Eight Things We Did To Prepare For The Baby’s Arrival
With simply seven days until my actual due date (although we are fairly sure Baby P will make us wait even longer), we have officially begun getting ready for her arrival.
Of course you’ve seen us tackling her nursery, but now when we say getting ready, we truly mean getting-ready-for-my-water-to-break-and-to-in fact-welcome-our-new-daughter-into-the-world. See, fairly much right after we found out I was pregnant we slowly began to wrap our minds around the idea that our family would be growing as my belly continued to expand with every baked potato and chocolate milk craving.
Now you see why I have been humming my tweak on an old Beyoncé classic: “I do not think you are ready for this belly.”
And only quite lately did we fully digest the concept that we in fact made a person. We made a person! There is a girl in my belly who will walk and talk someday, heck she’ll even have a job and likely be desperately embarrassed about her dorky parents who consistently have paint in their hair. It is simply such a giant thought that it literally takes about nine months to sink in- which might simply be why it takes so long to cook one of these things. It is likely nature’s way of making sure you are truly ready for the life changing and momentous birth instead of smacking you in the face with a baby after 30 days of gestation. But anyway, now that we have fully been able to wrap our heads around the notion that we are about to truly be parents (!) there are a few things that we have done in anticipation of our little miracle’s arrival:
1. Our practical purchase: My obsession with my water breaking in bed or on the couch got the best of me and I convinced John to let me get a waterproof mattress cover to protect our beloved organic mattress and another little waterproof blanket that I can place on the sofa or the seat of the car in these last few days… you know, simply in case. And the good news is that they are not nearly as crunchy and diaper-like as I expected (we picked them both up for $23 total at Bed Bath & Beyond thanks to two of those 20% off coupons). Perhaps it goes back to how fiercely I enjoy our house, but it simply seemed worth the brought in security to at least attempt to keep the sofa and the bed (along with the passenger seat of our new car) protected from the wrath of holy-cow-it is-truly-time. Especially since my mom’s water broke in bed with every single child. Sidenote: my absolute dream is for my water to break at Target or Home Depot because I simply think that would be hysterical since we practically live there. I know, I am weird.
2. Our Hands-on project: This second idea was John’s brain child (I am telling you, he’s the sweet sentimental one and I am the neurotic fool who worries about my water breaking). He in fact brought it up as my birthday gift back in March by suggesting that we get a fabric covered album and create our own little “baby book” with lively patterned paper and printed prompts that you see in typical baby books like “The First Week Was….” and “First Word…” We enjoy the idea of adding in keepsakes like her hospital bracelet and her little going-home hat along with a ton of photos and even things like her inked footprints (we plan to bring a few pieces of cardstock to the hospital since the nurses will gladly make footprints that we can stick into our little memory book of sorts). So we headed over to Michael’s (with a 40% off coupon in hand) and snagged a sweet 8.5 x 8.5″ album covered in especially lively Amy Butler fabric for simply $9 after my handy coupon.
We also picked up a pad full of 8 x 8″ patterned paper to use as a backdrop in our keepsake album (to the tune of $6). So our whole Hands-on baby book project ran us $15 total. And after adding all the decorative paper and leaving room for notes about momentous occasions (along with photos and other memorabilia) we were left with a fairly sweet way to document many of Baby P’s firsts:
And since we made it ourselves we had lively adding in quirky things, like this page of “future predictions” where John and I guessed everything from her hair and eye color to her first word, her go-to subject in school, and even her future profession. It should be especially lively for the beanette to look back at all of our goofy (and most likely fully wrong) guesses someday.
Plus the fact that it looks so cute in the nursery is the icing on the cake…
3. Our Burger-meets-baby prep: We have in fact read quite a bit about how to ensure that your pooch and your baby get along, because there is nothing we want more than for our first fur baby to happily coexist with our first human baby. And time and time again we have heard that bringing home a gift for the dog along with the baby can assist your pup associate the baby with good things and feel appreciated and excited upon her arrival. Of course we will also be doing the bring-home-a-baby-blanket-for-him-to-sniff-beforehand trick, but ever since John mentioned that his mom got him a He-Man toy when his little sister came home from the hospital I have been convinced that something especially lively for Burger (like a pup-cake from Three Dog Bakery along with a new chew toy) will make him giddy about our growing fam. So we lately picked up some goodies for him… and cannot wait to see his tail wag when he gets ’em.
4. Our journal backup: This forth prep step was in fact right up there on the practical side with my waterproof mattress cover. We have been working overtime for over a month to amass sufficient extra journal posts to “tide us over” for the first few hairy weeks after Baby P comes home. That means we took on a few secret projects and wrote up a lot of extra Reader Redesigns, Look & Learns, Email Answers, and Burning Questions along with some lively new walkthroughs to keep the journal from stagnating while we get our “sea legs” with a newborn, so to speak. Oh and we have a killer House Crashing post to share as well. In short, you can rest assured that you will still get the same YHL experience even when our day to day has gone from projects and journal posts to diapers, feedings, and no sleep.
5. And speaking of diapers: We got a bunch of BumGenius One-Size-Fits-All Organic Snap Diapers from a local shop called MonkeyGrass that we enjoy to support (here is a link to their online shop and for any Richmond people you can visit their store inside It is Hip To Be Round in Carytown). These cloth diapers alone (which were in fact selected as “more convenient cloth diapers” by Cookie magazine) will save us a substantial amount of money over the course of Baby P’s childhood, and we even ordered them in colors that will work for a possible boy down the road, since we certainly want to use the same cloth dipes for multiple children.
Plus our straightforward to use Energy Star front loading washer and dryer will keep our water and electricity use to a minimum (everyone says you do laundry like crazy with a baby so we figure it will not be much of a difference to add some diapers to the mix). And since the average baby uses 8,000 to 10,000 diapers between two and three years, we will get to keep that many disposables from landing in a landfill. And all the moolah that we will save from buying disposable diapers all the time (which is commonly estimated to be between 2-3K per child) means more money that we can put towards future Hands-on projects (perhaps even with the assist of our little girl when she gets big sufficient to hold a paint brush…). Is it weird to be especially excited about diapers? Likely.
6. My clothes cleaning ritual: I in fact read that washing all new non-organic baby clothing and bedding (as well as the removable covers of car seats and swings) with a cup and a half of vinegar can rid them of most of the chemicals and dyes that are not present in organic clothes. So I have been busy washing all of our sweet baby socks, onesies, and fairly much everything else I can get my hands on… simply so I am über ready with the purest baby clothes possible. And the funny thing is that they do not smell like vinegar when they come out of the wash (they are fully odorless, it is kind of remarkable). Of course I did have one fateful white-blankets-and-onesies-are-now-pink incident (do not ask- I somehow tossed compact hot pink leggings in with the whites) but the soft pink cast on everything in fact charms me to no end. And I guess I should get used to letting things roll off my back, so it was a good lesson in the whole nothing-will-be-ideal-and-that is-ok concept.
7. My pillowcase purchase: I in fact got a swift pointer from a reader that I simply had to follow since it seemed like such a plain way to add some cheerful color to the fairly-stark-and-sterile hospital birthing experience. Joni wrote to us and said:
“I have a little piece of advice that may seem stupid but you will thank me later. Make sure you have a fairly pillowcase for the delivery of the baby. It will be in a million photos. Mine was so fairly that when I look at the pictures 13 years later, all I see is my vivid baby and that fabulous fabric. It’ll distract people from looking at your puffy I-simply-gave-birth face”
Well, for those who do not know me, I can puff up like the best of them. Seriously I broke my nose in college and my cheekbones did not come back for nearly a year. I am a swelly girl (John even calls me Swell from time to time). So the idea of a fairly pillowcase to take the focus off my giant face sounds like a good one. Plus I simply enjoy pillowcase shopping. And the best part is that I hunted down this beauty (on sale of course) and John’s family in fact got two of them for me as a birthday gift. So springy and sweet right? Simply like my May baby on the way. And not only do I plan to use them at the hospital on Baby P’s b-day, but they’ll make such fairly and lively guest bedroom pillows from then on.
8. Our space saving multipurpose solution: We heard from various friends and family members that a white noise machine and a light machine were two secret weapons to assist the beanette drift off to sleep (especially in those first few weeks). And although we believed that they both would truly make a difference, with limited outlets and surface area in the nursery, we wondered if we could get some sort of a two-for-one solution that would work double duty. Enter our new iPod I-Home dock stage right (we have seen it on amazon.com for a good price):
It was another baby item that came highly recommended by friends and fam (since we can upload children’s music and learning songs for Baby P as she grows). And John, in a stroke of daddy-to-be genius, realized that we could download a CD of white noise from iTunes – to the tune of $6 no less – and effectively turn our iPod dock into a white noise machine with the press of a button (we can even leave it on “repeat” for lengthier renditions of “crashing waves” or “static”). Gotta enjoy a $6 swift fix that allows us to cut back on an whole nursery gadget while saving money. But wait it gets better, the particular I-Home dock that we selected in fact has a color changing feature, so it can cycle through a bunch of room-illuminating hues (swiftly, slowly, or not at all if you turn off the ambient light setting). So not only does it serve as a sound machine and a music player, it is a light machine too! Jackpot.
Oh and while we were prepping left and right we came across this quote, which touched both of us so much that we simply had to share it:
“A baby will make enjoy stronger, days shorter, nights longer, bankroll smaller, home happier, clothes shabbier, the past forgotten, and the future worth living for.” -Anonymous
Fairly sweet, huh? We cannot wait to meet our little one. And we’d enjoy to hear what any of you folks have done while prepping for a new arrival (whether it is a baby, a four-legged friend, a roommate, or even a few weekend guests). How did you get your house ready for the new company?
