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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

Oh, there’s definitely hard parts of having kids—but changing diapers isn’t really one of them.

The truly hard part is putting them to sleep

My mutant power is the ability to put babies to sleep. Before I had my own I'd put other people's kids babies to sleep easy peasy. It's something I've been able to do since I was a teenager.

Or waking them up for school... (A correlated problem)

At 8pm, and then 10pm, then 10:30pm, then 12am, then 2am, then 3:30am, then 5am.

As an expectant first time parent, this is the bit that I'm bracing for most.

Relax: it only lasts a few months. Rarely more than 60 or 70.

The big tip I have for you is to understand wake windows. Babies can get too tired to sleep(!) so you need to make sure to put them to sleep roughly 1-1.5 hours after they last wake up.

Highly recommend getting a sleep tracker app.

It’s rough at first but you will learn the baby’s rhythms and preferences. If you track their sleep and wake up times (I did it the old fashioned way in a notebook) you’ll see a pattern emerge pretty quickly, and then it gets easier because you will figure out how to work with it.

Every baby is different so most of the advice you find won’t work, but if you try enough things you’ll eventually find something that works consistently. Or you might just luck out and get a good sleeper.

Follow a routine every day. I posted elsewhere in this thread what worked for us. It was tough when they were infants because neither of ours slept through night till about 2. The routine saved us.

try co-sleeping, and also a comfortable baby-carrier that allows you to carry the baby around while keeping your hands free so you can work. the most difficult from babies not sleeping is that they are not supposed to sleep alone. see attachment theory. the other advice, if you can follow it, is to sleep yourself every time the baby sleeps. again, co-sleeping makes that easier.

I dunno, we found that our kid slept slightly better moved to his own room at 5 or 6 months old. Although that meant maybe 4 wakings rather than 5. Now he's nearly three years old and sleeps solidly for 10 or 11 hours. My guess is that food and metabolism have a big part to play.

I agree, I never found changing diapers that difficult or bad. I was also hardened by years of chronic insomnia so the sleep disruption wasn't a big deal, I took most of the night-time duties to let mom sleep.

The thing I remember being most annoyed about was cleaning all the bottles. That was really obnoxious.

Honestly the hardest part of changing diapers is when they get bigger and insists on wiggling everywhere while you are changing them

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