You feed a baby they're happy, you change a baby, they're happy, you get them to sleep and they'll be happier. It's a very different experience IMO to anything else: it takes as long as it takes, and it's all necessary, but the feedback loop is close to instant.
Source: am the father of an almost 7 month old so far (and was extremely skeptical I'd enjoy it as much as I actually am).
We just had our first this past weekend and so far your post reads entirely true, especially this.
- hot shower (not bath) before bed
- immersion school in another language
- sleep training
HTH, congratulations, and good luck!
Second, two tips more tips from a dad of 5 children:
1. From somewhere after around 1 year: Put effort into teaching sleep skills: I did it by leaving the room after singing and prayer and coming back every 1 + 2n minutes where n is days. (Of course, use your parental judgment.) This was surprisingly effective in teaching them that Dad leaving the room doesn't mean Dad had disappeared, only that Dad is elsewhere and will be back soon. Important: do come back. Use a timer and follow it exactly. Come back even if the kid doesn't cry. It is important that they realize they don't have to cry for us not to disappear.
2. Also, when teaching them to sleep, don't let the fall asleep with anything (persons, toys, food, music, tv, absolute silence) that won't keep all night. We all wake halfway up many times during the night to check if everything is OK. For a small child a missing milk bottle is enough to signal "not ok".
There's a PaulG tweet about this that I'll have to dig up sometime about how parenthood changes you and yes it will change you.
The first six-months to a year you won't have decent sleep. You'll learn how to function.
Really I think the difference is that you don't have much time anymore for distraction, you don't tolerate it. You can't tolerate it. Sure, you'll still be able to browse HackerNews and play games (sometimes). But those long periods of drifting off, spacing out, taking hours to finish something...you'll learn to stop that.
You'll become more efficient. You'll have to: the baby is hungry or needs to be picked up from daycare. Dishes need washing, diapers need changing. Some young dev is dawdling on about something in their day? No. Where's the MR, here's what you need to fix. Get it done. Push it out. We don't have time for this sh*t.
It gets real. In a good sense. In the best sense.
I think you'll wish you did this years ago.