Saturday, January 21, 2012

Preparing

I am doing my best to take advantage of my down time and relax. But, I know that there is such much that I need to start thinking about and doing.

Research Childcare
Learning about cloth diapers
Cleaning out the room that will be the nursery
Shopping for furniture for the nursery
Diaper bags/carriers/car seats/etc
Educating myself more on birth options
Once my morning sickness tapers off (yeah, the last few days have been a regression) I need to focus on a healthy diet - are there super foods I should eat?
etc.
etc.
etc.

Where do I start? Some of these things I feel like are too early to really get into. Is there a good checklist I can follow to help keep me on track? What am I not thinking of? I fear of getting deep into this pregnancy and have forgot something critical (my dream that the baby was born and I hadn't even looked into childcare, that didn't help).

I guess I feel a little lost. I was a pro with the IF piece. I've not spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if we actually got pregnant. It was too heartbreaking. Now, I'm floundering a bit.

For those of you that have been there, where did you start? I need a place to direct my energy and take on small tasks before I get overwhelmed.

5 comments:

  1. I'd start with the birth before you delve into cloth diapers and childcare. Start slowly and just see what your options are with where you live, what appeals to you and then research what you want once you figure out what that is. Also, cleaning out the nursery might be a good step before some of the others as well.

    And btw, there's no rush for any of this, I'm due in August as well and wouldn't dream of doing ANY of this right now.

    Good luck!

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  2. http://www.choosemyplate.gov/pregnancy-breastfeeding/making-healthy-food-choices.html this is a good website for healthy foods to eat while pregnant. btw I'm due in March and we just got the furniture to go into the baby's room and we've still got a few more things to do so don't get too worked up. Besides most of that anxiety is from the hormones.

    if you want you should make a list of things you know you have to do. As far as child care I'd ask friends and look up facilities online to see what their reviews are. Then I'd check them out in person. You probably want to take hubby with because I'm sure he wants a say in someone taking care of his child too. as far as birth options I talked to my ob/gyn and she said it's too early to choose one and like I said I'm due in march.

    I have researched the options and have checked them out at this point so I have an idea, but I'm still looking into them of course. You don't give your birth plan to the doc till your in labor, so you probably want to be sure at least a month before... and even then it'll probably change when in labor. My husband and I didn't start looking for furniture till January, and we just put everything up recently.

    I haven't even had my baby shower yet and I won't have one till February, and we did our registry around Dec/Jan.. so don't think you won't have time. You will :) Also I was freaking out about registering and making sure i have everything... well places like Baby's R Us and Target have check lists of items you're going to need when baby comes. So that really helped us out a lot.

    If you have any questions feel free to ask me, and Good luck

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  3. I'm putting together a post on cloth diapering in the next week that will hopefully help you, including links to a couple of other great reviews by fellow bloggers. So far my experience with them has been that they are SO easy. I'm extremely happy with the ones we went with (Bum Genius Elemental Organic All-In-Ones).

    Watch Craig's list for nursery items - there are often great deals on there!

    I really loved my Hypnobabies program and would recommend that (it includes tons of education on the birth experience, options, etc). If you don't want to do that, Ina May Gaskin has a couple of great books as well.

    You'll be fine!

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  4. Certainly look into childcare and slowly start cleaning out that spare room. I know a lot of daycares have waiting lists, so it doesn't hurt to get a jump start on that part of things!

    I waited until the second trimester to actually purchase anything, so I used the first tri to do a lot of researching. Try the cloth diapering tab on my blog for some basics, I link to my favorite tutorials from there. Jill did a great job explaining, also, on her Baby Rabies blog, that's where I learned a lot. Jilliansdrawers.com has my favorite tutorial.

    For researching baby items, definitely pick up the latest edition of "Baby Bargains." They rate all of the latest and greatest baby items from car seats to furniture to crib sheets based on safety, cost, and parental recommendations. It's a great purchase! For registering, we waited until we found out the sex, then registered shortly after that.

    For birth options, just do a lot of reading! Research online, get books, etc. If you're interested in a natural birth, one of my favorite books was "Ina May's Guide to Childbirth." You have a while before you have to come up with your birth plan, you generally don't discuss it in detail until around 30 weeks, but if you already know you want a natural birth or something specific, run it by your doctor now to make sure they're on board with your plans so you're not caught off-guard later on. Also, you can take try to find a birth class if you want to use the Bradley method or another specific birth practice.

    And don't worry, you'll get it all done... thankfully babies bake for 40 weeks so we have time to get ready for them!

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  5. Towards the beginning of my pregnancy I checked out a book from the library called "One Year to Organized Life with a Baby." It gave ideas of things to work on each week during pregnancy. Everything it mentioned wasn't applicable to my personal situation, but I thought it was a really good starting point for a lot of key items.

    I second the comment about the "Baby Bargains" book - I thought it had lots of good advice about almost every product you could possibly need.

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