Setting yourself up with a postpartum care kit before baby arrives is essential.  By creating a postpartum care kit that is outfitted with everything you need to be comfortable, you will heal faster and save your partner a trip to the store for supplies after baby arrives.

Learning about your postpartum recovery before labor and delivery is smart. I focused so much on the actual birth, that I really didn’t know what to expect in the weeks after birth. I knew I needed to get some pads and witch hazel wipes, but that was about it. I wish I’d read about how I would feel, common discomforts and learned healing tips while I was preparing for birth.

This article covers dealing with postpartum depression, processing your birth, coping with your new identity of being a mom, and strategies that you can enact before and after delivery to prepare yourself physically and emotionally for a new baby.

Once I was about 1-2 months away from my due date, one of my main obsessions was all about how I was going to get my body back. By this point, I had gained a lot of weight (more than I was “suppose” to) and wasn’t sure how exactly I was going to lose it. I wanted to breastfeed which means that I couldn’t diet, as dieting could lead to a poor milk supply and poor nutrition intake, leading to both you and baby feeling like crap. I could have tried to exercise, but I was trying to be realistic, the likelihood of me getting to the gym in those first few months wasn’t high. I wanted to be spending my time bonding with baby, not on a treadmill.

There’s nothing like a baby on your bladder to make you feel like you need to PEE ALL THE TIME! While it might be okay to deal with for a short period of time, you do not want to have this feeling forever or even worse, deal with urinary incontinence (bladder leaking) for the rest of your life. During my first pregnancy, I was constantly peeing but my body didn’t return to normal once baby arrived.