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Your nursery is finished. Your baby shower was a blast. You have written and recited your birth plan. For all intents and purposes, you are ready to welcome your new baby into the world. But wait! Don’t wile away those last precious moments of pregnancy simply waiting! Here are some fun and unexpected ways to prepare your entire family for a new member.
Go through your phones and your computers and collect meaningful photos of the two of you throughout your relationship. Spend some time together writing a letter to each other about how you feel pre-Baby. If you’ve got funny emails or Facebook posts and messages, gather some screen grabs of those too! You can then mock all of these digital files up using an online scrapbooking service like Shutterfly and create a ‘story’ book to give to your Baby telling him or her all about Mommy and Daddy pre-Baby.
And by splurge, I mean buy your favorite breakfast cereal or treat (I love me some cherry cheese danishes!), stock up on both of your favorite magazines, each pick out a movie or a show on Netflix and buy yourself a new duvet cover. Spend an entire morning eating and chilling out in bed. Goodness knows, once Baby comes - you won’t have that luxury. For brownie points, pick up some organic massage oil (I love the one from Arbonne) to ease some of that pregnancy tension too!
Ask for family and close friends near and far to submit photos of themselves to you. Write a short paragraph or two about each person, how they are related to your Baby, why they are special, something unique about them that the Baby will remember. Have it all bound into another book to read to Baby so that he or she becomes acquainted and close with relatives no matter how far away they are.
You might only have a weekend and not a week or two, but it’s worth it. Book yourselves into a honeymoon suite somewhere and indulge one last time. My husband and I went to a beach-side cottage for two-nights and it was divine. We actually worked on our Pre-Baby book while we were there!
Bedtime routines will be crucial once Baby arrives, so establishing some sort of reading routine while pregnant is a great way to find some flow! Pick out some short stories or magazine articles and take turns each night reading them to each other and to your belly. As the pregnancy progresses, Baby will be able to hear your voices and learn to recognize them and you might learn something along the way. Full disclosure: my husband and I have taken turns reading to each other nightly for years.
Is baby overdue? Or are you in the hospital ready to push? Having music to pump you up and get you out of a funk can be a small blessing during a trying time. Challenge each other to program the list in different ways to tell different stories! Mix high-tempo songs with ballads, electronic music with classical and see how it evokes memories and feelings. You can often find lullaby versions of popular songs to upload into your Baby’s sound machine, so they are in on the fun once they are born.
We volunteer for the same charity event in our community every single year. Typically, we notify our friends and family on social media and ask for a small donation to help us reach our goal. When we were expecting, however, we turned it into a Baby Pool! Using a simple Google Form, we created a multiple choice and short answer quiz, including everything from birth date, weight, length, eye color and time of birth. We emailed the link to all our close friends and family and suggested that they donate $10 to our charity team in order to participate in the Baby Pool! All the proceeds went to the event in our Baby’s name and we had a lot of fun watching to see whose predictions were closest to reality.
Being house bound as a new parent is no fun, but constantly shelling out for entertainment is equally as dreary. Take some time during your pregnancy to find out what’s available close to home for little to no cost. For example, my husband and I started going to our local library every couple of weeks. I’d check out books about motherhood and pregnancy and he’d gravitate to the true crime section - but we also discovered they have free kids concerts and performances every two weeks as well! We checked out our neighborhood outdoor pizza oven, where you can bring your own dough and make a delicious snack for free! We also got in the habit of going to our local farm market on weekend mornings. Even if you only buy tomatoes, the sights and sounds are wonderful and will be sure to stimulate Baby’s (and Mom and Dad’s!) social skills.
Erin Trafford is a former radio and television broadcast journalist turned DIY blogger; who's obsessed with all things paint and power tools. She's made over entire rooms for less than $500, is frequently seen hauling dilapidated furniture off the curb, and is incredibly proud of the day she decided to nail her old back yard fence to her basement wall.
She love dogs, cats, Han Solo and pie – probably in that order. Erin and her (incredibly patient) husband Dan bought their little house by the sea in 2013, just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia. They have been working tirelessly since then to turn it into a castle, one project and one blog post at a time. You can find all their bloggy and house adventures over at DIY Passion. This year they are adding a baby into the blogging and DIY mix, expecting the arrival of their first child in the Fall.