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Bringing Home Your Newborn: The First Week Checklist
A warm, practical guide to surviving and enjoying your baby's first seven days at home—with checklists, scripts, and the reassurance that you're doing it right. (For informational support, not a replacement for your pediatrician's advice.)
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: The Fourth Trimester: Why Your Newborn Act Like... a Newborn
Welcome home. If you are reading this with one hand while the other bounces a baby, or with your eyes half closed, or while sitting on the edge of a bed wearing the same shirt you have worn for two days, you are in exactly the right place. Let’s start here: you are not doing anything wrong. That is not a fluffy, feel-good sentence. It is a statement of fact, and by the time you finish this chapter, you will understand the mechanics behind it.
Your baby has just arrived, and you have just brought them home. The car seat is probably still in the hallway. The diaper bag might be leaking. Someone has already put a onesie on the dog, or maybe that was just a dream. The house feels strange, quiet in some places and noisy in others, and there is a tiny human attached to you or sleeping in a bassinet nearby who seems to be operating under a completely different set of rules than any other human you have ever met. You are now living in the fourth trimester. It is called that for a reason, because your baby is not really ready to be "out" yet, in a developmental sense. They are here, physically, but their entire nervous system is still trying to figure out how to exist outside of the warm, dark, cushioned world they just left.
Think about what your baby