While the world is in the middle of experiencing an unprecedented pandemic, we were joined by our baby girl. Becoming a parent is something that you read about online but this is one of those experiences that you cannot put down in words. You would have heard that having a child is considered a life changing experience but having a child during a global pandemic is a whole different ballgame. We took consolation in the fact that we were not the only duo but there were many others before us, during our time and since the pandemic is ongoing… many more couples after us.
A few things that we realized would be an immediate challenge was getting family, friends or hired help to assist us was not an option. We decided that we needed to enjoy our newborn and at the same time see the lighter side of things to get through some of the stress that comes along with managing a newborn and dealing with a pandemic situation. We started tracking every week as an achievement that we wanted to get. Our first achievement was HAVE A BABY DURING A PANDEMIC! Check! Words are not enough to explain the range of emotions you go through when you see the little human coming out of the womb. Also, no one prepares you for the FOURTH TRIMESTER. The first 6-8 weeks takes patience and your feelings range from unconditional love to extreme fatigue to everything in between. This is what I refer to the fourth trimester. You need all the help that you can get from friends and family and the pandemic just makes it normal newborn care advice somewhat obsolete but also you are left figuring it out yourself. Your life just changed for forever and some online help, video calls and meal trains go a long way in taking care of your newborn an enjoyable experience.
To start off, we created a list of helpful articles that we thought were quite helpful and prepared us for taking care of our little one. My techie side got the better of me and the list is on GitHub (an online source control product). So if you are a new parent or an existing parent who has articles or advice that would help, please feel free to contribute to the list.
The next thing that really helped us was a Meal Train. We weren’t aware of this and one of our friends suggested this to us. This was essentially a god send. Sign up for a meal train and you would take care of a major requirement: Keeping the parents fed. We don’t have words for the sense of gratitude we have towards our friends that got us meals during our meal train duration. It helped us not worry about our own meals and focus on the most important thing: taking care of our newborn.
Disclaimer: I am a dad that is sharing our (my wife and my) experience of managing our newest member of our family. The experiences that I shared are not based on professional education and you should apply your own judgment on whether you should follow it or not. Please refer our disclaimer for more details.
Hooman Dad 