It’s two weeks for me as Dad. Our son seems to have discovered that he has hands—he’s trying desperately to put those cute, dumb little things in his mouth all the time now. Half the time, he misses and just hits himself in the face instead. One time today, he got his own index finger stuck in his eye.

He’s still jaundiced, but apparently, breastfed newborns can take up to a month to clear out the bilirubin. I hope it doesn't take that long. To help him clear it out, we have started sunbathing him each afternoon. Blue light apparently causes bilirubin to break down.

He’s already eating almost four ounces of milk or formula per feeding. At this rate, we’re going to outpace the recommendations for feeding amounts for the first month of life.

While our kid’s doing fine, it’s been a challenge to adapt to the Chinese way of childcare. My mother-in-law is adamant on using cloth diaper flats to save money. I’m all for saving money, so that’s not a big deal, even if it’s a bit stinkier. What is a big deal is her hangup on washing machines. She wants us to wash them by hand.

In these two weeks, I’ve washed so many cloth diapers that my knuckles are fixing to bleed. Luckily, a newborn’s poop doesn’t smell too bad. It gets worse in a few months when you start feeding them soft foods. So for now, I’m playing along.

One other issue with cloth diapers is that without a waterproof diaper cover, their contents don’t remain where you’d like them to. Easy to solve, right? Wrong. I can’t seem to find a waterproof diaper cover on Taobao. Surely, I can’t be the only one who wants one of these in China?

Lastly, I found out that the Chinese conception of a cloth diaper’s a lot smaller than an American one. Also, Chinese people don’t use safety pins or snaps to keep them in place. They fold them into a long strip which is just enough to cover the newborn’s front and back. Then, they secure it to the newborn with an elastic strip with a button on the end. This contributes to the leakage. I’ll wait until his umbilical stump falls off so I can diaper him properly, but meanwhile, I must find a decent diaper cover.

Anyway, it’s two weeks down, a lifetime to go. I can confirm what others have told me: time speeds up. A typical day is filled with mostly the same tasks, interspersed with bits and pieces of the other things you had to do before you added childcare to your to-do list.

Routines will dominate your existence like they never did before. In some ways that’s a good thing. For someone like me, a stricter routine has been a sort of blessing. With less time to do the things I want to do, I have to prioritize. So here I am at 3:19 AM, writing a blog post on the night watch—oh, my son’s awake and he’s hungry. Gotta go.