The Mrs. and I have always said that they hand you your child, and it's 'have a nice time'...
If there was/is a manual, we didn't get ours either, 26 years ago.
There's something very humbling,in retrospect, about being a parent.
We often have an unspoken snicker when we see someone with a newborn. The snicker is mostly about the sleep deprivation and frustration of those first 3 months...