The First 30 Days With a Newborn in Singapore
A real-parent guide to what actually mattered the most during confinement and the first month. This is not a medical guide. It’s a practical map of our experience.
🍼 Feeding
Baby cues vs volume - what we learned
😴 Sleep
Expectations and how to manage them
🧠 Mental Load
Supporting each other as a family
👩⚕️ Support
Resources we engaged
What Surprised Us Most in the First 30 Days
Recovery is not linear
Some days you feel fine. The next day you don’t. That’s normal — and frustrating.
Baby care quickly becomes schedule-driven
Feeding, sleeping, bathing, and laundry take over the day faster than expected.
Advice will come from everywhere
Family, confinement nanny, social media, and doctors — often with conflicting opinions.
What we learned: you don’t need to decide everything at once. Focus on what affects today.
The Decisions That Mattered Most
Feeding Approach
Direct latching, pumping, formula - each has trade offs
Sustainability matters more than perfection
Confinement Style
Have a thought about how you want your confinement to be
Set clear parameters with confinement nanny
Night Duty
Figure out what works with your spouse
Parenting is teamwork, engage your spouse
What We Over-Worried About (In Hindsight)
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Milk volume and numbers
Pay attention to your baby's cues, look at the daily volume instead of volume per feed
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Whether the baby was sleeping "enough"
Newborns are not robots; they do not fall asleep right after feeding, and neither do they only wake to feed
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Doing things the "right" way
Enjoy your newborn; there is no one way to parenting. Every parent and every baby is different.
What We’d Do Differently If We Could Start Again
✅ Trust our instincts earlier on whether the baby was being overfed
✅ Be clearer and firmer about our feeding preferences
✅ Insisted on starting direct latching earlier
✅Going to a professional lactation consultant at NUH right from the start
Services & Products In Singapore That We Found Helpful
Confinement Nanny Agencies
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We engaged P.E.M
Lactation Consultants
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For breastfeeding - we engaged NUH lactation consultants
Postpartum massage
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We engaged a private masseuse, not from any agency
