We get it. There’s a lot to do to get ready for a new baby. And it’s not trivial.
My friend who works at a notoriously cutthroat private equity fund cried when she sat down to make her baby registry. So many decisions. About things she knew nothing about. What makes a good crib mattress? Do I need a “wipe warmer”? What is a nipple shield?!
It’s overwhelming because the decisions feel weightier than just buying gear. They feel like a referendum on your parenting ability. It’s the first brush with mom guilt: am I doing a good enough job? Am I buying enough things? The right things? Am I going to mess you up because I didn’t do enough research?
And if you’re a career-driven woman, you might also be thinking: This is so time consuming and you aren’t even here yet!! I have 3000 prenatal appointments. Am I going to completely ruin my professional life?
There’s more to say about baby gear, but for now, when it comes to stuff, just know this: if you have a child without health complications, all you really need is a way to feed your baby and some diapers. Everything else is potentially helpful, but not essential. It’s icing on the cake.
The essential preparation isn’t stuff.
The nursery, the gear, your hospital bag, perhaps a night nurse — these are obvious and tangible “nesting” steps you’re likely planning for. But there are other needs and changes less visible, also possible to anticipate and prepare for — thereby reducing your post-partum stress.
You’re focused on mitigating risks to ensure a healthy baby, a safe delivery, and having what baby needs. But you can also prepare for some common risks rarely discussed in advance: losing yourself, defaulting into an unequal partnership, and trying to do it all alone. Those might sound dismal, and perhaps that’s why no one talks about them — but you CAN prepare for these things (if you’ve been told they may be coming.)
Here are my top 10 non-obvious but absolutely critical things to do before the baby arrives to ease the transition from standalone human to parent:
As a not-yet-parent, you might be blown away by this video from Dr. Becky Kennedy. In it, she notes that 67% of parents feel guilty taking time for themselves.
Yeah, it’s a thing. Parent-you might start convincing yourself that you really enjoy acts of service for your family — and maybe you do— but that’s not the same as time for you. You existed before your children did.
Let’s make sure you keep in touch with that.
Here’s the exercise: imagine you have childcare obligations from 7am–9am and 5pm–8pm on weekdays and all day on Saturday and Sunday. Now think about everything you currently enjoy — yoga after work? Early morning runs? Reading a novel for 30 minutes before bed? — and figure out when you’ll keep doing it.
This is one of the most essential ways to preserve your “personhood” after giving birth.
Immediately postpartum, your newborn’s needs will necessarily be paramount, and that’s ok. You probably won’t even mind. But it’s easy to set up a pattern of perpetual self-sacrifice that you never course-correct because there will be no external event like birth that prompts you to snap back into living the way you lived before.
(Quite the opposite, in fact — you won’t ever live the way you lived before. You won’t be able to just walk out of your house, effortlessly, on a whim, for several years.)
Somewhere around the 6 month mark, I tend to hear from parents who kept waiting for the intense demands to subside and realized… they don’t. They evolve and you do get more sleep. But those parenting hours before and after work — they persist.
So: literally write down what you like to do for pure enjoyment. If you want to continue those between the hours of 7am and 8pm, you will have to coordinate childcare coverage. Or, do them before or after that (at home or while your partner is with your sleeping kids.)
“Childcare” could be your spouse or partner, but there’s a new coordination step you’ll need to take.
It’s good to anticipate this so you can proactively plan — this helps you avoid the trap of feeling lost in parenthood and unsure why. Believe it or not, you might feel guilty missing out on your future child’s bedtime if you don’t decide in advance that yoga twice weekly is what you need to be sane.
If you and your partner have been operating fairly independently to date — each managing your own schedules, your own logistics, your own lives — understand that you cannot keep doing that once you share a tiny, dependent human who is (in most cases) a fused version of you both.
A baby generates an astonishing volume of shared administrative work: pediatrician appointments, insurance claims, daycare applications, supply runs, feeding logs, developmental milestones. If you don’t consciously manage this before the baby arrives, all of this will default to one person — and by default, it will be the person with the longest parental leave — typically the birth parent. This is how inequity takes root, not through malice, but through inertia.
One concrete thing you can do right now: create a family email address. Something like TheJohnsons@gmail.com — whatever feels right. Use it for anything related to your child and your household: pediatrician communications, daycare enrollment, Amazon orders for baby supplies, subscriptions. This way, both partners have equal access to all information and neither is the sole gatekeeper.
This might sound small, but it’s foundational. It builds the habit of operating as a team on household management — and it means nobody has to “forward” anything or “catch the other person up.” You’re both already in the loop.
One household thing. This could be dinner. Groceries. Daily kitchen cleanup. Your daycare/nanny search.
One baby-care thing. Could be the dinnertime bottle. The evening bath. Diaper changes. (In our house, because I exclusively breastfed and all feeding was on me, my husband owned 100% of all diaper changes for the first 3 months. He actually loved this time to talk to and bond with our daughter!)
This supports the mother to heal, gives the non-birthing parent a clear contribution, and sets the groundwork for greater household management equality going forward.
If you’re unsure what dad can do, Mutterer did a great post on it. Don’t read this and assign your partner something — read this together so you’re sharing ownership for planning and getting educated on parenthood from the outset.
By the way, I’m not saying dad should only ever own two things. This is merely a discrete step to take as you plan for postpartum; you’ll need ongoing recalibration.
As a first-time parent, you expect to have lots of time on maternity leave, but in those early days, you will not. If you need to call upon critical service providers, it will be stressful to do the searching and research in your moment of need.
I assume you’ve got finding a pediatrician covered. Other great phone numbers to have in your back pocket: a night nurse, a lactation consultant, a pelvic floor physical therapist, a post-partum mental health provider, a post-partum doula, someone to provide sporadic or part-time household help (cleaning, making meals) and a babysitting service.
For the latter, I recommend Bambino because it is nationwide, so you can use it while traveling too. You can get a $10 credit by signing up with my code THETHIRDSHIFT. (They gave me this code because I sent them so many customers in my analog life — I am sincerely a raving fan.)
What do you do at home that someone else could do? This might be a cleaning service every two weeks. A meal delivery subscription. A regular grocery delivery slot. A laundry service. Whatever your household’s version of “buying back time” looks like — get it operational now, while you have the bandwidth to research, compare, and onboard.
I say this because in the postpartum haze, the last thing you’ll want to do is evaluate cleaning services, schedule trial visits, or figure out your grocery delivery password. And yet these are precisely the things that pile up and make new parents feel like they’re drowning — not the baby, but the piles of laundry surrounding the baby.
Two things to prepare: one is giving yourself permission. Let yourself buy ease, at least temporarily (if it’s not going to put you into debt).
The other is to make the decisions now and set up accounts and orders. You want this running before you come home from the hospital, so your decisions after baby are to cancel X thing you don’t need, not start from scratch on finding something you do need. In the worst-case scenario, you have a little too much help. This is far better than the reverse.
Newborn life is a season. It’s fleeting (truly). It’s also very demanding. Remember that anything you do during this period to give yourself more bandwidth isn’t a lifestyle commitment. Hiring a cleaning service for 6 months is okay. Using a meal kit service just for 9 months, until you’re in a better routine, is okay.
Not only do you not have to commit forever, you also don’t have to accept the company’s default cadence. If weekly is out of budget, do it monthly. Calibrate to your budget and needs.
Even if you’re the kind of person who thinks that paying for cleaners is “bougie” or getting prepared meals delivered is “highway robbery” (hat tip to my grandmother) — this is the time to do it.
Trying these services is not a lifetime commitment, but it may be a critical lifeline. Especially if you are far from your family.
Think of it this way: you would never start a major project at work without making sure your operational basics were covered. This is the same thing. Your household is about to take on its most demanding project to date. Put your support team in place.
If you imagined sleepy baby photos, those have to happen in the first 10 or so days post-partum. After that, baby gets a bit more alert. You can still take wonderful photos then. But either way, in those early days, you’ll be quite busy — busier than you are now, unbelievably, but true — and tired, and learning about breastfeeding and other weird aftermath of giving birth, and it will be difficult-to-impossible to schedule phone call consultations because you’ll be living according to the baby’s unpredictable sleep schedule. You have 9 months to plan. Do your photographer search in advance and save yourself the postpartum stress. Tentatively schedule for 10 days after your due date.
For some reason, all the baby prep courses I could take (and I took several) covered bathing, car seats, choking — critical safety. But not much about actual day-to-day routines and care.
There are a lot of opinions about this and myriad books you can read, courses you can take, and people you can hire. I personally liked and have recommended to others The Baby Whisperer. Not everyone likes it, and as a writer I disliked the folksy tone, but I thought it was the most tactical, practical guide for real questions I had on a daily basis during the first 10 days. If you prefer directive: at minimum, just read this.
But it’s not about the method you choose. Just start to learn before you’re holding your baby. Because you’ll be tired and basking in love, but also if you’re unsure about things, perhaps a bit anxious and panicked after the baby comes. It’s not the best time to start amassing information, and you’ll be especially vulnerable to spending money on “quick fixes” instead of entering the market as a confident and informed consumer.
It’s like, really hard to find truly helpful breastfeeding latch-related content because you need to be able to see the nipple. This video is it. Save it to your home screen for easy reference in the early days — it might even save you a lactation consultant visit.
(Note: the best breastfeeding advice I got was “try it for at least two weeks before making any decisions.” A lot of issues can be sorted in that time, so if you want it to work, don’t give up before then.)
You probably won’t need it right away, but you might. Your insurance pays for it, but it can be confusing to find out where to buy them since to be fully covered they may have to come from DME distributors and each insurer seems to have a unique set of partners. Do the administrative work of figuring this out with your insurer before the baby comes.
The brands people use most often are Spectra and Medela. If your office has a pump in it, get the same brand so you can use the same parts at home and at work.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, breast pumping doesn’t hurt — it looks alarming but the mechanics aren’t painful. (It looked painful to me and I couldn’t find a clear answer about this online, so here you go.)
This one catches people off guard, because it doesn’t feel like “preparation” — it feels social. But having even 2–3 people who are going through what you’re going through at the same time is a game changer. For getting advice. For referrals to providers. For feeling less alone at 3am when you’re asking ChatGPT whether your baby’s rash is normal.
Look for local mom groups, neighborhood listservs, WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups. There are organizations that literally match and form “moms groups” based on your due date and neighborhood. Your hospital may run one. Your birthing class may become one.
If you can’t find them, ask other moms — they know where the groups are. Or create your own: the women you meet in birth prep classes or prenatal yoga or maternity workouts are all about to go through the same experience. Exchange numbers. Start a group text. You will be so glad you did.
The particular magic of a new-mom community is that it normalizes everything. Your baby won’t sleep? Neither will theirs. You cried for no reason on Tuesday? So did she. You’re not sure if you’re doing this right? Nobody is. That shared experience is more valuable than any expert advice — because it reminds you that the hard parts are not evidence of your failure. They’re just part of becoming a parent.
Did I miss anything? Leave it in the comments!
I walk people through a version of all of this — and more — as part of my “Prepping for Parenthood” workshop, which includes creating your own YOU Plan. You can register for it in-person in DC or virtually.
This post is part of the subsection Preparing for Parenthood by The Third Shift.
The Third Shift begins the moment you’re pregnant. Suddenly, you’re juggling thousands of decisions about topics you know nothing about—baby gear, nursing logistics, postpartum mental load, partner delegation—without any framework for evaluating them. This section applies the same operational thinking we use for household management to the specific overwhelm of preparing for a baby.
If you’re expecting, start here. If not, you can easily opt out of the “Preparing for Parenthood” posts — or stick around and share your wisdom in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
Jennifer
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