Preparing for her arrival
First off, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! 2020 was a crazy year to welcome our daughter to this world!
To say I was overwhelmed by the thought of having to prepare for and take care of a second child would be an understatement. Overwhelmed, my logical, analytical brain took over, and like with most things, I pretended to assert some control over an uncertain situation by planning.
In today’s post, I write about priorities and timing.
Prioritizing
We already have a toddler, we were (and still are) in the middle of a pandemic, and were (yep… still doing this, too) working from home. Like many other people, we didn’t have much help at home. We knew we would have limited time and headspace to get fully ready for baby number two, whatever “fully ready” means.
My wife and I sat down about two months before baby girl’s due date to list anything that we would possibly need to do or buy in order for us to feel “prepared.” We came up with a list that fit into seven broad categories:
Find old stuff, like old clothes, swaddles, and the car seat;
Purchase new stuff, like diapers, formula, and bottles;
Setup things like the old car seat and bassinet;
Revisit health care and benefits, like deciding whose plan she would go on and understanding leave policies;
Pre-planning, like meal prepping for our toddler and getting our go-bag ready;
Day of planning, like arranging childcare for our toddler; and
Post-planning, like pre-scheduling baby girl’s first doctor's visit, thinking about how we felt about visitors, and arranging food for us and our toddler.
Timing
We arbitrarily started the planning process two months before the due date. For some reason, I held the belief that most deliveries happen plus-or-minus two weeks of the due date. For planning purposes, we were only concerned with early arrivals, so my based-on-nothing-theory was that two weeks was some measure of standard deviation, so two standard deviations would give me something like a 1-in-20 chance of being totally unprepared. Translation: we wanted all the really important things ready by four weeks of the due date.
For what it’s worth, that wasn’t a horrible based-on-nothing estimation, according to this New York Times article.
The action plan
By week 32, we had our to-do list. We spent the next couple of weeks categorizing each item as a primary, secondary, tertiary, or nice-to-have goal. We wanted to have all of our primary goals completed by week 36, secondary by week 37, tertiary by week 38, and the rest whenever we got to them.
This plan of action reduced some of our stress, and practically speaking, made preparing easier and manageable. Perhaps the biggest win was that planning gave us the sense that we were ready. I think we can safely say that we were at least ready to bring her home, feed her, keep her clean, and give her a place to sleep.
We’re five months in at this point, still social distancing, still working from home, with two kids. We’re still figuring a lot of things out.
Feel free to check out and make a copy of the spreadsheet we used to keep track of our progress against our plan.
Disclaimers
I’m just Tim the Dad. I’m not a medical professional, or any sort of special planner. Please consult all necessary professionals before taking any of my advice.
