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What is your top baby/kid advice? We are in the third trimester with our first. Revolutionary must have gadget, let them cry it out, co-sleep don't co-sleep, have a closet lined with mirrors to lock them in?
First: Congratulations!
I have four kids, oldest is five, youngest is four months. So I have a decent amount of experience with babies.
Sleep: The Back is Best campaign is probably responsible for a lot of only children. There was a study showing that booster seat legislation probably acted to prevent more births than the number of deaths it prevented. I would bet my life savings that the Safe Sleep campaign has also done so. That said, once you see your baby, you will be willing to suffer quite a lot to give them an extra 0.001% chance of survival. So here is how to make it suck less.
Sleep sacks are essential. For kids under 1 month, I prefer the Fleece Halo Sleepsack. As long as you have AC at home, I recommend the fleece. The cotton one kept riding up over my babies' faces. Once the baby starts to free their hands from the sleep sack, around six weeks, I recommend switching to the LoveToDream SwaddleUp or a good dupe. Always keep doubles of all sleep garments and sheets. Your child probably will not stay awake for a whole wash/dryer cycle until they are six months. The first three months you will be doing a lot of tiny loads of laundry.
For the first year, pretty much every week you will have a different baby. If you don't like what's going on, hang on a week! It will change (not always for the better.)
The first twelve weeks there is a lot more crying. Part of this is probably due to the digestion system developing and causing tummy pain and difficulty pooping/farting. You will learn to cheer on baby farts. The other trouble is that early on, a baby only has 20-40 minutes of staying awake before they get overtired. Once overtired, a baby cannot fall back asleep as easily and gets frustrated. Some babies will take longer to eat than the span of their wake time. This will be a source of frustration to you.
Pay attention to temperature. Smaller babies need more bundling up - they don't have as much hair, they don't even have bone between their brains and the outside. If a baby has a hard time getting back to sleep, especially at night, check your thermostat. You might have a night time setting to make things colder.
There is a difference between cry it out and not responding to every peep your baby makes. Some babies are just noisy. If a baby starts making noise, wait a minute before running to touch them. Pay attention to what the sounds are like. Are they getting louder, more high pitched, and closer together? That is a sign of crying. But the first week or so a newborn makes a lot of weird sounds. One kid sounded like a van with squeaky brakes.
If you do decide to cry it out, make sure you know what the goals are. Crying it out will remove your child's reliance on sleep aids that are not present when they wake up at night. It will not make it so that they are no longer hungry at night, if they are getting half their daily calories at night. It will not make it so that they don't soak through their diaper and need to be changed every night. It just helps you get them to sleep when you set them down in their sleep environment, with less crying overall. Read "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" by Dr. Ferber before doing anything - I haven't found a blogpost or other resource that explains everything needed.
Something like https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Deluxe-Kick-Play-Piano/dp/B076HYFZ37 is very helpful for the 3-6 month range. Babies are like plants. Outside of a few smiles and songs, they mostly like to be left alone on the floor near something they can grab.
A good range of books (each has their own very different and clashing philosophy, but take what makes sense for you and leave the rest):
On Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep - There must have been some edition decades ago where the author advocated for baby torture or something. This book is loathed by some people. But when I read it I saw nothing objectionable. A lot of the advice is the same as what you will find in Happiest Baby on the Block, which is a cherished book. I liked the presentation here better and overall found this book more helpful.
Elevating Child Care: A Guide To Respectful Parenting - I cannot say I'm a perfect Respectful Infant Educaring (RIE) parent, but starting off approaching problems from the RIE perspective has proven helpful (even if it doesn't always survive contact with the enemy.) The research seems to indicate that helping kids identify their emotions and not try to repress them helps kids behave better in the long run. RIE is one parenting philosophy that makes this easy. I like this book because it creates a narrative, a mindset, in which I can make sense of parenting choices. I don't know if I can explain it better, but I recommend the book all the same.
How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen - someone already recommended this I think, I like the little kid version.
Bringing up Bebe - Helps set the expectation that you can still have a good life and kids. Kids are not all you are.
Edit because there's a lot more I could say:
Get a carseat/stroller combo, the kind where you can remove the carseat and plop it straight onto a stroller without waking the baby.
You need to be your child's advocate. Basic things that you would think a doctor would do often are ignored. For example, one kid lost 10% of his birth weight and the lactation consultant, pediatrician, etc acted like it was my fault. They had me nurse him, then feed him milk from a bottle, then pump, every 2 hours day and night. The whole process took 1.5 hours and then I had 30 minutes of break/sleep in between. Exhausting. A year later, at his first dental check up, the dentist mentioned that he had a very bad Posterior Tongue Tie, something that was likely the cause of the poor weight gain and something not one doctor pointed out.
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