Shuffle Saturday: Company with New Baby!

Now that I am 38 weeks pregnant, we are making the final preparations for new baby. Things have been crazy around our house as a result. My husband has been trying to squeeze in last minute things at work in order to take two weeks off. Then both my husband and Judah got sick with that fever/cold that has been going around.

I have been fortunate to have extra help lately by so many people. Our neighbors have offered to babysit Judah a few times so that we can run extra errands and have a date night. We have some friends that offered to bring a meal early. And the grandmas have helped watch Judah. My mother-in-law took him a few weekends ago to the farm for us to have some catch up time at home and my own mom came down this last week to babysit and do laundry.

So we are juggling the last few items on our list. Our shuffle Saturday has been filled with rest and running a few last minute errands. We are also getting the house ready for our family that is coming to help watch Judah while we are at the hospital.

All this has me thinking about new baby and all the company that seems to come with it. From my previous experience, we had the grandmas come to help and a lot of people brought meals. On top of that we had a number of people want to see baby. This was nice but also very exhausting.

Among new moms there seems to be this debate: do you have help come or do you enjoy your time alone with new baby? Of course my perspective has changed since I do need the help this time to take care of Judah, especially after a c-section. You also have to ask yourself what kind of help do you need and for how long.

I will say this. The best advice from last time is limit the number of visitors in the hospital. In part due to my complications I was restricted for having visitors for the first 24 hours after my surgery. The sign posted on the door continued to stay up the rest of the week only allowing doctors and nurses to enter. Then the last day before we went home, we took it down, and we had a day full of visitors which totally exhausted me from recovering.

I would like to hear your thoughts new moms based on your own experiences of what worked, what did not, and how would you do it differently.