[ ABOUT ]
You get a due date. You don’t get an onboarding.
There is plenty of information about pregnancy, babies and parenting. Much less exists about how new parents actually reorganize their home, responsibilities, money, routines and working lives around a new baby.
[ THE GAP ]
The playbook I went looking for and couldn’t find.
When my son was born, we were also in the midst of another major life transition — selling our condo and moving into a new home. We came back from the hospital to haphazardly packed boxes and a stack of baby products we kinda knew how to use, but not really.
The questions arrived faster than we could process them.
How many pee diapers did he have today? Was he eating enough? When did we last eat a meal that wasn't shredded cheese or a fig bar? Who was going to take the first overnight shift? What about the second? Were we ever going to get sleep again?
So I went looking for help.
On one side, there's baby information that is clinical and correct and organized by absolutely nobody's real day. On the other, lifestyle content shot in soft focus, styled to sell you a $38 teether and the feeling you're already behind.
Neither told me how life with a baby actually runs .
Who gets up when. How you keep track of feeding and diapers without making yourself insane. What needs to be set up before the baby arrives. Who owns what. How leave, childcare and money fit together. What you should decide while you're still capable of making decisions without three hours of sleep.
The information was out there.
What was missing was a way to organize it around the actual work of becoming a family.
A role you started without a handoff meeting.
[ THE PLAYBOOK ]
The New Parent Playbook treats the first months of parenthood the way you'd treat any role you are serious about doing well. You assess what you're walking into, set your priorities and execute against them.
In your new role as a Chief Parenting Officer, either solo or with a co-executive, this consists of four main functions: Strategy and Setup, Operations (feeding, sleeping, diapers and everything in between), People and Finance. You have a core process, affectionately dubbed the Newborn Loop, that repeats until it stops feeling like a process at all.
The plays and frameworks are borrowed from the professional world you already know how to operate in, applied to a role you started without so much as a handoff meeting. They exist for one reason: to give you something to hold onto during a stretch of life where most people are handed a swaddle and a "you'll figure it out."
Professionals who plan.
[ WHO THIS IS FOR ]
People who run the spreadsheets and read the reviews. You're capable at work and you'd like to feel capable at home with your new baby — and you've noticed that nobody has offered you a structure for doing that.
[ THE AUTHOR ]
Savannah Bartell. Chicago. First-time parent. I spent fifteen years as a journalist and content strategist, plus a couple of years in consulting building playbooks that clients paid real money for and probably never opened twice.
My credentials for this book are not medical. I'm not a pediatrician, a lactation consultant or a financial planner, but I think you should lean on those professionals to provide you personalized advice. What I have is a career spent finding the pattern in complicated things and a first year that gave me a great deal of material.
My co-executive is a CPA whose busy season runs from July to mid-September, which is a scheduling detail that shaped many of our operational decisions. Our head of security is our goldendoodle, Hank. He was here first, did not formally sign off on the reorg, but has learned to love his new colleague.
[ YOUR NEXT MOVE ]
Start with the audit.
The audit narrows the field to one area worth working on next, which is more useful than adding seventeen more things to the baby-prep list.
Five minutes. Twelve questions. One useful place to begin.
Join the C-Suite
[ THE PREPARATION SERIES ]
If you're earlier than that, or you'd rather see how this works before answering anything, the preparation series has practical guidance, tools worth using, excerpts from the book, and occasional word on when it's out. It's not a weekly newsletter. I'm not going to send you one of those.