Mathew Miller

Becoming a dad is both an exhilarating and a terrifying experience. Planning ahead and being prepared are the best ways to handle what’s coming up in the next nine months and beyond. Doing what you can ahead of time, such baby-proofing your house and packing your hospital bag, will save precious time later on and help you feel like you’re in control (at least a little bit).

Pack a bag for the hospital in advance so that when your pregnant partner goes into labor, you’ll be ready to race out the door without worrying about finding deodorant and a phone charger. Your mind will be focused on the labor and new baby, so if you aren’t prepared in advance, you’ll probably forget items you wish you had.

Not all safety measures need to be in place by the time baby comes home from the hospital. But before the first six months are up, you’ll need to make sure to baby-proof with some basic safeguards installed in the following areas of your home: Stairways: Install baby gates at the top and bottom. Never use a pressure-mounted baby gate at the top of the stairs, because it may fail.

Knowing how much food a breast-fed baby is getting is very difficult, especially when your partner is just starting out. To make sure baby is getting enough milk, keep track of wet and poopy diapers for the first week, taking note of the number and type of soiled diapers. Comparing your notes to the following norms can put your mind at ease or can alert you to a breast-feeding issue that may need attention: Every day, baby should dirty 8 to 12 diapers total.

A pregnant woman has more prenatal doctor’s appointments than you’d ever expect, but the checkups are necessary to monitor her health and the growth and health of the baby. To screen for complications, the obstetrician (OB) performs different tests on the mother and baby at various stages of the pregnancy, an

Nobody likes to feel like he doesn’t understand what’s going on, but when you enter a strange new environment — like the labor and delivery floor — it’s normal to feel completely out of your element. When it seems as if everyone is speaking a foreign language, you may feel intimidated, overwhelmed, and ready to hide behind a newspaper or magazine so you don’t have to deal with feeling or sounding like an uninformed dad.

When you find out your partner has been choosing baby names since she was about 12, you may get the idea that picking a name for your baby is a Really Big Deal. And you’re right. A name is one of the first gifts you give your child, and unless he goes to court to change it, it’s a gift that lasts a lifetime. It’s easy to mess up this gift, though, by not thinking things through clearly.

More and more dads are making the decision to leave the workplace behind to stay at home and take care of their children. Whether you’re leaving the workforce altogether or balancing work with childcare responsibilities, it’s important that both you and your partner acknowledge that raising a child is a job. And although you aren’t pocketing a paycheck to look after your little one, managing your new role as you would a traditional career will keep you from pulling out your hair and feeling underappreciated.

If you’re feeding your baby out of expensive pouches — or grinding up food for her in the food processor — you may be wondering when you can start feeding her the same food everyone else is eating. Actually, babies don’t have to eat pureed food at all; you can give them big-people food from the start as long as you give them the right types of food and avoid the dangerous ones.