First off, Congrats. Secondly, this is not about taking care of your wife, but just my 3 years of working experience and things I thought I would share. Sorry

First off, Congrats. Secondly, this is not about taking care of your wife, but just my 3 years of working experience and things I thought I would share. Sorry, I can't help about taking care of your wife, because my wife was able to take care of herself. She had a natural birth Second most important thing I learned is applying "Customer Driven Development" to the baby. There is a different kind of cry between baby is hungry, baby needs change of diapers and baby needs a hug. This was the basis of the Dunstan Baby Language. I can personally attest that the different types of cry is true, though I believe that each baby has their own set of cries and not a one size fit all as proposed by the Dunstan Baby Language, so you need to learn and find out. <sidetrack> I was going to develop a mobile app for that but my baby grew up too quick</sidetrack>. Most important thing. Observe the baby, play with the baby and have fun! I discovered a lot about myself observing my baby. The one that really etched in my memory was when I saw her trying to get a toy for herself. At that time, she hasn't learned to crawl yet, but she could sit and roll. This toy was beyond her reach and it was really amazing to see how she shifted her sitting position, lie down, keep rolling till she reached her toy. At that instant, I saw the stroke of ingenuity of her in me when I was young. Trying different ways to get what I want. The question is, how did that trait in me got lost throughout my life? One program I do recommend is "Your Baby Can Read". I let my daughter watch this show when she was 6 months and she got engrossed in it. We know she was picking up things from the show because she could sing "Twinkle, Twinkle" even though we didn't teach her, but we did encourage her to sing it to us. The magical moment was when out of the blue, she just followed the action of "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes". But she got bored of this show at 18 months and is now currently watching "Playschool" (this is shown in Aust). You might be able to purchase some of this show on shop.abc.net.au Another privileage we have was having my wife stay at home and look after her. The main benefit I found from this was that my wife is better able to understand what my daughter wants when she talks. For example, she used the word "wee" to mean she wants a drink prior to learning the word water. Only my wife knew what she wanted. I remembered my daughter and I both getting frustrated when she went "wee" and kept crying because I didn't know what she want. It was only until my wife overhead us and gave her the water that I realised what she wanted. I could only imagine if we sent her to childcare she had to go through educating adults that "wee" is water multiple times. I wrote a bit about how we managed childbirth without epidural in my blog if you are interested http://kschua.posterous.com/tag/chidbirthepiduralbaby http://kschua.posterous.com/tag/chidbirthepiduralbaby I believe the machine I refered to in my blog is Cardiotocography and my thoughts about when to stop breastfeeding here http://kschua.posterous.com/tag/breastfeedingbabywean http://kschua.posterous.com/tag/breastfeedingbabywean Have fun!