In case you haven’t heard, Hayley and I are expecting a baby in September. This will be our first child and I’m preparing for life to be turned upside down.
I recently Tweeted about the little anxiety I’m feeling as we get closer to the birth:
As someone who plans ahead and lives by my calendar, trying to plan around the unknown when having a baby that could arrive any time in the next 7 weeks is kind of nerve-wracking
— Paul Minors (@paulminors) August 5, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I received some great messages of support and so want to talk about this a little more.
Don't want to read this post? Listen below:
You probably know that I’m someone who’s very organised. I live by my calendar, not just for client appointments but I block out time for most of the tasks I’m working on as well.
I typically get booked up with client work about 2 weeks in advance. This is nice as it means I have a constant supply of work and know what I’m going to be doing each day.
But now we have this baby on the way. Hayley is 33 weeks pregnant and realistically the baby could decide to come early. For all I know, this time next week we could have our baby.
And I’ll be honest, this is kind of scary.
As someone who’s lived by his calendar for the last 6 years, not knowing how to plan for something that could happen at any time is difficult.
And I’m doing everything I can to plan. I’ve emailed my clients to explain the situation and that when the baby comes I’ll have limited availability and people are generally very understanding.
None the less, it’s still hard to prepare for something that’s unknown.
I’ll say this in the nicest way I can; it’s like waiting for a bomb to go off. You can prepare, gather supplies and make a plan on how you’re going to handle the aftermath but it’s tricky when you don’t know when it’s actually going to happen.
I guess this is the downside of living a very organised, structured life. When life throws you a curveball, you can’t rely on your normal methods.
With this being the case, we’ve planned as much as we can but keeping in mind we have to remain flexible.
- The babies room is ready.
- I’ve spent the last 6 weeks painting and doing up the house.
- And we have everything we need.
Tick!
I even have a “Labour Checklist” of things to do when the baby arrives. Things like:
- Clearing my calendar for the upcoming week and re-booking all appointments.
- Re-Configuring Calendly so that I can’t be over booked during the following weeks.
I was talking about all this with Hayley over the weekend. It’s funny because if someone else came to me with these concerns, I’d be telling them “You’ll be fine, you’ve planned well and have nothing to worry about”. But for some reason, I can’t follow my own advice.
I expect what’s actually going to happen is that as soon as Hayley goes into labour, all concerns about the business and my calendar will go out the window. Instead, I’ll be 100% focussed on Hayley and the baby and really will be fine.
It’s just this lead-up, this waiting period that has me nervous.
Anyway, I hope this had been an interesting insight to read about.
If any parents out there have any advice for us, please leave us a comment below!