I’m three months pregnant with my first baby, super pumped about that, and I’m hoping that at some point some medical professional will give me a leaflet or something* on how to look after the baby when it turns up next year. In the mean time, how about some experiences and opinions?
I’d like to travel to Scotland while about seven months pregnant. I live in London. It’d be about a five hour train journey and I’d be staying with family whilst there. Possible? Advisable?
Baby is due 24th May. I’ve been invited to a wedding on the 21st May. Wedding is about two/three hours drive away. Possible? Advisable?
Another wedding in the middle of France for the end of June, baby would be about a month old. Would require several nights stay away from home and a long drive of at least a day. Possible? Advisable?
I’m supposed to organise a hen (bachelorette) party for my best friend in the middle of July. Baby then about 6/7 weeks old. Hen party is in Bristol, about three hours on train. Could go for the day, or would go for one night the day before and stay out for the day. Possible? Advisable?
On top of that, any completely random tips are appreciated.
*Being slightly facetious. We’ll get some free classes on childbirth, breastfeeding and parenting. Luckily. Not many of my friends have kids, and my mother’s advice is 30+ years out of date.
Not a parent, but a friend to people with newborns.
From what I’ve seen, I’d avoid any sort of travel until the baby is at least 3 months old - so no wedding in France, no hen party, etc. If you’re breast-feeding, it’ll be incredibly inconvenient for that reason alone, but even if you’re not, you won’t want to leave your baby behind and it will be difficult to do the various activities with the baby there. (Not to mention that the baby won’t have all its shots yet, so it will be at risk if you take it out in public too much.) You’ll also still be hella exhausted, between the difficulty of labo(u)r and the baby making you get up several times in the night.
Firstly…yay for baby! I had twins born on May 24th, so it’s a lucky day
Travel at seven months by train shouldn’t be a problem. In fact 5 whole hours with your feet up, snacks and a good book…might be the last time you have 5 minutes to yourself!
Which is a nice way of saying ‘the other ladies who just want to get drunk and oogle the naked butler will get tired of playing pass-the-baby very quickly.’
I don’t think the wedding three days before your due date isn’t feasible from a travel standpoint, but rather from a ‘you will be so uncomfortable after 39.5 weeks of pregnancy and begging for the child to just show up already that you won’t WANT to go’ standpoint. The last few weeks are not comfortable or pleasant ones.
For the other two outings, you don’t say if your spouse/partner will stay home with the baby or if you will attempt to take the baby with you. If the latter- stay home. If the former, it will depend (as Maggie said) on whether you’re breastfeeding, whether you feel physically recovered (less likely if you have to have a c-section), whether you’re ok with traveling postpartum by yourself and your spouse/partner is ok with it as well.
The advice on flying is generally not to after 34 weeks. It’s probably a good guideline for train travel, too, as it will be similarly hard to get off a train and to a hospital. Car trips are probably safer even later, but you would want to be prepared for the possibility of ending up giving birth at an unexpected hospital.
I flew at 7 months, and it was fine, though at that stage everything is going to be somewhat uncomfortable. But all of this, of course, depends on how the pregnancy is going. Don’t make any expensive reservations without your doctors go ahead, and consider trip insurance. Things can change quickly.
Only 5% of people give birth on their actual due date. For the week or two leading up to it, you will be a ticking time bomb (or an overfilled balloon) and will want to stick to easy driving distance to the hospital.
Babies aren’t super portable for the first several months, as they haven’t had their key vaccinations yet and their immune systems are pretty delicate. By about six months, you can start lugging them around.
If you have a reliable sitter (or family member) you may try to plan a few evenings or even overnights while the baby is young. It’s not always easy (I spent a lot of time furtively pumping in bathrooms at parties), but it will at least give you a break. Those first months are VERY hard, and extremely isolating and exhausting.
Your social life will change a lot. It felt almost catastrophic for me at first, but you adapt. It sounds like you have a pretty active social life, so prepare for a pretty rough transition period. It’s normal, and it gets better.
Hilariously, I don’t actually have too much of an active social life. But for some reason everyone has decided to plan fun stuff for when our baby is due! (Or, I decided to get pregnant to coincide with all the fun stuff…depending which way you look at it!).
For all the activities mentioned, my husband is happy to do as instructed, i.e. come to Bristol with the baby and ring me when s/he needs a feed, even if hourly. This is the event I’m most concerned about; the others I can easily jettison from my 2016 itinerary. This is the hen party for my best friend. I have two best friends, and they organised a hag party (joint hen and stag for me and my husband) earlier this year. The other best friend is somewhat socially anxious and I don’t want to drop her in it being the lead for the event. It won’t be a raucous one, and we had planned a series of sedate events throughout the day aimed at her religious non-drinking relatives with a party later for her more rowdy future in-laws (and me before I got knocked up).
In fact, this friend jokingly decreed No Hump November so that no one would be dropping a baby at her wedding next August. Then me, and both her sisters-in-law became pregnant and her wedding is going to be a huge baby-fest.
ETA weirdly, low slung denim has actually become useful, matched with very long t shirts and jumpers
Assuming it’s a normal pregnancy, sure. No problem.
Not a good idea. What if the baby decides to arrive three days early, which plenty of them do? It probably won’t, but just in case, you don’t want to be several hours’ drive from the hospital.
I don’t see why not. At that age, they mostly don’t care where they are, as long as snuggles and food are readily available. You might well be too tired and frazzled to enjoy yourselves, though.
If you’re breastfeeding, oh hell no. ‘My husband will ring me when she needs a feed!’ isn’t gonna work. When a newborn needs to eat, it needs to eat NOW NOW NOW, and if it takes you half an hour to get back from whatever hen activity to wherever your husband is, the baby will be in a state of pure hysteria. If you want to do the hen party, you need to be either formula feeding, combined feeding, or pumping and sure that the baby’s OK with eating from a bottle.
Also, you may be surprised by how viscerally strong the mother-baby pull is at that stage. Before my kids were born, I would have considered a day trip at six weeks totally doable - but when they were actually six weeks old, there’s no way in hell I could have left them for a full day.
For travel prior to the baby’s birth (~7 months), as long as you’re not flying and going somewhere with a good hospital service nearby, I think you’re sweet. I went to a wedding and danced the night in heels at 7 months pregnant - it’s actually a good time, not completely stuffed (tired) or stuffed (full up to bursting).
Travel after, particularly at a month - what you don’t realise, and can’t comprehend now despite being told is how frigging exhausted you’re likely to be. Interrupted sleep can take a tremendous toll,at a time when you’ve got all the hormones still flowing, still getting the hang of breastfeeding and baby sleep schedules which seem to change daily. Plus you’re possibly still leaking from numerous orifices. While it’s possible at a month, you just might not feel like it. Or not - you might be feeling awesome. Just don’t plan on it, and go if you feel up to it.
After 3 months things settle down into a bit more of a routine - I took a 3 month old to NZ (from Australia) for 2 weeks, and my second at 5 month old with her 2 year old sister to NZ by myself -I’d be optimistic about that.
Don’t take on trying to organise anything though - it’s a full time job you’re about to have, and the first 12 weeks are tough - don’t feel obligated to try to meet someone elses timeline. Everything takes forever. I had inlaws visit for 6 weeks when my first as 3 months old and I was cooking 3 course meals every night (Italians, what are you going to do!) - it was ridiculous.
For the hens: attend (see if they might be open to having it in a hotel where hubby can be upstairs with the baby and you go up to feed), send your love, volunteer to pick up the pieces when she has her first kid, but don’t try to organise anything. Again, you might be fine, but you don’t want to have to pretend if you’re not.
In the US is would not be legal to drive in the car pool lane with your in womb child as your second passenger, but OK once he or she pops out, because ya’ know that reduced traffic since you and your infant decide to car pool together instead of taking separate SUV’s.
It’s so totally dependent on you and your baby that advice at this point is meaningless (although I do agree that you may want to give up the organization of the hen party, or at least get a co-organizer.)
I find newborns to be perfectly portable. It was when they were toddlers that I felt like I was trapped in my house. That was just me, and my kids. My boy used to sleep in his carrier under the table at the local diner while I practiced lines with my theater group. The second was a preemie, so she wasn’t going anywhere for 3.5 months. But a month after her due date, when she was developmentally “a month old,” we drove from Chicago to New York (11 hours) to Kentucky (10 hours) to Indiana (3 hours) and camped in a tent for a total of a month. I breastfed and pumped, and the most challenging part was finding electric for my pump. But my kids were both really easy babies. There’s no way of knowing if yours will be as content to sit like a potted plant for hours on end. And I’m really laid back and don’t much care if they make a squeak before I can pick them up again, and have no qualms about breastfeeding in public. There’s no way of knowing how you’ll feel about those kinds of things. You may have some ideas now, but your body and your hormones will change a lot, in unpredictable ways.
This is the only one that I think you’d probably be best off sending regrets for. Just in the small chance that something happens and you deliver there and the baby needs to stay in the hospital for a while, you really don’t want it to be two/three hours from your home. There were a few families in that situation in our NICU, and it was really hard on them. I became the designated baby cuddler for a couple of them, but it really tore up those moms and dads to have to leave their babies behind for a week or more at a time while they went back home to deal with their lives.
The others…see how you feel. You have an excellent excuse if you decide you’re not up to it. Just let everyone know that you’re hopeful but not certain of attending, and give them as much advance notice as possible if you have to/decide to cancel.
I found very young babies to be quite portable. You just need to be able to step away and feed it. And lots of women really do enjoy playing “pass the baby”. I wouldn’t plan to organize anything, because you will be sleep deprived and fried. And the wedding right by your due date sound dicey, because you want to new able to get to the hospital if you go into labor. But the rest sounds feasible to me.
No, but the details have. Not supposed to use old heirloom cribs, not supposed to put them to sleep on their bellies, no rice cereal in the baby bottles, exclusive breastfeeding until 6 months, no baby bumpers or blankets or pillows, swaddling with the legs bent instead of straight to prevent hip dysplasia, tummy time to prevent flat heads, no honey…there’s so much safety stuff that’s been introduced in the last 30 years, as we’ve learned more about the myriad ways in which we can accidentally harm our babies. A lot of my mother’s advice was pretty out of date 10 years ago. Did you and I survive despite all the horribly unsafe things our parents did because they just didn’t know better? Of course. But lots of others didn’t. Infant morbidity and mortality (once you factor out prematurity related issues) have gone down as we’ve figured out how to do this stuff better. SIDS alone dropped off dramatically with the simple “Back to Sleep” campaign, just since 1994.
This is all absolutely brilliant and has definitely given me food for thought. One thing in particular was taking the baby out with potentially a lot of exposure before vaccinations, that is a really good nugget.
I think I’ll get the shy friend to do all the organising for the hen party, and then turn up. As it was always probable that men would be invited to it - the bride has as many male friends as female, no reason to exclude them - I’ll see if my husband can come too, and I will focus on spending a half a day out with husband and baby and the rest of the hen party, doing the talking on behalf of the shy organiser. By the evening those that are left will be drunk and they will no longer need a social introducer, and I can slip away for sleep. (Ha! With a baby! Unlikely).
I am totally down with public breastfeeding. Intrusive commenters can take the risk, but I have already planned my fruity retorts. Seeing as I’m in Britain, I’m more likely to just get tutting and eye-rolls anyway, in which case a simple ‘try me, bitch’ should suffice.
The end of May wedding has been deleted from my 2016 calendar of fun.
The end of June wedding would be awesome but I’m going to delete that as well.
I’m incredibly smug that I’ll be on maternity leave during the Olympics. This little baby is going to be watching a lot of sports with me in his/her first few months.
With regards the out of date advice, I do disregard a lot of statements that start “In my day…” As they often conclude with something definitely inadvisable and occasionally now illegal. My mother: “In my day you didn’t even go to the doctor when you were pregnant until you’d missed three periods and even then they’d tell you to just go away and be healthy” - right. I’m grateful for increased healthcare options.
