jethrien

Title: The Mayo Clinic Guide to Your Baby's First Year
Author: Mayo Clinic
Genre: Parenting guide
Thingummies: 5

Synopsis: Month-by-month and then topic by topic guide to milestones, safety, and health of newborns.

Thoughts: I'd really liked the Mayo Clinic pregnancy guide, so I got this one as well. I was not disappointed. Once again, they're science-based without being overly clinical, unsentimental but still reassuring. There's a refreshing lack of fads and an acknowledgement that parents need to make the best choices for their circumstances without bowing too far. (So they strongly recommend breast-feeding, with its associated health benefits, but do not condemn parents for whom this is not a reasonable option. But they have little patience with the anti-vaccination crowd.) There are chapters for special topics, including adoption and multiples. They cluster the list of the really horrifying but very unlikely diseases/defects at the end in a chapter they warn you not to read unless you have to, which helps a lot with the tendency towards hypochondria.

I particularly appreciated the charts: the appropriate windows for various vaccines, the lists of milestones that should be looked for in each month, the photos of common skin rashes that all look terribly alarming but are mostly harmless.

Down-to-earth, easy to use, and lacking in moralizing. We'll see how it compares to the actual experience, but I'm feeling a lot more prepared for my expected addition than I was before.