The Best Ways to Plan Your Pregnancy

If you’ve decided you’ve reached the right time in your life to start a family, it can feel overwhelming. It’s a long journey to reach a point where you feel confident you can raise a child and provide everything it will need, but it’s an even longer and more fraught one you embark on when deciding to try and get pregnant.

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One way to feel more confident about is to make plans. Today we’re looking at some of the best ways of planning your pregnancy, so you can approach your due date feeling calm, confident and ready for anything.

First Steps

One of the first things you should do is speak to your doctor. The pre-conception health check is an important step and ensures your doctor know about your plans and can get into waiting lists for any relevant programmes, tests and classes in your area. They can also talk you through some of the issues that affect your getting pregnant and test for conditions that might affect your fertility, as well as conditions that could affect your health while you’re carrying a child.

It is also now that you should start taking pregnancy vitamins so that your body is getting all the right nutrients it needs to be as healthy as possible and to support the pregnancy.

Things to Buy

A baby will need lots of clothes and equipment, like buggies and sterilisers, but there are two useful things to invest in now: one is a fertility monitor and the other is a wall planner. A fertility monitor will help you understand when you are at your most fertile, so you know when to try and conceive. A wall planner is a vital aid to organising the many appointments, errands and important dates that will be coming over the next nine months. 

You can use different colours to assign different jobs to different people, making sure everyone does their fair share, and so you can see at a glance who is pulling their weight and if anyone needs to take on more or get a lighter load.

Lists and Looking for Help

Making lists helps you identify the key tasks you’ll need to achieve by your due date and prioritise them. Deciding whether it’s more important to get the nursery painted or go shopping for buggies is difficult – putting them into a list with other things you need to gets done helps you make that decision.

You can also identify the tasks that you need help with and go looking for that help. When you announce that you’re expecting, it’s not rare for your friends to be excited and offer to help! It’s good to take them up on it, but if you know when and how they can be most helpful, you can get more out of it. A couple of people willing to help you set up the nursery can be a huge boon, and save you some time and effort, if you’re willing to repay them in hospitality, whereas you could ask friends who are less DIY-oriented to contribute some frozen food to help keep your diet interesting and healthy in the days or weeks after the birth when you’re too busy or exhausted to cook!

This is a collaborative post.