The Baby Books We Shall Read

New parents have no idea what they are getting into, no matter how much they have seen or heard about it from others. Advice is abounding from every corner, but the truth is that you don't know what kind of parent you will become until you are one. Others' parenting styles might not work for you, but that's an opportunity: you get to come up with your own thing.

We know we want to be informed parents, among other thing, so we selected a few books to introduce us to the topic and get us started on the same page. Interestingly, I find that the more I read, the more it looks likely that we will end up improvising a whole lot. It seems that book knowledge plays a lesser role than experience (what really works in the end) and instinct. A friend recently told me: you'll know what to do when you have to do it. But I'd like those actions to be smart.

Since we won't remember all the advice we have received at this point, we decided to at least read up and bookmark what we think might be helpful.

We think our parenting will start with the ideas in "Babywise" (Bucknam), especially those about sleep and feeding schedules, if they will work for us. The other books are mostly supplemental and for reference, sources of other ideas we might find useful down the road. We are quite determined to not be "bookish" parents who follow book recipes to the tee, but more organic and with a high level of freedom in style. (I obviously don't know what that means!).