra seconds to let yourself be pulled together before you attend to the baby. The next tip I have in terms of mindset is just to remind yourself it's a phase. When my older son didn't sleep, and that was a long phase, I kept saying to myself at night, it's just a phase. When he's an 18 year old teenager, he's going to be sleeping all day, I'm sure. These newborn days are really short, they truly fly by. When you're in the midst of the baby crying and trying to comfort them and swaddle them and nurse them, it kind of feels like this will never end and it's just so hard. But the truth of the matter is, in just a few short days, sometimes that phase will be done. So I just really keep that mindset when it's a tough day that it's just a really short phase and things will change so soon. So I mentioned this blanket. This is one of my top tips. I call this the does it all blanket. I'll show you guys. So for example, of course it's a blanket, it's a swaddle. I like to tie the two ends together and use it as a nursing cover. I'll tie it first and I'll slip it over my head. We've got a nursing cover. I also use it as a car seat cover, a stroller cover, and then just to clean up messes and I change the baby on it if it's at night like I showed you or somewhere where I don't have a changing pad, et cetera. So again, this is a does it all blanket, you only need to carry this one, you don't need a hundred other things with you, and yeah, definitely recommend one of these. Then my next tip is for germs. Practice saying this with me, have you washed your hands yet? This is something I say whenever anybody asks to hold the baby, I just say, oh, have you washed your hands yet? Like it's just a natural thing that comes out of my mouth. I'll say it to family, friends, my husband, anyone. It's just good to get in that habit of reminding people to wash their hands before they pick up a newborn and to not make it a big deal and not make it awkward. It's not because you don't love them or trust them, it's just because they probably haven't washed their hands that recently and it's best to keep those germs away from a newborn. The next thing you should feel very empowered to say is, oh, his pediatrician recommended X. If there's anything that you want or don't want, like you don't want people coming up to the baby and sniffing it or touching it, et cetera, or you don't want the baby to go out at a certain time, or you don't want to do something, all you have to say is, oh, the pediatrician recommended that we do X and nobody's going to question you. So feel fully empowered to use that line, but in all honesty, don't even feel the need to do that. You're the mom now, you're in charge. Do what you want and what you feel is best for your baby. So those are all my newborn tips for you guys. I hope that you found them useful. If you did, please make sure to give this video a big thumbs up and subscribe to my channel down below to see more and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Say bye bye. Bye bye.