Eat, Poop, Sleep

Damian decided to pick out a book to read about babies. I'm going the traditional route with What to Expect: The First Year, but it is far too long and detailed for him. Plus, it doesn't make sense for us to read the same book. Divide and conquer! After scanning the baby section at Barnes and Noble, we were a little disheartened. Most of the books were either textbooky or written for women, which wouldn't be so bad, but certainly wasn't ideal for him. There were some books written for fathers, but they weren't written for the kind of man that Damian is. They all assumed that that their reader would be a "dude," and tried to use humor to hold interest, which doesn't say much for the opinion the writer had of their readers. Damian is certainly just as much a dude as the next guy. He likes beer and football and would love to drive a fancy sports car (if only his wife would let him), but he also likes Bach, documentary films, and is a bit of a feminist (what can I say, I rubbed off on him). He is also genuinely interested in fathering, not to mention excited by it. Just at the last minute, we found a book called Eat, Sleep, Poop: A Common Sense Guide to Your Baby's First Year. It was written by a pediatrician and proud daddy, and combines his medical experience with his parenting experiences. It is practical and straightforward, but also more on the personal side when he brings in stories about his daughter. It struck just the right note with Damian, at least so far. 

That being said, I can tell you that it is not as unbiased as the book I'm reading, but I think this comes from his stance as a doctor. Doctors are biased about all sorts of things, and that is why we often get second opinions on the important things. So it is a good thing to look into alternative view points on things that are most important to you or you know the least about. I know there are a lot controversies about vaccination and circumcision, but I'm not going to spend hours researching these topics because I already has a strong bias for what I plan to do, and there are a lot of conflicting opinions/studies about them, so I go with my gut. But the topic of helping my baby sleep through the night is a different story. My gut is confused by this topic. It tells me that I won't be comfortable letting my baby cry it out, at least not for long periods of time, but it also tells me that I can't go running at it's every whimper  So I'll definitely be looking into all kinds of philosophies on this topic.