1. If what you’re doing is not working, try something else. 2. Feed –> Wake –> Sleep. For baby novices like John and I, this advice from Babywise was a lifesaver (and three babies in, it’s still working). It goes like this: when the baby wakes up, you feed them. Then you play together. Then they go to sleep. When they wake up again, you feed them again. The length of the sleeping and playing changes as they grow, but the basic rhythm was SUCH a helpful place for us to start in learning how to care for our babies. 3. All the babies I’ve ever known are obsessed with ceiling fans (especially if the blades are high contrast with the ceiling color). If you need a few minutes to get ready in the morning, lay your baby on the bed, turn on the fan for a few seconds, then turn it off and let it spin lazily. Baby magic. 4. Take the paternity leave. In the long arc of your career, you will never look back and wish you had worked those three days or two weeks or four months instead of being with your wife and baby. If you have a paternity leave benefit and it’s not your work’s culture to take it, be the change. (This one’s from John.) 5. Fun story: a few weeks after June was born, my Dad was changing her diaper. He called John and I into the room and said (very kindly), “This is not what her bottom is supposed to look like. Do you have any diaper cream?” Apparently a baby’s bottom is NOT supposed to be bright red? Right, got it. We did have and apply diaper cream, but after that, I also gave her an extra minute or two