A Field Guide for New Parents · Established 2026

A field guide for the first year.
From two parents a few months up the trail.

What we figured out about the first year - registries, hospital bags, childcare math, mat-leave, sleep setups. We don't tell you what to do. We hand you the tools we wish we'd had.

Read the articles → Or use the key below.
The Field Guide by Pam & Jim

Fig. 1 · Key

What are you working on right now?

Where are you in the timeline?

Branch 1. Before week 32 Trying to decide what to buy Pre-Baby Decisions More guides coming. Branch 2. Weeks 32–40 Hospital bag & last minute to-dos Pre-Baby Decisions More guides coming. Branch 3. Months 0–4 In the thick of it First-Year Logistics What I didn't expect to love about mat leave Branch 4. Months 4–12 Childcare and back to work Childcare Decisions More guides coming.

This week's dispatch

From the field journal

Short entries. Notes from the trail.
Entry · 2026-04-22

On hired help, calibrated

A doula is genuinely valuable when affordable. We had one. Most readers won't. The cheaper-and-DIY path is a parallel route, not a fallback.

Entry · 2026-04-18

The mat-leave research hole

There is no consolidated breakdown of California SDI + PFL + employer top-up that survives contact with payroll reality. We are writing it.

Entry · 2026-04-12

Sleep training, both views

Pam ran the Ferber method. Jim was a skeptic. The article shows both runs and the spreadsheet of nights one through fourteen.

What this is

We help you decide. We don't tell you what to decide.

We give you the questions to ask, the tradeoffs to weigh, and the math worth running. The right answer is the one that fits your family.

The parent layer, not the baby books.

Childcare logistics, money mechanics, sleep shifts, partner dynamics. The small-but-real decisions that nobody puts in the books.

Written by parents living it.

We had a baby in 2025. We figured a lot of it out. We're still figuring it out. Every piece reflects what we actually did, what worked, and what we'd do differently.