Easy to read and well laid out but at times a bit scaremongering (Your Baby Week by Week: The Ultimate Guide to Caring for Your New Baby - Caroline Fertleman)

Member Name: masterchef98

Product:	Your Baby Week by Week: The Ultimate Guide to Caring for Your New Baby - Caroline Fertleman
Date:	19/10/09 (10 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Split into manageable chunks with a good reference section

Disadvantages: A bit definite in their scary assertions sometimes

This book gives information on baby care and development (as well as caring for mum) from birth to six months.

The big advanatage of the book is that it is split up week by week so there are only a few pages to read every week which makes it very manageable for a new parent. Furthermore each of the weekly chapters is split up into short section which makes it even easier to read as you don't lose your thread if interrupted. These sections are:

Sleep
Crying
Feeding
Nappies
Washing
Development and Playing
When to see a Doctor
What's Happening to Mum
Planning Ahead

I found the book very easy to read and a handy reference guide. It was nice to have something so clearly split up so that you could track your baby's development and it also contains a lot of information that is not necessarily week specific such as information on eye colour changing that you can look up easily using the index.

I did however find it to be a bit scaremongering at times. For example in the Week 0 chapter it says "... you might find that occasionally he'll go for four hours without food - don't let him go longer than this as his blood sugar will drop and he'll feel too sleepy to wake up and demand food" My baby had a 5-6 hours sleep daily pretty much from birth (took a while to get him to do it at night rather than in the afternoon though) and waking up a sleeping baby just seems like a ridiculous thing to do so I did find this very worrying despite reassurances from my midwife that it was not necessary to wake him after 4 hours.

Another minor thing but one that I find really annoying is that the book ends after 24 weeks. There are not exactly 4 weeks in a month therefore 24 weeks is not 6 months. I find it really strange and very annoying that this 4 weeks = 1 month thing keeps coming up since having a baby as before this I never really came across this misconception at all.

Summary: I did find the book useful, but wouldn't recommend this particular one