Overcome Feeling Useless in Hospital – Keep a Baby Journal

It’s happening. You’re having a baby.

Well, maybe not you personally. The royal you. Let’s just start over. Ahem:

It’s happening. Ya’ll are having a baby!

Before you get any further, know this: You’ll forget everything. You need a baby journal.

Let’s assume for the purposes of discussion that you’re at the stage where you’ve gotten to the hospital. Your stuff is laid out, intake finished. Your partner’s the star of the show, so she’ll stay pretty occupied with being fussed over.

But what about you, Papa?

It’s possible you might feel a bit lost amongst all the motion, and on some level, you’re going to have to make peace with being second fiddle. But you can direct your energy into productive things – you needn’t feel like a complete lump. One of those things is becoming a scribe: Documenting the tsunami of information you’re about to have come down on your heads by keeping a baby journal.

But how best to do this? A few tips:

Don’t get fancy with a baby journal.

Pen. Paper. Scritchy scritchy. That’s about as snazzy as it needs to get.

You’re probably not going to have space to set up a big battlestation in the room you’re in. You need to keep your footprint light, lest you become the source of the nurses’ derision. When Sprocket was on her way our nurses were recalling, with deep eye rolls, new parents showing up to the unit with multiple pieces of luggage. It was all full to bursting with a bunch of stuff that invariably got regurgitated into their small room. Then the beleaguered nurses had to be diplomatic about it while they were tripping over clutter trying to get their work done.

So stay light on your feet here. Things are going to be happening fast, so becoming a scribe means making this baby journal solution easily accessible. Maybe you can peck on your phone screen faster than you can write – if so, you have a really odd mix of skill sets and deficiencies, but go for it. If you’re like me, though, you can stroke things out a lot faster with a pen and paper. Get a notebook that lies flat rather than one of those cheap composition books that tries to close itself, but otherwise don’t overthink it.

Things are about to move quickly, which means your process of becoming a scribe should too. What should you be getting down in your baby journal?

Write about your mindset in your baby journal.

This is a weird, wild, wonderful time that you’ll want to remember. In particular, though, you’ll want to remember your headspace. You’ll probably have pictures and video of all the stuff that actually goes on, but what you (and eventually your child) will be even more interested in is what you were thinking.

Maybe this isn’t natural for you. It wasn’t for me. I’ve never been a diary keeper, and talking to myself on paper doesn’t come with ease. So I framed my baby journal when Sprocket was coming along as a long-form letter to her. It started around her due date and proceeded through her birth nine days later and on into the newborn haze. Becoming a scribe meant treating my future self, and Sprocket’s future self, as pen pals across time. That old baby journal is a talisman now. It lets me time travel back to particular spots, with particular lighting, listening to my pen scratch the words I’m reading so much later.

It’s a powerful thing. If you have any down time at all, I really encourage you to talk to your future selves and make a baby journal.

Track inputs and outputs in your baby journal.

When Baby comes along, it will assuredly be very helpful to have notes about what’s going in and coming out. If you’re formula feeding, timestamp each bottle in your baby journal with a note about how much was taken and anything that rises to the level of mention (gassiness, hunger level, whatever applies). If your partner is breastfeeding, log each session with notes about duration and quality (was the latch good, how was the letdown, and so on – and if none of that makes sense to you now, don’t worry, it soon will). Also, if you’re getting visits from a lactation consultant, get a pen in your hand and pay attention.

Don’t you dare check out because “oh that’s breastfeeding stuff so it doesn’t apply to me,” which I’ve in essence heard guys say before. There is no ‘you’ anymore, jackass. If you’re not all thriving, none of you are. Your partner is exhausted and sore, and getting reams of information dumped on her when she’s most ill-equipped to process it all. This is where becoming a scribe and keeping a baby journal comes in. Don’t scrape this heap onto her plate just because it’s the case only she can breastfeed.

You’ll probably feel like a nerdy doofus standing there scratching notes while your partner’s having her boobs handled very matter-of-factly by a complete stranger. Do it anyway. As you can see, sacrifices are being made here, so get in the game and make a small one yourself. When the moment passes and your next feeding session comes in the absence of the consultant, you don’t want to sit and blink at each other while you struggle to remember whatever it was you were told. You’ll find whatever notes you take in the moment invaluable later on, at least until it starts clicking and you find your rhythm.

On the other end, keep track of diapers. Don’t worry, you won’t need to do it forever – just long enough to establish a baseline of data. Make a quick note about diapers coming off of Baby: Time, contents, volume (which doesn’t need to be more complicated than light/moderate/heavy). It’s something that can be pored over if there’s some concern about milk transfer or digestion. Hopefully it’s a complete make-work project that you won’t need to refer to going forward, but if it becomes applicable, having data points to graph will be a boon to your care providers.

Write down anything your care providers say.

The nurses and other care providers coming in and out of your room on a maternity ward are, on average, going to be founts of information. Yes, there will be the occasional one you don’t especially jive with, and yes, sometimes their respective bits of advice will run counter to one another. But pay attention regardless, because while this is a somewhat novel experience for you, this is just the Thursday in their work week.

They’ve seen the good, bad, beautiful, ugly, and everything tucked in between. They know what works, what doesn’t, and what current best practices are. You can’t sit them down and pump them for everything they know – it’d take two weeks apiece, and they’re already being run off their feet. So anything they do share, take down. In the midst of their work, they’ll drop tokens of advice, encouragement, and tips on how to be more efficient in your early baby days. Scritchy scritchy scritchy.

Along the way, and particularly in a torrent before you leave, you’ll be given notes and reminders about first one thing then another. Don’t be a bobblehead standing there empty-handed, nodding in preparation of promptly forgetting between 37 and 92 percent of what they say. Write it down. Even if you only reference it one time – hell, even if you never have to reference it because the act of writing it down helped you keep it front of mind – it’ll have been worth it.

Life, and information, are going to come and go quickly when Baby comes to call. Your partner’s going to have enough to think about, and you’re never going to remember it all, especially when solid sleep becomes a wistful memory. So get your scroll, get your quill, and get your scribe on.

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This post was previously published on THEUNBOTHEREDFATHER.COM.

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