25 Newborn Baby Hacks Every First Time Mom Should Know

this is a tip that I wish that I had figured out with my first baby there is an ergonomic way to carry your car seat when you are freshly postpartum and this is not it I know that that sounds so weird and like it couldn't possibly work but just hear me out for a second let's do another demonstration [Music] what is up you guys welcome back to my YouTube channel if you are new here welcome my name is Beth and today I'm going to be sharing with you guys 25 newborn hacks that every first time mom should know I had my first baby back in 2021 in just a couple of months later I found out that I was pregnant with baby number two so I'm currently in the thick of life with 202 and I thought while it was still fresh I would share with you guys some of the different like tips and tricks I picked up along the way that made everyday life with a newborn a million times easier now I have a lot of tips to share as well as some like demonstrations to get into so I'm just gonna jump right on into it tip number one when you are changing your newborn orange diaper or your baby's diaper in general try and use the diaper as the first wipe this is a tip that I wish that I had figured out with my first baby I honestly didn't even really figure it out until my second but it will save you so much money on wipes and save you from having to pull out a million every time you are doing poop diapers especially if you just take the top part of the diaper and use that to wipe down any of the initial stuff there you would be surprised at how well these things can do to actually just like get a cleaner surface before you actually use wipes to finish the job one of the ways that I make sure that I'm not like making even more of a mess when I do this is when I'm done using the diaper as the first wipe I'll just tuck it under like this and then finish doing the diaper change and you guys I promise you it will save you so many wipes next tip is also diaper related and this is especially helpful for anyone that is expecting a baby boy if you know you're expecting a baby boy I'm sure that you have already heard that they often do pee during diaper changes especially in the newborn stage and so you don't need a pptp you don't need anything extra what I would do is just put the new diaper directly under the new diaper and then actually use the top of that for quick cover if I needed it if he started peeing the other thing that I have found especially helpful about putting a new diaper directly under the old one before I start changing it is that it kind of keeps the entire area clean in general sometimes if you have a blowout for example it's easier to just have the second diaper be what gets dirty than have it be the changing mat or the floor or the changing pad especially if you're like out in public so I find that having that diaper underneath saves me from any like additional cleanup or mess but it is also super helpful if you need to just cover things up while you are changing a baby boy my next diaper related tip is to have a diaper change station on each floor or level of your house now if you live in a house that doesn't have levels and it's just kind of flat like our house is because we are currently in a bungalow I would say to try and have a diaper change station in each section that would be really high traffic for you during the day with a newborn especially you end up changing so so many diapers during the day and if you only have one spot in your house that you're constantly having to go back to to grab another diaper and the pack of wipes you're probably going to get pretty annoyed with how many times you have to go and do that and I have just found that having a Zone in the areas that I know I'm going to be spending a lot of time in and all that it has to be is a couple of extra diapers a couple extra wipes and you can kind of refill at the end of the day it just saves you from all of the back and forth and especially while you are recovering postpartum the last thing that you want to be doing is having to go all the way back upstairs to get diapers and wipes and having to go back down the stairs again to change your baby's diaper when what you really should be doing is just resting and so I highly recommend having a couple of different diaper changing zones around your house my next two tips are belly button related now some of you may already know this but some of you may not and when you bring your baby home from the hospital or if you're having a home birth or whatever you end up doing when you cut the umbilical cord your baby's belly button has to heal from that and so typically you're baby will have a little clip that is attached to the leftover part of the umbilical cord that is still attached to their belly button and this is not something that you want to remove you want to just leave it there until it falls off naturally because that is the safest thing for your baby now what I didn't expect as a first time mom was how kind of nasty and hard to work around that clip was when it came to dressing my baby and putting diapers on so when you are putting a diaper on your baby and they still have that belly button clip attached what you want to do is just fold over the top part of the diaper like this at the waistband to kind of avoid hitting and fully covering that belly button clip by giving it a little bit more space from the diaper you'll give it a better opportunity to kind of breathe and recover naturally without having this kind of bumping it and irritating it all the time second thing is on the type of like body suits to dress your baby in at this point both of my newborns spent most of their days just in Sleepers at this point in time but there were times that I did want to get them dressed to go out or something like that and I was typically pulling a bodysuit like over their head and then over the their belly button and it would kind of tug at the belly button clip and so I actually had a friend recommend to me using the wrap over style bodysuits and essentially these have little Clips so that you don't actually have to pull anything down over your baby's head you just lay them flat into this put their arms in and then you can wrap over from the front to clip them in these were so much more comfortable for my newborns I have found the widest selection of this type of bodysuit at h m baby that's just where I have had the most luck but if you guys have found them somewhere else then definitely drop that in the comment section my next tip is for anyone that plans to breastfeed their baby and I wish that it was something that I knew before I started my breastfeeding Journey no one told me this until I actually went to a lactation consultant for help but it is that when you are breastfeeding your baby you should bring your baby to your breast not your breast to your baby I just remember being so desperate to try and figure out how to get breastfeeding to work for my baby and I and so I would find myself in the weirdest positions during the day like hunching over kind of bending my wrist and your directions just to try and get her to latch and I ended up experiencing so much just like back pain neck pain wrist pain from trying to do this and I honestly feel like it made breastfeeding even harder because I was unable to relax and actually just like sit back and enjoy the breastfeeding experience so what I would highly recommend is that you get yourself as comfortable as possible when you are breastfeeding so whether that looks like a high chair behind you with pillows propped or something underneath like a nursing pillow to prop your baby up you really want to make sure that you're bringing your baby to you and not yourself down to the baby if you want to avoid any unnecessary pain while you are adjusting to breastfeeding your little one my next few tips are kind of around scheduling and how to structure your day with a baby in general now there is a lot of information and opinions online about how to kind of schedule life with your newborn and feeding and all of that stuff and while I love a good schedule and I'll share the general framework that has worked for me what I would highly recommend is just feeding your baby on demand your body and your baby are working together and so if your baby is needing to eat more often than a schedule that you're trying to follow is actually allowing for that can be really damaging to your milk supply and you'll probably have a fussy baby a lot of the time and so I have just found that what works the best is actually following nature biologically and feeding your baby when you know that they are hungry that being said the schedule that has really worked well for me and my newborns and I've just kind of customized it depending on when my babies typically like to eat is following the Eat Play Sleep Rhythm what I like about Eat Play Sleep is that it's less tied to a specific timeline although it is generally on like a three hour rotation and it is more tied to the way that you actually spend your day with your baby so it's pretty self-explanatory but essentially when your baby wakes up from a nap the goal of this schedule and this framework is that you feed them at the beginning of that wake window you play with them for the next stretch of time that they're awake and then after that they go back to sleep again and then essentially you keep following this Rhythm the general guideline is that a newborn needs to eat around every three hours or so but your baby might be different than this I found that my second baby particularly liked to eat every two hours so we followed Eat Play Sleep but it was on more of a two hour rotation whereas with my first baby we followed Eat Play Sleep on a three hour rotation almost to a tea what I found really helpful in the first couple of weeks as I was adjusting back into this schedule was actually setting a timer on my phone for the next time that I expected to need to feed my baby so practically what this looked like with my first baby is I would feed her and then I would set a three hour timer because I knew that around that Mark was when she would need to eat again and with my second baby it was like a two hour timer and you might find that overkill for some people I'm sure it's easy to just kind of keep track of the time but I find for myself especially in the early days of having a newborn I'm always like okay 9 to 10 10 to 11 11 to 12. when does that put the next feeding and so just having something that I could check on my phone to know how much time was left before I would approx definitely need to feed again I just found that that was really helpful for me to kind of keep track of where I was in the day my next tip around scheduling with your newborn is to start looking into wake windows by age essentially a wake window is from the first moment that your baby wakes up all the way down to the moment that they go back to their next nap now what you will discover is that a newborn's wake windows are actually very very short and you may find that you actually need to be waking your baby up sometimes to eat because they are just so sleepy in the first little bit of their life naturally as your baby gets older their wake windows will change and they'll be able to stay awake for a little bit longer and so to get a general understanding of what that looks like and what I should be aiming for when it comes to wake time during the day I referenced a lot of the content from taking care of babies and baby sleep doctor on Instagram they both post a lot of great content around wake windows and kind of what to expect at each stage and so if that's not something that you have a general understanding of I would highly recommend just brushing up on it a little bit because I find that it just gives you a better understanding of how to structure your day with your baby my next tip is something that I try to do with my babies kind of as I progressed in my recovery from birth and it was actually to try and get my babies outside for the first little bit of their wake window to help with day and night confusion now for the first six to eight weeks your babies will not know the difference between day and night and it's not really possible to just have them figure that out by bringing them outside right when they wake up but what it does do is help to start kind of bring that association with being awake and seeing light in those moments versus going to sleep and having dark in some of those moments I didn't really introduce Darkness around naps until after the six to eight week Mark but I did always try and get my babies outside to get a little bit of light around them not only for the Sleep benefits but also just for the fact that it is good for babies to get some fresh air I think at the end of the day just getting a little bit of sunlight in your baby's wake window can be super helpful for them and for you next tip is kind of scheduling related but more so just to help you keep track of everything as a new mom and it is to download the Huckleberry app one thing that you may not know and I did not know as a first time mom is that after you have your baby your care provider whether that is family doctor nurse OB Midwife and kind of what has happened with them over the course of the day so some things that they may ask you are how many wet diapers you've seen how many poop diapers you've seen how long they're typically feeding for what side they're feeding on and for me I just remember especially after my first birth in hospital and the nurse came in and asked me all these questions and I was just like I don't even know my name right now like I am so tired I cannot remember the last time my baby ate peed whatever and so what I ended up doing was downloading Huckleberry because there is a free version of the app and I never ended up needing to pay for it and what it allowed me to do was record the number of pee diapers that my baby was having how long each breastfeeding session was when it happened when I would go into my follow-up appointments after this point and the doctors were asking me questions I would essentially just reference the app and have all of the information right there for them and this just made it really easy for me to stay on top of that in the early stages and I found that as I kind of progressed and got more comfortable as a Mom it just became more intuitive and I didn't need to have that extra level of just like tracking but in the first little bit it can feel like such a learning curve and there's already so much that you are trying to just like figure out and wrap your head around and so if you find that all of that kind of tracking feels overwhelming for you I would highly recommend an app like Huckleberry alright let's talk about tummy time I do want to share with you guys some of the ways that tummy time can be a little bit more tolerable for newborns especially at first I find that they typically just face plant and cry and it feels really sad especially because people are like that's how they learn that's how they figure it out you do not need to do tummy time in that way one of the ways that I love to do tummy time with my newborns especially when they are so fresh and you were working on just forming that attachment with them is doing tummy time on your own chest and bonus points if you do it skin to skin as well I I love doing it this way because I find that it's really easy kind of before or after a feeding to just burp your baby and then lift them up onto your chest this is a really great way that you still give them the opportunity to build that like neck and back strength while being really close to you in the newborn stage as well another Tummy Time tip that sometimes people don't realize is that baby wearing actually does count as tummy time as well this is another great way to do it because it does just keep your baby very close to you which is exactly where you want them to be in the newborn stage and as you recover it gives you the opportunity to kind of get things done as well so when you're ready and you feel like you want to have both of your hands to maybe start folding laundry again or propping some of your own food I find that this is a really great way to kind of accomplish tummy time while still snuggling my baby as much as I can my last tip on tummy time is to use your breastfeeding pillow if you have one as a prop for tummy time to make it a little bit more tolerable for your baby as well at some time I do recommend that you introduce floor time to your baby because this is an opportunity for them to start getting freedom of movement and learning how to use their limbs and all the different pieces of development that help them kind of progress into eventually rolling over both ways sitting up and so when I wanted to do tummy time on the floor but I felt like my babies just weren't loving it and they were still kind of face planting and getting fussy I would use the breastfeeding pillow and kind of prop them under their chest with their hands over down in front so that they could actually like lift their heads up with a little bit of support and still work on their arm strength without literally just face planting the entire time my next tips are all around baby clothing now you've probably already heard the tip that you should definitely prioritize getting pajamas or like sleepers that have a zipper instead of buttons so if you haven't heard that one I'm throwing it in as a freebie for you but in the middle of the night I can just tell you that you are not going to want to try and line all those little buttons up at 3am let me tell you that but another tip that you may not have heard is that if you can get footless clothing like footless pajamas footless pants I find that it is just way better because your baby is going to be growing out of the clothing at a much slower rate than if you choose to get everything footed now I know we want to keep our newborns nice and cozy and believe me I live in Canada and I had a baby in October but I just found that for clothes in general like especially during the day it was easier for me to put socks on him than buy a bunch of pants that were footed we have gone through the footed things so so quickly both times next tip on baby clothing is to invest in drawer dividers if you can when you first wash all of your newborns clothes and you get everything set up and it all looks cute it's so exciting and fun but then you start washing it and your baby starts wearing it and the amount of times that you have to do laundry and have all these little pieces all over the place I can tell you that you are not going to want to just be like chunking it into a drawer without any like Rhyme or Reason because it is going to be so hard for you to keep track of what things are pajamas versus bodysuits what things are newborn size versus zero to three and so if you can invest in some sort of drawer divider or like organize organization system for the types of clothing that you have the accessories that you have and also the sizes that you have you will love yourself for it in the postpartum stage next tip is about baby baths you're a first time Mom what you might expect around your baby's first few baths is a very peaceful and relaxing and enjoyable experience because those are the type of baby bath videos that are uploaded to social media that was not my experience both of my newborns absolutely hated bows in the first stage I found that they would just scream through it it was very overwhelming and kind of like stressful for my husband and I but one of the things that we found very helpful to make the experience a little bit better for our babies was actually taking a washcloth and wetting it with a little bit of warm water and laying that over them while they were having their baths they're typically not going to be fully submerged the whole time and they do not like being cold and so just giving them something to make them a little bit Cozier will make the experience of the bath a lot better for them and for you let's get into some tips around pumping and bottle feeding there are a couple of things around breast milk storage specifically that I wish I had known the first time around and I wish I still had breast milk storage bags to actually demonstrate this for you guys I've used them all but I do have this little baggie to kind of give you a little bit of a demonstration to store this in the most effective way in your freezer to take up the least amount of space possible one of the things that I found very helpful and I'm going to use this table here as a demonstration is to actually take the bag full of milk and just smooth it over the counter or dining room table or whatever is available to you to kind of remove all of the air from it before you put it into the freezer after that I would find a flat surface in my freezer and lay the bag down like this and then when I would go back in to add my next bag I would take the bag that had Frozen flat and then tilt it up and stack them in a row to take up less space in my freezer than if I had just kind of thrown it in and allowed it to freeze in whatever way and then just had a bunch of different randomly sized breast milk storage bags in the freezer taking up unnecessary space I had like over 400 ounce of stored milk in our freezer and the way that I was able to make it all fit was using this trick of a laying flat freezing and then stocking upright to minimize the amount of space that the bags were taking up next tip if you are planning on pumping or collecting milk to some degree is all about the hakka now if you do not plan on using a Haka you can just skip to the next tip but for the Haka specifically I found that there was a way to actually use this that I didn't know of at first what I was doing at first was just suctioning it and then putting it on like that but what you want to do to maximize suction is actually fold this top part over and then squeeze and then stick it on and you will get so much more milk this way if you just suction and place it on one thing that I will throw in as a disclaimer is that this will increase milk supply and so if that is not something that you are interested in doing then maybe just stick with that tip of suctioning and placing it on to catch the milk but if you do kind of want to get a little bit more off of the other side while your baby is nursing then I would highly recommend folding it over before you do that the next thing that you you guys need to know is that there is an ergonomic way to carry your car seat when you are freshly postpartum and this is not it if you carry your car seat like this you're going to end up putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on your pelvic floor and your core my pelvic PT taught me two ways that you can carry your car seat that are better for you while you're recovering and the first one is to hold it with both of your arms in front of you so that you're using more of your like upper body strength to keep it in place instead of like your core being misbalanced and an even better way to do this that makes it feel like you're not carrying any weight at all is to hold your car seat and actually wrap your arm in and around through and grab onto the little base that's at the bottom for whatever reason this honestly makes the car seat feel weightless and I think it's because you're balancing most of the weight of it on your hip this will make carrying your car seat in and out of appointments and anywhere else that you need to go in that early postpartum stage so much easier while still allowing your body to recover my next tip is for your baby's tiny little fingernails one thing that I did not expect as a first time mom was how fast my baby's fingernails would grow I think it's just the hormones that are still in their body when they first come out but their nails grow really really fast and I found that my babies would always have their hands curled or they would just be kind of moving around and so the easiest way for me to comfortably clip their nails while they were not moving around and just to make it safer for them was to always plan to do it while they were asleep lucky for you your newborn will be sleeping a lot in the first little bit and so even just like once a week while your baby is sleeping plan to cut their nails then and it will be so much less scary for you than trying to do it while they're awake this next tip is going to sound so weird and I'm sure some of you are going to think I'm crazy for it I don't know if this is legit or if this is just something that my mom did with my sister and I and so my sister and I did with our babies but just hear me out for a second with both of my babies I wanted the option for them to take a pacifier for at nighttime sleep if you are in the same boat and you want your baby to take a Soother but you find that they are just spitting out every single branch that you offer to them one of the things that my mom taught me and I did with my baby was actually taking my hand and making it almost like a c like this and just gently kind of cupping The Suitor around my baby's mouth up to their cheeks like this because it kind of just like simulates a boob a little bit I know that that sounds so weird and like it couldn't possibly work but for whatever reason it did work like a charm and you do not need to be like forcing your hand you don't need to be like pushing the Soother into your baby's mouth that is not what I'm saying all you need to do is just gently hold the Soother there and just lightly rest your hand on your baby's cheeks and if it works for you great if it doesn't you didn't hear it from me next tip is all about cradle cap now if you've never heard of cradle cap before essentially it is what happens when dry skin kind of forms over an area where there is excess oil production in a lot of newborns get this on their scalps around their eyebrows just places where hair would be growing there is nothing wrong with cradle cap it is not itchy for your baby it is not harmful for them or painful for them but for some people they do just want to reduce the appearance of that and that is totally okay what I found worked really well for us is actually putting an oil on my baby's head like an hour before bath time and typically coconut oil is the best experience in terms of smell and treatment and things like that but I have also used olive oil when I did not have coconut oil on hand and essentially you let the oil sit for one hour before bath time and then when you give your newborn a bath you'll shampoo as normal and then take a really fine tooth comb and just kind of gently lift at the spot where the cradle cap is you do not want to be scraping keep in mind that your baby does have a soft spot here so you want to be really gentle with this process but the fine-tooth comb will just kind of lift that skin off really nicely and if it doesn't that's totally fine you can try again with the next bath and over time I think you'll find that this will be a really nice and gentle way for you to just stay on top of cradle cap treatment alright we are at my last two tips and it is all about baby gas my first baby was not very gassy and so I didn't even really need to do anything other than the bicycle trick here and there with her legs but as I mentioned my second baby did have reflex bucks he was very gassy and so I did need to get a little bit more creative in managing that so let's do another demonstration one thing that I found super helpful with my gassy baby and I discovered it purely out of desperation with sitting him up on my legs like this when I was resting on the couch or on a chair or on my bed and honestly just moving my legs back and forth like this with him seated upright on my thighs this is literally all that I would do was just move back and forth like this and what I ended up realizing is that with gassy babies what you really want to do is just create movement in general for their stomachs you're trying to get some of that air that's trapped in them out and so the bicycle trick is not the only way that you can do that you can actually really comfortably still sit with them and be creating that movement that will help them to release some of that gas and just get them a little bit more comfortable because I've had a very gassy baby I know that sometimes movement is not the only thing that helps and so my next tip around gas is to have the products on hand that will make your baby a lot more comfortable and those products are ripe water and the biogaia probiotic these are both over-the-counter products that you should be able to find at most drug stores or even like a Walmart or a Target near you and these were things that we would just always have on hand even when traveling because it made his life so much easier and it was just nice to be able to have an option for him that we knew could help his belly when that extra movement wouldn't do the trick well that is all of the tips that I have for you guys when it comes to newborns and making this stage of life a little bit easier for you guys to transition into if you are expecting a newborn I am so excited for you I know that there is so much information that you are probably taking in right now and you're probably feeling a little bit overwhelmed about it all and excited as well but I can promise you that this is one of the most incredible things that you will ever do you are going to be an amazing mom and you and your baby will figure it out as you go if you guys are expecting I would love for you guys to share your due months in the comment section so you can connect with some other moms that watch my channel and I do have a lot of content on pregnancy on birth on newborn life so I would highly recommend that you check out some of my other videos as well and if you are a mom that has been through the newborn stage before and you are a veteran I would love for you to share some other things that worked well for you during this stage I know that I did not hit on all of them in this video there's got to be some other tips out there and I'm sure and expecting mom would love to hear them but until my next video I love you guys I'm praying for you guys and I will see you soon thank you [Music]

Channel: Beth Grace Moore

Views: 111,061

Keywords: newborn, life with a newborn, newborn baby, newborn baby tips, newborn baby hacks, baby hacks, newborn schedule, newborn tips and tricks, new baby schedule, newborn baby care, how to take care of a baby, newborn baby bath, newborn care, baby scheduling, new mom, eat play sleep, day with a newborn, how to enjoy newborn stage, first time mom, how to entertain baby, breastfeeding tips

Id: Es5tyoL8AsU

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023