How to Prepare for Postpartum

Hey mama, you're listening to the Postpartum Prep Podcast. My name is Ceridwen and I'm here to help you prepare for the part of having a baby that no one really tells you about, what to expect after birth. This is the show where we dive into all the questions you didn't even know you needed to ask about life with your new baby.

So let's get you ready because birth is just the beginning. Hello and welcome back to the Postpartum Prep Podcast. In this episode, we're going to be talking about how to know if you're actually prepared for postpartum.

In my last episode, I shared about how I thought I was prepared for life after birth and then when my baby was born, postpartum came around and there was so much I was surprised by that I just did not know to expect and that I just did not prepare for because I, you know, I thought I was prepared. So in this episode, we're going to be talking about how to know if you are actually prepared for postpartum. You know, things like buying the car seat, washing the baby clothes, taking a birth class, reading about breastfeeding are all helpful but are they enough to actually get you prepared? So let me just walk you through a few questions that you might want to ask yourself and just reflect and see if this brings up anything for you that maybe you do want to dive into a little deeper before your baby arrives.

The first question is, what do you think that your life is going to look like with a newborn? And what is that idea based on? For me, it was really just based on what I'd seen in movies or on TV shows which really was not anything like what it was actually like to be living with a newborn day to day. I'm yet to find, I'm sure there are some movies which, or TV shows which have really good examples of what it actually looks like to be living with a new baby but I'm yet to come across one so if you do know any, feel free to send them to me on Instagram or send me a DM on Instagram at motherbabywellbeing because I would really love to watch something like that. Maybe we should even do a whole episode about comparing TV shows to the reality of postpartum, that would be really fun.

But just coming back to this idea of do you have a realistic idea of what newborn life is actually like, consider where you're getting your ideas from. One thing that I would warn against is anything that is like a set or an example schedule that you see online. I mean, no baby runs on a schedule, right? That's just not how babies work.

I mean, some babies have a personality that actually does make them quite predictable but my warning is more about expecting that if you have a schedule in mind that your baby will follow it because that's where I find a lot of confusion and anxiety actually comes up for new parents is because their baby is not following a schedule that they had in mind for their baby and now they're wondering if something's wrong with their baby or if they're doing something wrong when actually we can't just expect a baby to follow your schedule that you have in mind. But one thing about schedules that you'll see is they do show kind of this pattern of or, you know, if it's a good schedule, it would show a pattern of feeding every two to three hours, waking up every two to three hours, or maybe even waking even more frequently with a newborn because if you're feeding every two to three hours, they may be waking slightly before two to three hours, which means you'll be waking slightly before two to three hours and remember that this is the pattern that your baby will follow 24-7 day and night. The next question that I have for you to consider about where you're at in terms of how prepared you really are for postpartum is do you know what your plan is for feeding? And I know that this is at the same time like a huge question and also like a really simple question because when I was pregnant, I would have answered this.

I would have just said, well, I'm planning on breastfeeding and I kind of looked at that and that was the extent of my plans for feeding my baby, but I didn't know things like how often was I supposed to be feeding my baby? How do I latch my baby? What happens if my baby is not latching? What happens if I need help after birth? Who do I go to if I need help? And I don't just mean like the lactation consultant that I can see at my OB's office next week. I mean, like, who do I see if I need help ASAP? Because I have to keep feeding my baby every two to three hours. I mean, think about just the two to three hours in between one feed to the next.

If I've just fed my baby and it went horribly and I know I have another feed coming up in two to three hours, is there anyone I can talk to in the meantime? And like I said, support is one of the biggest parts of that. When I did have my baby that was taking up to an hour to latch, thankfully I actually managed to get a next day appointment. It just kind of worked out that where I was planning on going for breastfeeding support, they only had someone there on one day a week and thankfully that one day a week was the day that I was actually going to be there.

But I always think, what if I had gone the next day and the breastfeeding consultant wasn't there and I hadn't been able to get support as soon as I did? My breastfeeding journey could have gone completely differently and thank God that it went the way that it did and that I did get the support at the right time. But that was a real blind spot that I had before I gave birth, is planning for breastfeeding support because I just did not realise how essential it could be, especially how essential it could be to get that support in as early as possible. So that's something for you to think about.

Let's move on to our next question which is, have you thought about how you're going to get enough sleep? If you're going to be waking every two to three hours to feed, what is that going to look like for you and how will your family function if your baby is waking frequently? This could look like exploring what your plans are for sleep, whether that is dividing up responsibilities in the night time, so one parent takes one shift and another parent takes another shift. It could look like looking into bed sharing safety so that you can maximise the amount of sleep that you are getting. It could look like planning for having extra support in the day so you can catch up on sleep during the daytime.

It could look like having someone come over really early in the morning or having your partner take over early in the morning so that you can go back to sleep. There's so many different ways that you can navigate sleep but the important part is that you do have a plan in place. I just thought, yeah it's just going to be really hard but I'm just going to have to get through it.

The reality was, it's really hard to just get through it. Sleep is an essential need. Not to mention the importance of sleep for supporting your postpartum recovery.

Obviously, what I'm saying is, you are probably going to not be getting enough sleep and what I'm trying to say is, you need to plan so that you can get as much as possible because that's where I find things could so often be a little easier if we just planned, okay, how are we going to get you as much sleep as possible and not just toss sleep to the wayside completely but really plan so that almost our entire life, especially in that newborn stage, is going to revolve around how do we get you as much sleep as possible and exploring different strategies for that. Which brings me to, have you thought about your postpartum recovery? Have you thought about, like I said, how you're going to get enough rest? I shared an Instagram post recently about the 5-5-5 rule which I maybe had even mentioned this in the previous episode now that I think about it but this was something that we discussed with Carla from Carla Sage Birthwork in her episode which I'll be sure to link in the episode description. We were talking about the 5-5-5 rule or Carla actually uses the 7-7-7 rule which is three stages of postpartum recovery.

The first stage is the first five or seven days you're spending in bed. The next five or seven days you're spending on the bed or around the bed but still really sticking quite close to the bed and the last five or seven days is where you are spending time around the house but you're still sticking close to home, you're still resting. So this whole process takes two to three weeks of really just taking it super slow, super restful.

Obviously, depending on your circumstances, I know if you're a second time mom you're probably like laughing about how are you going to manage that when you have another child to take care of or if you have to go back to work at, I mean I know that some people don't even get any maternity leave so of course you're going to be back at work straight away and I think, to be honest, I need to do a whole separate episode on these situations if you have another child or if you're returning to work really soon after birth. We need to do entirely separate episodes diving deep into planning for postpartum recovery in these situations but for now all of this is just to say rest is an essential part of supporting your postpartum recovery and if you are going to plan to support your rest and if you have the opportunity to practice the 5-5-5 or the 7-7-7, what kind of support would you need to actually make that happen? For me, that would have been talking with my husband about, you know, if I'm going to be in bed all day, I'm going to need you to take over some of the duties that I usually do like I usually was the one cooking for our family and, you know, after birth I did just kind of resume that normal routine and I felt terrible and resentful of my partner but I didn't know how to communicate my need to him for rest and so we didn't get the opportunity to really plan around that. Cooking is an example of kind of support you might need, cleaning is another task that people often benefit from support with after birth, childcare if you have older kids, someone to help walk the dog, that can be a helpful thing to have in place, anyone that can just come over and like hang out with you for the day, just to be there if you need to have someone to hold baby while you use the bathroom or take a shower or while you eat a meal, especially if you're more of an extrovert and you really benefit from seeing other people, you might really want someone there just so that you're not alone at home all day, especially if your partner's already returned to work and you're just home with baby, it can be really nice just to have someone there to talk to.

My next question is actually going back to chatting things through with your partner which is, have you and your partner talked through what postpartum will actually be like? Like who's going to be doing what? How are you going to split responsibilities during postpartum? Because it's probably going to look quite different from how you split responsibilities before birth because you as the mom, now you're taking on way more responsibilities like just your postpartum recovery in general, like that in itself is a huge responsibility because if you're not physically doing well, it's going to be really hard for you to take care of your baby. So your postpartum recovery is going to be your number one priority. And if that's your biggest responsibility, as well as obviously if you're breastfeeding, that's another huge responsibility, time consuming and mentally and emotionally, physically, it all takes energy from you.

So if you're redirecting all of your energy into your postpartum recovery and maybe breastfeeding your baby, you've now got this huge stack of extra responsibilities. There's probably going to be some things you need to hand over to your partner to create a little bit more balance so that you're not completely overwhelmed or if your partner is not willing or able to take on some more responsibilities, that would be a good thing for you to know before birth and then you can start planning for what external support you might need beyond just you and your partner. Another thing to talk about with your partner is any plans that you might have for how you're going to handle sleep.

If you're planning on handing baby over to your partner in the morning so that you can go back to sleep or if you're hoping that you might do more of like a shift sleeping routine, you need to both be in the loop about what that's going to look like. Something I would advise against is becoming like the coordinator. That's not a responsibility that you need to be taking on.

If you're going to be discussing these new, this transition of roles and responsibilities with your partner, keeping it as a discussion rather than just giving them a list of tasks to take on, that you want them to take on, is probably the way to go because otherwise you take on this whole extra role now of becoming the coordinator or the organizer or the director and that's the opposite of what we're trying to do right now. We're trying to get these responsibilities off your plate completely rather than you having to be the one that's still kind of orchestrating things behind the scenes. So going into this conversation with like an open mind, an open discussion around especially starting it off, just finding out what are they expecting, what is your partner expecting postpartum to look like and what are they expecting their roles to look like in postpartum can be a great place to start by listening first and then obviously asking for what you want but again asking for what you want is totally different from taking on the role of the director or the organizer of how things are going to go.

And that's easier said than done for a lot of moms who, especially if you're like me, first child or eldest daughter, you are used to kind of controlling how everything goes. It can be really hard to hand things over to someone else, especially if you've been doing these things for a while because you know how you like them done and if someone else is going to take something on and you're not going to be directing them or micromanaging, they might not do it the way that you usually would do it and maybe that's just something in itself that you might need to explore your feelings around. How are you going to feel if someone's taking on, if someone else is taking on a responsibility that you usually would have, how are you going to feel about that? Especially if they do it in a way that's different from how you would have done it.

The last question that I have is do you know where you'll turn when you have questions? Because you're almost certainly going to have them and like I've said several times already throughout this episode, there's going to be times when you need support and do you know who you'll go to if you have questions? I guess this is a good place to, a little bridge into talking about my upcoming workshop where you can come and ask me questions. If we went through these questions right now and you're suddenly realizing actually I do still have a lot that I need to think about when it comes to preparing for postpartum, that's exactly what this workshop is for. It's a one hour workshop so come with all your questions, come with all your plans or lack of plans and we will work through it together so that by the end of the workshop you have so much more clarity about anything like practically that you need to do or just in your understanding and awareness of what to expect after birth and what strategies you might want to have in place to support you after birth.

You can come with questions about feeding or sleep, you can come with questions about newborn care, postpartum recovery, your relationship, planning for how you're going to handle boundaries with visitors or anything else that you're wondering about and we can talk through it together. The one thing that I, you know I love doing this podcast but the one thing that I do find challenging is I don't know who I'm talking to, I don't know what your values are, what your beliefs are, what your intentions are for the way you want to raise your baby and I don't want to be just another voice on the internet giving you more information and telling you what you should do when I don't even know you and that's exactly what this workshop is for so I can actually give you personalized information and suggestions and tips and strategies and just to help you think through your plans for your unique situation. That's also why the workshop, before you attend the workshop you'll complete a questionnaire which allows me to get kind of an overview of your situation and allows me to pick up on anything that, oh actually in this area I think you might want to take a look at this or oh I noticed that you have some flags here that could be signs of potential breastfeeding concerns that you might want to just be aware of or you might want to create some plans around how you might manage things.

So if that sounds like something that you might be interested in, whether you just want to ask a few questions or you want me to totally audit your plans for postpartum, come along to the workshop. All the information that you need will be in the episode description. Alright, that's all from me for today, thank you so much for listening, like I said if you have any other questions, come and ask them at the workshop and hopefully I'll see you there and if not I'll see you in the next episode, alright bye for now!