It does indeed come back, I remembered random things I'd totally forgotten about that newborn phase - sadly in my case mostly not good, more along the lines of 'oh f*ck, I've remembered how frigging hellish this is' 
. But time passes faster 2nd time round which was definitely good, first time 6 months lasted forever and each day was a month, second time it flew and we were over that newborn bit thank goodness. Definitely more chilled though - been there, done that, although it's still a shock discovering that what worked with #1 doesn't work with #2 so you're back to the drawing board sometimes, but in terms of physically handling them, pah, it's so easy compared to those nervous changes of first born early days 