How Choosing a Car Seat Changed My Ideas on Parenting

I spent hours researching this car seat. Days in fact, maybe even a week or more.

Everything else I picked up from Gumtree or as hand-me-downs without too much planning or expense - bassinet, pram, carriers, clothes, cloth nappies, swaddles, sleeping bags - the list of baby gear could go on forever.

The car seat though, where you're asked to weigh up safety features, ease of use, expense, rear and forward facing capacities, comfort...this felt like a huge responsibility. It was one of the first things that made me realise that my/our parenting choices were ours alone, there was no responsible adult to tell me what to do any more. And had someone dared try, I probably would've told them to back off!

I realised I didn't want to have the "stuff" but not the know how. We learnt about birth with Karen at Embracing Birth and engaged Nikki Grandjean as our birth doula. I was organised - or so I thought.

Then I turned my attention to postpartum and parenthood and was blown away. I got researching and delved deeper and deeper, and invested in what I felt mattered. The things that would make us feel more capable and able to assess what was 'normal' and what wasn't.

I researched and read, a lot.

We went to breastfeeding education class.

I read up on what the spectrum of biologically normal infant sleep was and how to facilitate that without sleep training.

I learnt about what was happening in my brain, my baby's and my husband's in regards to rewiring and bonding.

I read about hormonal changes post-birth, and how traditional cultures use warmth, special food, rest and mama care practices to prevent drops in mental and physical health immediately post-pregnancy.

I learnt how to create a modern village that cocooned us after birth, automated our life admin and got familiar with how fatherhood and motherhood might lead to shifts in our identities and family dynamic.

As an exercise physiologist, I invested in professional development, and felt ready for labour but also upskilled to tackle physical rehab in postpartum.

The groundwork helped us avoid the stress and overwhelm in those early days. It didn't make newborn life easy peasy, but it made it enjoyable.

And then I bundled all I had learnt in my professional life, pregnancy and new parenthood into a six week parcel for parents-to-be like you: so mums don't have to be responsible for the mental load of educating their partners on the things we should all know about parenthood and babies but don't because of how modern society is structured; to allow you to feel peace and joy in postpartum; to feel prepared together, like we did.

Check my online course outline here.

And if you know from the start that you want one-on-one guidance, that's cool too. 

Read up on my individual postpartum support services here.