Motherly Advice

I know a ton of people who are pregnant right now. It seems like this is the year of the baby, practically every day a new announcement pops up on facebook that someone else is expecting a baby in the near future. That being said here is my advice after surviving the first few weeks with a newborn.

Echo in her cloth diaper, sans the diaper cover

First of all I wanted to share my favorite baby products of all time. The single most important thing I purchased for baby Echo is the boppy pillow. It's a nursing pillow and I seriously don't know what I would do without it. It helps support the baby while you nurse and saves your aching arms and back, those little babies get really heavy really fast! I don't know how my parents generations survived without these, they are the best!

Secondly I want to rave about cloth diapers. I wrote a post about these before and told you I would update you on how we liked them after we started using them. Well we began using them a few days after we got back from the hospital and we love them! I had no idea the sheer quantity of diapers we would go through before having a baby but let me tell you we go through a ton! Using cloth is saving us so much money and we also feel pretty good that we are cutting down on the amount of waste we produce. We love them so much that we also got cloth wipes and are enjoying those as well.

We have found that cloth is so much nicer and softer than disposable and we haven't had any problems with blowouts or leaks. I also want to give a rave review to the snappi diaper fasteners we've been using. You can kind of see it in the picture above, it's the pink thing on her diaper. These things are so much easier to use than pins and have made diaper changing a breeze. We are doing a lot of laundry as a result of cloth diapering (although I should mention we still use disposables overnight) but we would be doing tons of laundry with a newborn anyway and I really feel it is worth the extra effort.

Next on my list of advice is to make yourself take naps. This is sooo hard for me! I've never been a fan of napping, I feel like it is a waste of time. Especially now that I have a newborn I really don't want to nap because I want to take advantage of the time when she is sleeping to get things done like dishes and laundry. However I have noticed that I have a much easier time of it when I force myself to take a nap, I feel so much better and it really is worth the time you take out during the day to do it.

Lastly I would advise new parents to make sure you take some time to yourself and get out of the house. After being stuck at home for the first few weeks (aside from visits to the pediatrician) I was feeling like a basket case. I had such bad cabin fever, I had to get out! See if you can get a family member of friend to watch the baby while you go to the store. Just having some time away can make you feel like a new person, even if it's only for half an hour.

Anyway, that's all I can think of for now but I'm sure I will have many more pearls of wisdom to pass on in the baby department as time goes by. I'm wishing all you mommas to be happy and healthy pregnancies!