Top Tips for New Mums
- Learn to swaddle and keep baby swaddled at night for the first week or so, they feel safer this way (ensure they can still kick their legs about if they need to)
- I rolled my eyes at the cliché ‘sleep when baby sleeps’ because I felt I had so much else to do but please believe me, those things can wait. The ONLY things you need to take care of are you and your baby, and you can’t do that whilst sleep deprived. Plus lots of other amazing things happen to your body whilst you sleep, check out my Sleeping to Boost Health blog.
- African proverb: ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ – sadly in the western world we don’t live much in extended families any longer and so we lose the close contact and support of older and more experience women to guide us through these vulnerable new times. Let others help you, in fact you should ask them to help you because they may want to give you space, but you don’t need space, you need support.
- Spend as much time touch, carrying, holding your baby as possible. Skin-to-skin contact can quickly get a baby through a fever and calm them down.
- Go out walking with baby. Walk. Walk. Walk.
We walked everywhere, in any weather!
- Try and rely on your natural instincts rather than what 100 other mums say on the internet, you need to develop those skills and that is difficult to do if you’re being bombarded with too much information. Find 1 or 2 ‘mentors’ who you trust and ignore the rest
- Having said that, joining a postnatal mums group will be one of the best sources of support and safety that you will find, and you will likely make lifelong friends as you go through some of the toughest and scariest times of your life together.
- Be kind to your partner, they will likely feel left out for the first few months as there isn’t much they can do, but you need them to keep you sane, to love baby as you do and then to share duties with you as baby grows up.
For further reading I can recommend the following sites run by wonderful women: