Postpartum planning is a must for every expecting women and here we are going to dive deep into what you need as part of your plan.
I cannot stress enough the importance of having a postpartum plan, something you need to prepare when you’re pregnant.
I know so many of us love to have our birth plan in place, but it’s just as important to have a postpartum plan as well.
Let’s look at the top five tips, the essentials that you need to have as part of your plan moving into your motherhood journey.
So let’s dive deep into what these five essentials are.
1. Support Network in place
The first essential you want to have as part of your plan is know who your support network is going to be.
We need to look at this from two perspectives for our postpartum planning:
- who is going to be the support network that you turn to on a professional level; and
- who is going to be your support network on a personal level
Professional Support Network for Postpartum Planning
When we talk about a professional support network were are talking:
- Lactation consultants;
- Osteopath;
- Chiropractor;
- Doula;
- Postpartum Councillor;
- Safe Return to Fitness Trainer;
- Womens Health Pysiotherapist;
- Acupuncturist and Chinese medicine;
- Maternal Child Health Nurse;
- General Practionener;
- 24hr Breastfeeding Hotline; and
- Sleep and Settling Consultants.
The list above gives you a great start and allows you to find reputable professionals in your area.
So much is available to us and mist of the time we don’t even realise.
There’s even councillors, specifically tailored to support women in their postpartum experience that you can go to if you need to talk things through to start researching the type of professionals that can help you with your postpartum journey and make sure that’s in your plan.
Have you heard of a postpartum doula?
A postpartum doula is someone who provides emotional and informational support to a woman and her family during the postpartum period. This may be an extremely useful service to adopt if your partner is FIFO or you don’t have much of a support network where you are based.
You will not necessarily have to use everyone on the list, but if you do need them, you know how to access them.
Family Support for Postpartum Planning
The second part of support is family support.
Support from your friends, they may prepare a few meals for in the freezer or someone to come over and watch baby so you can have a nap and a catch up to rejuvenate and renew your energy.
Motherhood is hard, you don’t get a lot of sleep, and you need to have the support network in place to ensure to stay healthy and happy for you own personal wellbeing and that of the baby too.
Whether your support network consists of a family member or a friend, have the conversations in the early days.
Ask people if they’re willing to help you out when it comes to baby’s arrival.
2. Debrief after Birth
The second essential is just make sure that when you leave your birthing place, whether it’s a birthing suite, whether it’s the hospital, whether it’s your home, don’t let the professional, your midwife or doctor leave without giving you a full debrief.
Now this in itself is essential for mindset and for overcoming any trauma.
Make sure birth debrief is at the top of your postpartum planning list.
When we talk and debrief and understand why something happened the way it did, or why something happened to us the way it did, there’s a sense of closure. You receive understanding that follows you into your postpartum experience, which will have a large bearing on how your experience unfolds.
Sometimes women who don’t get that closure or don’t talk about their birth experience or don’t understand why their birth experience happened the way it did really struggle.,
This can lead to postpartum depression, and anxiety and that is not what we want for any mother.
So make sure you debrief with the professionals, make sure you understand your own birth story and why it happened the way it did.
3. Breastfeeding Preparation and Education
The third essential is to ensure you go into your postpartum journey understanding or having knowledge about breastfeeding.
You can include important information as part of your postpartum planning list.
Are you going to breastfeed?
If you are what are the things that you can be doing?
What are the things you can be preparing for?
What could you have in your postpartum bag to support you?
You may not necessarily need to invest in a breast pump yet some people never use one, but things like a nipple shield or organic reusable breast pads.
Nipple cream is a good essential for your postpartum bag but make sure it’s chemical free.
Those simple little things you can have readily available for your breastfeeding journey is really, really important.
Make sure before the professionals leave you that you have access to a good lactation consultant.
Make sure the nurses in the hospital or the midwife at home helps you to breastfeed.
Make sure you are not left alone to figure it out on your own.
It is important, it is essential that you have the breastfeeding support you require for you and bubs to have a really positive breastfeeding experience.
There are, however, certain things you can do to prepare as part of your postpartum planning for your breastfeeding journey.
And all I want to stress here is make sure you have the items that you need and also make sure that you have an understanding of breastfeeding.
What is colostrum and why is it important for my baby?
When does the milk come in?
If my supply is low, what can I use to support it?
If I have mastitis, what can I use to support it now?
The things that worked for me were simply from my natural mumma toolkit.
Your natural toolkit can support in all the areas we need as a mum.
4. Nutrition – Feed the Body what it needs
The fourth essential for postpartum planning is all about nutrition.
Give your body what it needs to be able to look after itself and feed your baby.
Breastfeeding takes a large toll on our body, and it is important that we replenish and nurture our body when we’re breastfeeding.
I was quite silly, as a new mum (also unaware of the importance of this) and because I didn’t supplement while breastfeeding or at the beginning of my breastfeeding journey, I got very ill and my body screamed at me to start replenishing what the baby was taking.
So a good whole food supplement was all I needed to support my body to get back on track.
If you’re interested in accessing something like that, I love and still do use the Lifelong Vitality Pack.
The Lifelong Vitality pack is a trio including multi-vitamin, omega blend and cellular blend.
Make sure you’re giving your body everything it needs to thrive.
And of course, if you’re feeding yourself the right nutrition, your baby is going to get good quality milk as well.
This will also in turn support your supply.
Make sure you keep hydrated also with a good quality filtered water. This ensures you’re not putting additional chemicals into your system.
Here are some great tips on how to increase your water intake in fun ways. It’s certainly something many of us struggle with.
5. Natural Mumma Toolkit
The fifth essential that I will leave you with, is to make sure you have a natural mama toolkit. So if anything occurs in that fourth trimester, in your postpartum period that you have what you need to be empowered at home.
Maybe baby has some dry skin on the scalp or the body, or an upset tummy? Maybe baby has a sore ear, or a little bit of congestion, anything that requires support in those areas.
And, of course, for yourself, to support things like sleep and all the things that are thrown our way.
In those past postpartum days, I was able to support myself and my baby solely with a natural mama toolkit.
So if you’re wondering what I’m talking about, you can check out the natural mumma toolkit information yourself.
I explain exactly what the mama toolkit looks like and how it has helped me and my family step into our own power and bring the tools and responsibility for health and wellness back into our our home.
Even though my children are a little older now our toolkit continue to serve us every single day.
Recap on the Postpartum Planning Essentials
So, just to recap on the essentials for your postpartum planning:
First essential: Make sure you have a good support network; a network of professionals to support you and a good family and friends support network. Make sure that these feature as part of your postpartum plan.
Second Essential: Make sure you debrief with the professionals, your midwife or your doctor before they leave. And you totally understand your birth story, why things happened and the way they happened.
Third essential: Educate yourself on breastfeeding. How does it work? What is it? What are the sequence of events when baby is born? What are the tools I need to have in place to support myself on my breastfeeding journey and make sure you have access to a good lactation consultant because having someone to show you how to breastfeed is essential, especially for your first child.
Fourth essential: Make sure you have access to good nutritional food, a good whole food supplement, and you’re drinking quality filtered water. This will all help you on your postpartum journey.
Fifth essential: Make sure you have access to a natural mama toolkit. A toolkit that does not have chemicals, contains no toxins and is completely healthy for you and your bub. A toolkit that will allow you to thrive and will help you on your postpartum journey. This ensures that when things arise you have a toolkit of natural options that you can use at any point in time in the comfort of your own home to support your family.
Postpartum Essentials Checklist for Postpartum Planning
So I hope you enjoyed those five essential tips.
If you would like more detail and are looking to write a postpartum plan I have your covered. If you are anything like me and always want all the things, then you may be interested in my postpartum essentials checklist.
The postpartum essentials checklist contains a list of all the essentials (that helped me and my fellow mums) and it has been compiled to help to in preparing your own postpartum plan.
The postpartum essentials checklist is for those who want to take it all the way.
For those who want to be fully prepared for their postpartum experience.
This checklist contains many more things you may not even realise are important and I can wholeheartedly say I wish I had of had access to a list like this before I commenced my own postpartum journey.
Just download our postpartum essential checklist below:
If you would like to hear me chat about this topic watch our video below:
I really hope this helps you or someone in your life. Feel free to share this blog with others it may help.
A postpartum plan is a very important step and allows you to have the discussions that you need too before baby is born. Let us know if this has been helpful in the comments.
Thanks for reading.
