How to Ease the Transition into Parenthood

After enumerating many challenges related to having a baby around in yesterday's post, I'm back to try and generate proactive strategies for making the transition a tad bit smoother.

Here are some thoughts:

• Go for a daily walk with a friend: This will help me stay healthy, and it will give me a healthy dose of adult conversation. Luckily, I have a neighbor who is due a couple weeks before me. It's perfect!
  
• Figure out how we're going to feed ourselves: I know my birthing class will address this. My midwife wants me to set up a calendar of friends who will drop off food. The only problem with getting food dropped off is then being forced to interact with visitors (which I may or may not want; it's hard to tell). Maybe I'll ask people to drop off frozen meals right before the baby is due. It would also be helpful to create a six-week menu of easy, easy meals (with corresponding shopping lists). Maybe I could set up a rotating schedule of friends to do our shopping for us...
  
• Post directions about how to help around the house (as well as an ongoing list of things to do): Based on your suggestions last week, I think I'll post directions about how to do basic things around our house (like where the vacuum is and where we store our dishes, etc., for anyone who wants to drop by and help with cleaning!). We can also keep an ongoing list of "Things We Need Help with" on our whiteboard.
  
• Have family come to help: Once Matt gets his paternity leave situation figured out, we'll have a better sense of when family should come to help.
  
• Hire a housekeeping service: We'll definitely have to vacuum every week (thanks to Hoss!), do laundry every other day, and keep up with doing the dishes and emptying the dishwasher, but it would be nice to hire a professional service to come and clean our house every other week. I think I'll add gift certificates to our registry (we recently had a company come by and give us an estimate). We definitely won't be able to afford this without gift certificates, since we'll be down to one income.
  
• Schedule blog posts to run while I'm on "babycation": I'll have to do a lot of planning in advance to ensure that my classroom will run smoothly while I'm gone. Once I do that planning, however, I'll be able to put it completely out of my mind. I'll also have to come up with a plan for my blogs. For 2000 Dollar Wedding, I can try to have guest posters. For this blog, I can write most of my posts in advance to give myself a little break (but I will need to pop in to update you all about how it's going!). I know: I can continue to write five posts a week, but I can schedule one of them to run while I'm on maternity leave. If I do that from now until February, I'll have a solid month done.
  
• Try to get Matt to take paternity leave: Matt is very committed to his job. I'm trying to convince him that staying home for a little while with our newborn baby is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
  
• Stock my breastfeeding station(s) with great books, magazines, music, and audio books
  
• Have lots of conversations with Matt about the challenges we are likely to face
• Prepare as much as possible: The more I learn about things to consider while raising a newborn, the more prepared I feel!
  
• Continue to build our savings for the next five months!
• Find babysitters: Matt and I will need to start going on monthly dates, as soon as our baby is old enough to stay with others.
• Give myself time to recuperate: I talked with someone who just delivered a baby with my midwife, and she said that the recommendation is to "stay in the bed for the first week, on the bed for the second week, and around the bed for the third week." The idea is to give yourself lots of time/space to recuperate after birth.
  

Definitely let me know if you have more ideas!

Share |