According to the Huffington Post, baby planners - a prenatal version of the sort of manic organizational consultant that is hired to plan weddings - are the latest thing for mothers-to-be. After all, why prepare for baby on your own when you can delegate?
Here's why:
1.) Part of the joy of a first pregnancy is the preparation. Buying little onesies! Plotting nursery design! Putting together a playlist of the perfect music to accompany that perfectly blissful home birth that you have planned! Because! Everything with pregnancy and babies always goes as planned! Yay, planning!
2.) Little of that planning amounts to more than jackshit.
Seriously. With my first baby, I plotted and planned and schemed and shopped and by the time I was seven months along I had the nursery set up, a full unisex wardrobe tidily stored in a refinished antique dresser, a stroller bought and road-tested (cats work nicely in this regard), a labor doula hired, a spot on the waiting list of one of the best daycares in the city, and was being treated, prenatally, for post-partum anxiety.
When my second was born, we had to stop for infant diapers and onesies on the way home from the hospital, and baby was immediately housed in our bedroom, because the nursery was being used for laundry. I'd done nothing, except make sure that my Ativan prescription was filled.
It made no difference. Everything about the second baby-arrival - everything except for the birth itself - went no less smoothly than the first. All that planning the first time around? Was really only useful inasmuch as it made me feel productive during a time that I felt somewhat helpless. End of the day, the nursery didn't get used until month 6, the stroller until much later - the Baby Bjorn not at all - the onesies didn't fit and we ended up hiring a nanny instead of using the daycare. (I did, however, make good use of the psychiatric treatment and the Ativan prescription.)
Hiring a planner? Might have made me feel more efficient, but wouldn't have made me any better prepared. I knew by the second time around that all that mattered was that baby have a place to sleep and something to wear and that I be more or less mentally and emotionally taken of care of and the rest would sort itself out. Really.
Because, seriously? The getting-ready-for-baby part of the whole project is far and away the easiest part of parenthood. You can't manage that part on your own? You might be in for a wild ride.
That's totally how I feel/felt about wedding planning! If you and your fiance couldn't get it together over those plans and you couldn't get him/her to help you, how were you going to be as a married couple? I LOVED wedding planning, figuring out all the details. Like you said, the baby planning is fun.
Just like the wedding industry has blown up into this unnecessarily bloated thing, they're taking over the baby industry now, too. Just say no! lol
Posted by: Candice | 12/04/2009 at 02:58 PM
Sounds more stressful if you ask me.You can't plan a pregnancy no more than plan a birth.What is the world coming to?
Posted by: Aly | 12/04/2009 at 02:58 PM
Baby planners? Seriously? What's next, hiring people to help you breath?
Posted by: Summer | 12/04/2009 at 03:01 PM
If someone actually hires a baby planner I think they should also be required to take an exam for their suitability as a parent and have to get a license.
Sheesh...
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