How to Have Fun Celebrating New Year’s — With a New Baby by Tracee Herbaugh Getty Images If you had your first baby this year, there’s a good chance your New Year’s Eve plans are going to look pretty different from last year. Staying up super-late, drinking, hangovers… they’re not quite as appealing once you have a tiny (early-rising) kid. But just because you don’t feel like taking your baby to a chilly NYE ball drop doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate. There are plenty of other ways to have fun, make New Year’s memories, and keep yourself  and  Baby happy. Here are some of our favorite ideas. Continue reading

10 Ways to Celebrate Christmas with a Newborn Infant  by Diana White Your baby’s first Christmas is a truly special one, but it can also be confusing. A newborn doesn’t appreciate gifts or decorations yet and is too young to enjoy family traditions. Moreover, if you delivered a baby just a few months before the holiday season, you may be too tired to enjoy the Christmas cheer with your newborn. However, you should start teaching your little baby Christmas traditions even from a young age. Here are absolutely amazing ways to celebrate Christmas with your newborn infant.             Continue reading

The Grief And Stress Of IVF Loss Is Crushing by  Amanda Shapiro After eight months o f IVF treatments/four cycles of IVF, I was finally pregnant. Two lines — the first joy my husband and I had had during the past eight months of bleak, grueling treatments. We did a little dance while singing about having a baby. This was not our first rodeo. Our daughter was born via IVF. While it was difficult to go through with her, we had no idea how lucky we were to conceive her within only two cycles of IVF. Even then, after our first failed cycle, I had felt as if my world were crumbling around me. A grief that went largely unacknowledged, just as the stressful, taxing process of undergoing IVF had also gone unacknowledged. In recent years, the  grief associated with miscarriage  has been begun to be brought from the shadows into the light of public discourse and mommy blog articles. However, little attention has been given to the loss experienced with failed cycles of ...

Parents, Stop Feeling That Everything You Do Is Wrong BY PERRI KLASS, M.D. photo courtesy iStock When was the last time you heard a curmudgeonly adult complain that kids today have it easy? Results from this year’s  National Poll on Children’s Health  were released in April, suggesting that many adults — both parents and nonparents — think that children today are experiencing more stress, and worse mental health, than when they themselves were young. This is a striking reversal of the traditional dynamic, in which adults recall the hardships and dangers of the old days, and conclude that kids today have it easy, said  Dr. Matthew M. Davis , a pediatrician who is director of the poll at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan. Continue reading

Ten Changes New Parents Face Diana Divecha  describes how your mind, body, and life will change with the arrival of a baby. BY  DIANA DIVECHA photo courtesy Kelly Merchant My niece had a baby last summer. Since I’m a developmental psychologist, I just had to ask her, “How’s it going?” Her answer had a quiet and whimsical grace. “There is nothing more beautiful in this world than his smile,” she said. “Or watching him discover something new. Last night he found the upper register of his voice, so he spent five minutes shrieking at a high pitch, playing around with that newfound note.”   Continue reading

After Newborn Died From Dehydration, Breastfeeding Mom Shares Her Heartbreaking Story This first-time mom didn't know her baby wasn't getting any milk during his first three days of life, and she's opening up about her extremely rare but devastating experience. By Melissa Willets It took mom Jillian Johnson five years to share the story of her son Landon's death; mainly because she was in so much pain after losing him, and also because she feared being judged. But now Johnson is opening up,  in a blog post  for Fed Is Best, about how Landon passed away from dehydration just days after his birth, and how she had no idea he was actually starving to death. She hopes her experience, while exceedingly rare, will save other families from going through the painful loss she did. During Johnson's pregnancy, the first-time mom and her husband educated themselves in an effort to be the best parents possible. "We were ready! Or so we thought...." she write...

The Hardest Parts of Being a New Mom by  Flora Ware 1. The verbal abuse.  Perhaps I’m a tad sensitive, but personally, I don’t like it when someone screams at me. Unfortunately, now I have to put up with a boss who, if he gets hungry or cranky, pulls himself up to his full 22-inch height and BELLOWS at me until he’s reddish-purple in the face. To make things more stressful interesting, he and I don’t speak the same language, so I am constantly trying to translate. Usually, what he wants is my breasts, however, which also makes this whole scenario borderline sexual harassment. 2. I am now a 24-hour human buffet . It’s wonderful and all that I can nourish my baby the way nature intended, with the “liquid gold” that flows from my breasts, but wow, it takes up a lot of my day (and night). For someone whose stomach is apparently the size of a walnut, he sure spends A LOT of time eating.   Continue reading

HERE’S HOW TO HELP A NEW MOTHER (ESPECIALLY WHEN SHE DOESN’T ASK) As a new mother, I had a knack for giving the impression that I didn’t need help. My village lives on the other side of the globe, so it was borne out of necessity, but I wonder if it was more than that. As new (or not so new) mothers, I wonder if we feel as though we’re letting ourselves down if we show that we’re vulnerable. Are we falling short if we admit that we simply can’t do this alone? That we have one hairy leg because our survival strategies have devolved into shaving one leg one day, and the other the next. And we forgot the second leg…for a week. That we eat breakfast for dinner on a semi-regular basis. And that if one more well-meaning person tells us (as if we’ve forgotten) that we  really  need to take care of ourselves, we’ll scream. Because, before becoming mothers we were used to feeling productive. To meeting deadlines. To getting the job done and feeling like a...