When we were expecting, my wife and I handled the excitement and nervousness differently. It’s only natural, as we tend to react differently to, well, basically anything. Our different reactions and points of view generally complemented each other during the nine-month wait, except for the urge, and I would even say the urgency, to nest my wife had.

When we found out, we both started to get ready. We aligned on our financial goals for when the baby came; we agreed on the medical care we wanted within our possibilities; and we decided on what school we wanted our baby to attend, which is something you need to decide almost immediately here where we live because you need to get a slot as soon as you can. We even agreed that we both wanted to wait until the baby was born to find out whether it was a girl or a boy. But we did not agree in the least bit on the timing to have the baby’s actual stuff ready. In other words, my wife wanted to nest and I didn’t get it.

Having gone through it now, I realize it was something biological. Is not that my wife wanted to nest, or at least is not only that she wanted - she needed to do it. The urge was bigger than herself and it got to the point where she equated the future baby’s well-being with the success of her nesting efforts. I, of course, and it’s the reason for this entry, did not understand it. When my wife asked me to assemble something for the baby (boy are you going to spend hours assembling stuff), I always asked, “What is the urgency?” We still had months before the baby came!

We had lots going on during the months we were expecting, so it was easy to get distracted, but when the baby finally came I was very thankful for all the planning, organizing, and structuring my wife had done. How would we have crashed and burned if it wasn’t for my wife and all she did during the wait. And I think this is the best warning any first-time expecting dad can get - the pregnancy months go by very fast so don’t think you have much time.

The best example to illustrate what I said above was the baby’s crib. My wife researched, compared options, and finally decided on a used crib she saw advertised in a garage sale on social media. I was swamped in work and life in general and we still had about five months to go, so I thought it was very inconvenient to have to deal with the crib at that time. As if it wasn’t enough, once we got the crib home, my wife insisted that we assemble it right there and then. I couldn’t understand why that was necessary. 

After resisting for a few days, I finally conceded and we started putting it together. It took us four nights and three different tools, two of which I had to borrow from my dad. After that, I still didn’t understand why we had to go through all that work at that very moment and why it couldn’t wait. The baby came and let me tell you, THANK GOD WE DID IT! Thank God my wife insisted that we do a lot of things all that time in advance. 

This leads us to my first advice, which closely relates to how fast the pregnancy goes by. Do not leave anything that you can do before the baby comes to after she is born. If you have the space, the time, and the resources to get ahead of some or a lot of work, do it! Once the baby comes and you have her in your arms, you are going to be missing sleep and are going to be dealing with a hell of a lot more emotions, new emotions, and the last thing you will want to do is assemble, buy, or decide anything. Anything you can do before the baby comes is worth doing it. Believe me, your future self will thank you for it.

My second advice is not to wait until not even when the baby comes, but until the last months of the pregnancy to do any buying, assembling, or deciding. Most of those things require two sets of hands, even if you do the heavy lifting. The crib we bought, for example, required that my wife hold the legs upright while I was tightening the screws. If you wait for the last months of the pregnancy, your wife’s belly is going to be too big and too heavy for her to even stand for long periods, let alone do any physical activity. You will be able to do some things yourself, but others, like our crib, you will need help with, so you will have to get a friend or a family member to help you.

Another helpful warning is that the due date is only an estimate of when the baby will come. In Spanish, the term used to name that day is “likely day of birth.” So do not count on the fact that you will make it to that date. In our case, our baby came ten days before her due date. It might not seem like much, but ten days, especially when it’s your first baby, is a lot of time not to have when you thought you would. And that was a short time. Some babies can come weeks before their due date. The sweet spot considering all that I mentioned above could be to have all the essentials, especially those that require heavy lifting, before week number 28.

Lastly, my wife’s nesting also helped me get up to speed with my responsibilities as a father quicker than I would have otherwise. She made sure that we had every single thing that the baby would use for all her needs and that it was organized in a way that was easy to find them. The diaper change, the bath, getting the baby dressed, tummy time and playtime. Everything was organized in advance to make sure it was readily accessible when you were doing it. Even breastfeeding, which might seem like I couldn’t really do anything about, I got to help with indirectly because through organizing she let me see what she needed to be able to do it and I could help make sure all of it was ready for her.

And I say it helped me get up to speed with my responsibilities quicker because it helped me by getting rid of the pressure and overwhelmingness of constant decision-making. For example, not in a thousand lifetimes would I have been able to foresee before actually seeing it happening how quickly a baby’s wardrobe changes. My wife not only saw it but organized all the baby’s clothes by type and size. 

With my wife’s system, I quickly understood first, which of course is very important, what size we needed for each stage. But also, I understood what type of clothes was intended for which occasion. Of course, this means that I understood my wife’s preferences in these matters, such as level of elegance, which is more trivial, but also whether she thought they were for warmer or colder weather, which is more related to the baby’s well-being. And it wasn’t long before I was optimizing the classification, taking out things that no longer fit our baby and moving others from the warm section to the more chilly weather category.

I’ve thought about my initial resistance to working on the baby’s stuff, especially compared to my wife’s urgency. My best way to describe it is that the baby comes for the mother way before it comes for the father. It finally dawns on dads when they hold the baby and actually see it. For the mother it happens way before that. That makes sense, right? They fill it moving inside them! So even if you don’t see it now, help your wife with the nesting! It will help you immensely too.