As you well know, that first year of your baby’s time on this planet is one of intense development and learning. That’s often one reason why a baby will have trouble falling asleep – he’s trying to learn a new skill. The one year-old you will have in a few months bears little resemblance to that newborn you welcomed just a little while ago. Knowing what to expect during that first year of development can help you watch out for delays, and it can also help you to encourage your baby as he learns new skills.

Here are the stages of that first year of development:

• The newborn stage. During this stage, your baby’s development and movements are all about the reflex. There are the sucking reflex and the rooting reflex, both of which help him to feed. There is the quirky “tonic neck” reflex in which your baby will turn his head one direction, and then straighten the arm on that side while bending the other. There’s the startle reflex, as well as the grasping reflex.
• The 1 to 3 month stage. During this part of the first year of development, your baby will get some more control over her body. She’ll roll over, prop herself up on her arms, and be able to lift her head up when she’s on her belly. She’ll kick her legs too, getting ready to crawl.
• The 4 to 7 months stage. This stage is characterized by rolling over, reaching out for objects, and passing things from one hand to the other. She can probably stand on her own, too, but not for long.
• The 8 months to 1 year stage. The final stage in the first year of development is characterized by sitting up, standing, bouncing, crawling and getting up onto all fours. Some babies will also walk during the first year of development.

As always, if you’re concerned about your baby’s development, bring it to the attention of your pediatrician.

Trying to soothe a crying baby can be frustrating at times. This is especially true if the baby has been fussy over a long period of time, such as when the baby has colic. It can seem like you’ve tried everything to soothe your baby, only to have them scream all the louder. It’s enough to make a parent want to scream.

If you find yourself becoming overly frustrated or angry with your baby, that may be exactly what you need to do. If you are unable to stay calm while your baby is crying, go ahead and lay her down. It will not hurt her to lie in the crib and cry for a while. Babies have cried, sometimes violently, in their cribs for centuries and still managed to grow up to become healthy adults.

It’s much better to lay your baby down and walk away than to try to take care of her while you are becoming angry or overly frustrated yourself. Step outside for a few minutes. Drink a glass of water or milk slowly, go for a walk around your house, do whatever it takes to calm yourself down. But, whatever you do, do not shake your baby.

Shaking a baby can lead to severe head trauma in a matter of seconds. Worse, the effects might not even be readily apparent. In extreme cases, babies can even die from being shaken, though it is more likely that your baby will suffer brain damage.

Babies brains are not quite snug within their heads when they are little, and shaking them causes the brain to bounce around inside the skull, potentially causing bruising or even bleeding. Shaking babies and children is dangerous until the child is more than five years old (and still not a good idea after that).

Remember, your baby is not crying to act out or to be bad. Babies cry because they lack the ability to otherwise express what they want or need. Admittedly, meeting a baby’s needs can be a frustrating guessing game. But if the frustration is getting to you badly enough that you think you might hurt your baby, place her someplace safe (like her crib) and walk away from the situation until you have calmed down.

If you need to, call someone to come over and help. If you find that you are frequently becoming angry, frustrated or depressed when baby is fussy, consult your doctor or medical practitioner about the possibility of postpartum depression or other conditions which may be adding to your anxiety.

If you haven’t already done so, consider getting a good camera and chronicling your pregnancy, and the first couple years of your baby’s life. When your baby grows up, she will have lots of questions about where she came from, and some of the most precious memories you can make involve opening up your scrapbooks and showing your kids how mommy and daddy looked through the whole process. Additionally, she’ll want to see lots of pictures of herself through her baby and toddler years.

You’ll want to pick up a good camera. If you use a digital camera, you’ll want to make sure that you get a quality printer which is able to accommodate photo paper. While there’s nothing wrong with having a database full of your favorite pictures, there’s nothing worse than having a hard drive crash, leaving you without any of your precious photographs. Make sure you print out your favorite photographs.

Many parents to be like to create scrapbook pages. Entire businesses, such as Treasured Memories, are devoted to teaching people how to create beautiful, creative scrapbook pages which can be enjoyed and handed down for generations to enjoy. Even if you don’t use special scrap booking materials and books, make sure to jot a few notes down about favorite photographs. Trust us on this one, you’ll have a great time sharing the memories with your children as they grow up.

We recently received some pictures of our grandparents and great grandparents when they were babies and toddlers. Remember when you take pictures of your pregnancy, and those precious first few years of baby’s life, that you are creating memories which will outlive both you and your baby. Someday, your great grandchildren might be able to see the things you’re seeing and experiencing now.

So, take as many pictures as you can. Make sure that you mark every milestone. Take photos of the places you go while you are pregnant, of the loved ones who surround you, of the places you live. Even the smallest things can serve to bring back pleasant memories for you and your children down the road.

When you first bring you baby home, your baby will sleep as many as sixteen or seventeen hours per day, but that sleep will come in short, two to four hour increments. She will wake up several times during the day and night needing to be fed, changed, or otherwise comforted.

Newborn babies wake up this frequently because their stomachs don’t hold much food yet, and the liquid diet (formula of breast milk) that they live on doesn’t take very long to digest. Breast fed babies will actually tend to wake up more frequently than formula fed babies, because breast milk digests faster in baby’s stomach. This is one of the few drawbacks to breastfeeding.

Of course, you shouldn’t let that discourage you from breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is the healthiest way for baby to get her nourishment, both physically and emotionally. Baby will eat more often, but ultimately, that’s the way nature intended for babies to eat.

One of the best things you can do as a new parent is to learn to work around your newborn’s sleep schedule. Generally speaking, this means taking lots of small naps right along with your little one. For most of us, who have grown accustomed to sleeping eight hours at night, this requires quite a bit of adjustment, but it is often the only way for new parents to get adequate rest.

About the time your baby reaches three months old, you’ll find that she is beginning to sleep for longer stretches. She’ll also be eating more, as her body is undergoing rapid growth. As baby is able to eat larger portions before she goes to sleep, she will be able to sleep longer before becoming hungry again.

Around three months, you should start training your baby to sleep at night. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore her when she cries, but it does mean that you should try to keep night time feeding, changings, and other necessary baby care as subdued and uninteresting as possible.

Do this by keeping the lights low or off and taking care of baby’s needs without interacting as much as you normally would. The idea is to make night time as boring as possible, in contrast to day time, when baby can see lots of things going on, and you interact and play directly with her.

The more baby begins to view day time as fun time and night time as blasé, the more she will soothe herself to sleep at night. Of course, she will still need naps during the daytime, and she won’t actually sleep through the night for several months yet, but she will steadily sleep for longer periods at night if you don’t give her extra reasons to want to be awake.

There have been strong and often conflicting opinions on the merits and demerits of the pacifier. Some parents swear by them, others believe that they will somehow damage their little one if they use it. There has been recent evidence, however, that using a pacifier can significantly reduce the risk of one of the leading killers of infants between two and six months old: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS as it is commonly referred to, is when an apparently healthy baby dies during sleep, and no other cause can be discerned. While the exact causes are unknown, there are several things which medical professionals have determined to reduce the risk of SIDS. One of the most recent discoveries is that using a pacifier significantly reduces baby’s risk. Here are some other things you can do to reduce the risk of SIDS:

• If you smoke, stop smoking inside the house or around your baby. Better yet, stop smoking altogether.
• Leave a fan running in baby’s room. Face the fan so that it is parallel with baby’s crib. This provides air circulation which helps prevent SIDS.
• Always lay baby down to sleep on his back. Never lay a baby down to sleep on her stomach. This has been found to be the leading cause of SIDS.

If you are breastfeeding your baby, don’t introduce the pacifier right away, as this can cause confusion for the baby and make breastfeeding difficult. Wait until baby is a month old before giving her a pacifier to sleep with. The risk of SIDS is very low before baby is a month old anyway. After baby is a month old, she should be well accustomed to latching on and breastfeeding.

Babies are at their greatest risk of SIDS between the ages of two months and six months old. Giving babies a pacifier (also called a dummy in some parts of the world) not only helps them fall asleep faster and soothe themselves better, but also helps keep their airway open, significantly reducing the risk of SIDS.

The bottom line with pacifiers is this: most of the objections some raise to them are based on anecdotal beliefs. There is no study which proves that using a pacifier can have any negative impact on a baby’s teeth later in life, or that pacifier use damages a baby in any other way. There is, however, significant evidence that using a pacifier helps reduce the chances that baby will die of SIDS.