The first appointment: everything worth bringing that isn't the baby

Nobody warns you that the first appointment is partly an exam for you.

Not a hard one, and nobody is marking it. But you will be asked things — about the birth, about the weeks since, about your own family — and you will find out in real time which of them you can actually answer.

Why it's harder than it should be

Two reasons, and neither of them is about you being disorganised.

The first is arithmetic. The appointment is ten or fifteen minutes. The stretch it covers is four weeks, most of them without sleep. A month of a new person's life has to be compressed into the length of a bus ride, out loud, with the person in question on your lap.

The second is that the useful information sits in two places and you only control one of them. The hospital has the measurements, the dates, the paperwork. You have everything that happened after you walked out of the door — and nobody has written any of it down.

"They asked how feeding was going and I said 'fine'. Three days later I remembered that it had not been fine on the Thursday."

What's worth having with you

Not a folder. Nothing that looks like homework.

• The birth facts, as written. Date, time, weight, length, how it went, anything that was said at the time. Most of this is already on paper you own — it just needs to be somewhere you can reach it one-handed.
• The family history. The one nobody prepares. The first appointment is where you discover what you don't know about your own family, and asking your parents is one phone call that cannot be made in the waiting room.
• What's happened since. Feeding, sleeping, skin, anything that changed and roughly when. Not a chart. Three lines.
• Your questions, written down. This is the one that actually changes how the appointment goes.

Collect the questions in the week before, don't compose them that morning

Questions don't arrive when you sit down to make a list. They arrive at four in the morning, in the shower, halfway through getting someone into a car seat.

So the list isn't something you write. It's something you collect, one line at a time, on whatever is nearest.

And then one more thing, which matters more than the list: ask the one that worries you first. Not the easiest, not the one that sounds most sensible. Appointments run out of time at the end, and the question people save for last is almost always the one they came for.

What happens to it afterwards

The appointment ends. Someone writes something into a system you can't see. You go home.

A few weeks later there's another one, and both problems are back — the ten minutes, and the four weeks nobody recorded.

Which is the real argument for keeping your own notes, and it has nothing to do with being organised. The official file is a set of snapshots taken every few weeks. Everything that makes the snapshots mean something happened in between, where only you were.

Anything that worries you between appointments belongs with your doctor or health visitor, straight away — not in a notebook. What belongs to you is the plain record: what you saw, and when.