If you are a stay at home dad like me, you know we have very little ‘down’ time for ourselves. Before my son was born, friends and family members bought and passed on their favorite parenting books to us. I have a large shelf with all of these thick parenting books with catchy titles, but never have the time to read any of them. A couple of months ago, my son bumped his head on our table. The bump started to swell and I was not really sure what to do. I grabbed the Baby 411 guide off our book shelf and had my ‘simple stupid’ answer within a minute.
The Baby 411, Clear Answers & Smart Advice for Your Baby’s First Year is not a book I would suggest reading from cover to cover (it would take ages), but for quick answers it has been a useful resource guide the past couple of months. Sure, you can do a more thorough search on the internet, but this book gives me the simple answers quickly! The layout of the book is in Question & Answer format. For example, here is the question I needed last week. Q: “My nine month old has goop draining from his eyes and has a cold. Does he have pink eye?” The book gave me the answer “probably” including a concise and detailed description of what to do and how to handle it. Believe me, it was NOT the answer I wanted to hear! Check out the Baby 411 book on the web.
Do other parents use this popular resource book in your home or is there something better?
Whenever something happens with my son, I go the Google route. For example, my wife’s co-worker’s son came down with croup. Coincidentally, my son started making coughing noises as part of his daily babble. I thought it was part of his repertoire of noises, but to be sure I googled, “Does my baby have croup” and it came up with what it is, as well as the symptoms. A quick diagnosis showed he had none of the symptoms, so to be sure, I also googled, “My baby makes fake cough sounds” and also came up with a community of answers of other parents expressing the same thing–letting me know that it’s not out of the ordinary for him to make those sounds to get attention, or just for fun.
I think it is also a great resource with a very good index. We have tons of books, few get opened, but this one does….maybe more so in the first two months than recently, but still very good. Also highly recommend the Baby Bargains book which helped us make some good choices…same publisher I believe.