Day 310 - Make a Dentist Appointment for the 1 Year Birthday

Today's first time parenting tip - Make your baby a dentist appointment for around their 1 year birthday

Your infant's first dentist appointment should be somewhere close to their one-year birthday. Your baby may or may not have all his teeth in yet, but the dentist should still check their teeth and gums to make sure they're healthy.

Like your pediatrician, you should be comfortable with your dentist, both in his bedside manner and his professionalism. The first visit will be fairly easy, the dentist will try to get comfortable with your child and check the teeth and gums for signs of bottle decay.

He'll also be able to give you advice on how to care for your infant's teeth, as well as possibly give you fluoride drops, especially if your tap water doesn't have this added already.

After this first visit, you should come back every six months for a cleaning and check up.

Parenting, Dentist, Teeth, Care, Dental

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Day 298 - Keeping the House Clean with an Active Baby

Today's first time parenting tip - Do a daily "partial" cleanup

When you've got a baby, toys, a short attention span and the urge to move everywhere, your house can feel a lot like a plastic jungle with toys, tupperware, books and clothes all over the place.

One of my son's favorite activities is to carry stuff back and forth across the apartment. And since he's only interested in things for five minutes at a time, you can see how the mess could pile up quick.

If my wife and I tried to have everything in its place all the time, we'd go insane. So instead, we pick up his mess once a day when he goes to bed. And "putting something in its place" is a pretty loose interpretation too.

Instead of having things perfect, we'll stack all the books on the floor, put all the small toys in a box and the bigger ones arranged along a wall. Since our son is just going to get them out when he wakes up, there's no sense making everything perfect.

This way we don't spend a ton of time cleaning up and don't get overwhelmed when all our hard work gets erased the next day. And half the fun for our son right now is pulling everything out and discovering his toys all over again.

Parenting, Toy, Clean, Sanity, Mess