There Goes My Baby: Surviving the Absurdity of the Newborn Phase

I'm standing in our freezing London kitchen at 4:12 in the morning, holding what appears to be a very angry, red-faced sweet potato wrapped in a slightly damp muslin cloth, when my phone, completely unprompted, shuffles to an R&B playlist from 2010.

Suddenly, the smooth, seductive tones of that infamous Usher there goes my baby track start echoing off the tiles, which feels like a deeply personal insult from the universe because my baby is absolutely not going anywhere—she's currently fused to my left collarbone, violently refusing to succumb to sleep, while her twin sister is aggressively filling a nappy in the other room. You see that viral there goes my baby meme floating around the internet—the one where the toddler is suddenly eighteen and driving away in a Volvo while the parents weep into their empty nest—and when you're in the thick of the newborn trenches, you find yourself staring blankly at your phone thinking that the idea of them finally leaving the house sounds less like a nostalgic tragedy and more like an all-inclusive holiday to Spain.

But here we're. You bring them home from the hospital, you place the car seat in the hallway, and then you just stare at each other waiting for an adult to arrive, until the crushing realization hits that you're, allegedly, the adult. I spent the first few weeks getting almost every single thing wrong, mostly because I tried to intellectualize a biological process that basically amounts to keeping a very loud, very fragile sack of fluids alive until the sun comes up.

The absolute hubris of the sleep tracking app

If I could go back in time and aggressively shake my younger self, the first thing I'd do is throw my smartphone directly into the Thames. When we first brought the twins home, I decided that the way to survive was through data, downloading three different tracking apps and forcing my wife to log every single milliliter of milk, every minute of sleep, and every bowel movement with the kind of manic precision usually reserved for air traffic controllers.

It was a disaster. I'd stare at the little line graphs at 3am, furiously whispering that twin A was "statistically due for a sleep cycle," which is exactly the kind of unhelpful rubbish that nearly got me smothered with a nursing pillow. My wife, who was operating on perhaps forty minutes of broken sleep, finally snapped one afternoon and told me that babies can't read spreadsheets, which frankly blew my mind. Letting go of the rigid tracking and just sort of tumbling blindly into the chaos—feeding them when they screamed, sleeping when they randomly passed out, and assuming a dirty nappy was just an inevitability of breathing—was the only thing that actually kept us from totally losing our minds.

What my GP actually muttered about the science of sleep

All the parenting books tell you exactly how babies should sleep (page 47 of a very expensive paperback suggests you simply place them down "drowsy but awake," a phrase that I'm convinced was invented by a sadist). When I finally dragged myself into the local NHS clinic, smelling faintly of sour milk and desperation, my GP took one look at my twitching left eye and gave me the only advice that stuck.

She told me that human babies are essentially evicted from the womb about three months too early because if they stayed in any longer, their massive heads wouldn't fit through the exit, which seems like a massive evolutionary oversight if you ask me. This "fourth trimester" concept supposedly explains why they hate being put down in a cold, silent cot—they're used to living inside a noisy, warm, squishy water balloon. She said the absolute non-negotiable rule is placing them flat on their backs with absolutely zero blankets, pillows, or cute stuffed bears in the cot to prevent SIDS, but beyond that, if you've to walk laps around the kitchen island doing deep lunges to get them to nod off, you just do the lunges and pray your knees hold out.

She also casually mentioned that letting your partner do things their own way is the only way to survive co-parenting without ending up in divorce court. I had this awful habit of hovering over my wife while she did up a babygrow, offering unhelpful commentary about how the snaps were slightly misaligned, until she handed me the baby and walked out of the room for two hours, leaving me to realize that there's no "correct" way to put a nappy on a screaming banshee as long as the poo stays on the inside.

The wardrobe choices that didn't make me want to cry

When you're operating on a severe sleep deficit, the physical mechanics of dressing a newborn become incredibly pressing. You get all these beautiful, complicated outfits at the baby shower—tiny denim jeans with actual buttons, microscopic cardigans with complex toggles—and they all go straight into a box under the bed because at two in the morning, you need clothes that don't require an engineering degree.

I eventually became deeply attached to the Organic Baby Romper Long Sleeve Henley Winter Bodysuit. Look, I'm not going to pretend a piece of clothing changed my life, but during those bitter November nights when the flat was freezing and I had to check a nappy in the dark, the three little buttons at the top meant I could wrestle a squirming twin into it without scraping fabric aggressively over her face, which usually triggers an alarm-bell wail that wakes up the other twin. The organic cotton is remarkably soft, which is nice because both of my girls had that angry, red newborn skin that flared up if you even looked at it wrong, and it held up to being washed roughly seven thousand times a week when the inevitable bodily explosions occurred.

In the slightly warmer months, we basically lived in the Organic Baby Romper Henley Button-Front Short Sleeve Suit, which is virtually the same concept just with less arm fabric. It didn't magically make them sleep through the night—nothing does, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to sell you a PDF—but the stretchy cuffs meant their little legs weren't trapped when they were doing that frantic newborn bicycle kicking thing.

A brief digression on swaddling and screen time

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to learn how to swaddle using a giant square of muslin, watching YouTube tutorials in the dark while a baby screamed in my ear, repeatedly ending up with something that looked less like a secure burrito and more like a loose, tragic toga. I'd wrap them up, feel a fleeting sense of immense masculine pride, and three seconds later a tiny, violent fist would punch through the fabric and smack me in the nose.

On the flip side, everyone panics about screen time and brain development, but if you happen to have the TV on in the background while you're desperately trying to eat a piece of cold toast and the baby accidentally glances at the Great British Bake Off for four seconds, their brain is probably not going to melt out of their ears.

The things that were just okay

You end up buying a lot of rubbish when you're desperate. Around the four-month mark, when the drooling started and they began gnawing on my collarbones like tiny, toothless zombies, I panic-bought a bunch of soothing tools. We had the Silicone Sloth Teether Toy, which is heavily marketed as a magical gum-relief device.

It's fine. It's a piece of food-grade silicone shaped like a lazy mammal. Did it provide natural soothing relief? Maybe for about four minutes at a time. I'd pull it out of the fridge, hand it to one of the twins, she would chew on the sloth's foot thoughtfully, drop it on the floor where it would immediately get covered in dog hair, and then she would go back to trying to eat my car keys. I'm not saying it's a bad product, but babies are absurdly unpredictable creatures who will almost always prefer a discarded cardboard box over an ergonomically designed sensory tool.

Accepting that there's no village, so you've to rent one

People love to tell you that "it takes a village" to raise a child, but nobody mentions that in the modern world, the village has completely relocated, is working a 50-hour corporate job, and only communicates via WhatsApp voice notes. My health visitor, an incredibly blunt woman who had clearly seen too many weeping fathers in her time, looked at our dark circles and told us to aggressively accept any and all help, even if it felt humiliating.

When my mother-in-law came over and offered to do a load of washing, my instinct was to politely decline and pretend I had everything under control, standing there in a shirt that smelled suspiciously of sour milk. Letting go of my pride and saying, "Yes, please do the laundry, and also could you hold this screaming infant while I go stare blankly at the bathroom wall for twenty minutes" was the hardest, best thing I ever did.

Eventually, the newborn fog does lift. One day you wake up and realize you haven't been aggressively terrified for at least a week, the girls are sitting up, and you hear those Usher lyrics again, and maybe, just maybe, the idea of "there goes my baby" doesn't sound entirely like a threat anymore.

The inevitable questions you're probably googling at 2am

When does the newborn phase really end?

Technically, the medical world says it's around the three-month mark, but honestly, it ends the first time they look at you and intentionally smile instead of just passing gas. For us, it felt like waking up from a really long, very sticky fever dream right around week twelve, though your mileage may wildly vary.

How many layers of clothes should they honestly be wearing?

The NHS midwives told me to dress them in whatever I was wearing, plus one extra light layer. So if I was comfortable in a t-shirt, they needed a bodysuit and a thin cardigan. I spent weeks frantically touching the back of their necks to see if they were sweaty, which they usually were, mostly because they were permanently strapped to my chest like a hot water bottle.

Is it normal that they sound like a grunting farm animal when they sleep?

No one prepares you for the noise. You expect quiet, peaceful breathing, but babies are incredibly loud sleepers. They grunt, squeak, snort, and periodically sound like a tiny congested pug. My GP assured me this was totally normal because their airways are tiny and full of mucus, but it definitely ruined my sleep for the first month.

Do I really have to wake them up to feed them?

In the very beginning, when they haven't regained their birth weight, yes, unfortunately, you've to wake a sleeping baby, which feels like a crime against humanity. Once the pediatrician gave us the green light that they were gaining weight properly, I stopped setting alarms and let them wake me up, which they did, loudly and often.

How do I stop my partner from micromanaging how I hold the baby?

You have to have a very awkward conversation in the cold light of day. I had to learn to literally walk out of the room and let my wife figure out her own rhythm with the twins, even if she was doing it "wrong" according to whatever nonsense I had read on a parenting blog that morning. If they're safe and breathing, let your partner do it their way.