Diaper time!

Sure, you'll drive your wife to the hospital and provide moral support during the birth, but the most daunting act of your new fatherhood will be changing a diaper. Especially since the odds are good that you'll have many female relatives watching you like hawks as you do it for the first time.

Practice at least once at home, just to ensure you don't do anything stupid. Also remember that your new bundle of joy is not made of glass. You can grab him by the legs and hoist his butt up without breaking anything. Always keep wipes handy and make sure he's completely clean and dry before putting on a new diaper. If the baby's butt starts to get red use some ointment on it, but don't go overboard with it every diaper change.

Something to decide beforehand is whether to use cloth or disposable diapers. I will admit that disposables are slightly more convenient, but doing a load of laundry every two or three days isn't that big a deal if you've got a washer and dryer at home. The benefits of cloth diapers, on the other hand, are many. In the long run they're cheaper, since on average you'll go through up to 8,000 diapers before potty training. Disposables are also made of plastic and chemicals that go into landfills, so that's a mountain of 8,000 diapers you can avoid adding to your local dump where they'll be around for a few hundred years. It's fewer chemicals on your baby's nether regions and actually help your child potty train faster.

Diapers are pretty fancy nowadays, too, and the best ones are just as easy to put on as disposables. Personally, we went "old school" with the old-fashioned big rectangles of cloth for the first year to save money, then switched to fancier ones when Simon got bigger and decided to squirm through diaper changes.