Babies don't always act like you thought they would. The important
thing is to pay attention to your baby. He is trying to communicate
with you to let you know his needs and desires, and you must listen to
his little cues.
Expect to get advice from everybody around you, even if their only
previous experience is watching babies on television.
Most of them are
well-meaning, but in the end, you need to make your own decisions and
trust your instincts. Nobody knows your baby as well as you do. If you
think that your baby needs to be held when he cries, then you are
probably right. You have a motherly instinct to pick up a crying baby
for a good reason, it's natural, and it's what the baby needs. Trust
your own judgment and ignore other peoples' advice to "let him cry it
out."
There are a lot of books and manuals about the first year of a child's
life, and you will see timelines that show various milestones about
what a baby "should" be doing at one month, two months, three months,
and so on. Expect that your baby will not comply a hundred percent with
these timelines. While these are generally approximately correct, the
fact is, every baby is different. If your baby's development isn't spot
on with the timeline in your baby book, it does not mean that there is
a problem, or that he is somehow deficient.
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