When is the right time to have a baby?

(oh, and stop reading the glamourous yummy-mummy books and lay your hands on a copy of Libby Purves' How Not To Be A Perfect Mother. Much more useful .)

Gangle - we planned ours a while in advance - I went and had a Rubella injection about a year before.

When it came to it I didn't want to be in hospital over Christmas, so we waited till even if I conceived first time it would be due mid Jan.

I knew pregnancy was 40 weeks, but didn't realise you count from day one of your cycle...

... baby was due New Year's Eve, waters broke on Christmas Day - ds1 was born on 27th Dec that year.

Ds2 was conceived first time, too - we were very lucky.

just do it! it is a bit like starting a new job. I suppose the job title would be managing director....i am ignoring the other less glamorous aspects! You will make lots of new friends and you will feel jolly pleased with yourself for doing it...

Are you ordering from a catalogue?

I'm afraid that with motherhood you may need to try some things, change some others and just accept what you can't change. Children may be projects but there are so many variables that are just out of your control.

And the body thing, I breastfed ds1 and walked loads with the buggy and was never as thin as I was the first few months... then he started eating food and I'd be polishing off his lunch etc. and I put some back on again... but I don't look all that different really.

I think it would be hard to plan exactly what time in the year you wanted to have a baby... it took us just three or four months of trying both times. Actually it's great having them in the winter, because you don't get out much anyway in the first month or so, and they sleep more as it's darker outside (well, theoretically! )

I am pregnant with our first (32 weeks), we´ve been married 18 months and I´m 29 so several months ago was in a very similar place to you. We had been talking about it and dh originally wanted to wait a bit longer but I was worried that we might take a long time to conceive etc etc. In the end we decided to just go for it on exactly that same basis of ´there´ll never be a right time´.

We figured there would always be more places we wanted to travel to first (as a couple), more things we wanted to buy, more things we needed to do and we could put it off by this argument forever. What won it round is that essentially we both decided that having a baby was the one thing we knew we both definitely definitely wanted and would not be happy to forgo. So we tried and 6 weeks later I was pregnant. We were in quite a bit of shock for a while, having convinced ourselves it could take a year but of course we thrilled and excited aswell. After the crippling fear subsided

I do feel fat and sometimes unattractive, I feel like my life is already changing, I can see that I will have less in common with some friends for a while, I can´t/ don´t want to go out as much, I feel a bit bored and quite lonely and I know dh and I will never be ´just us´ again. But we´ll be a family, there´ll be 3 ´just us´ and we are both very very excited about meeting our baby and wouldn´t turn back time and do anything differently for all the world.

At the end of the day, it really seems that people who regret having had kids are in a small minority.

to LIVE without one!

Reading at your first post I would say you are not quite yet ready, if you perceive maternity like that there' along way to go.

Although if we concentrated in all the things we loose, the human race would have never existed... obviously, being childless you have no idea of what you are missing. The truth is that once you have had a baby around for a few weeks you will start to wonder how on Earth did you manage to leave without one

I had my first at 32 and felt it was a good time for me as I was going to take a career break anyway, and had already traveled loads, been with dh for six years, etc. I just had a second baby (I'm 36) and want to have a third in two more years!
It does change your life, and there are positives and negatives, but nobody I know with children has ever regretted having them. It is the most amazing experience. Go for it!

Gangle - Hi and welcome to MN. All your worst fears will be realised but you won't care - I wouldn't have thought of myself as having any maternal instincts at all until I had ds1 when I was 32.

Go for it! You'll wonder why you didn't do it earlier

I was 23 when I had dd, she's now 5 (just was at the end of feb) and I have ds 3.4 and ds2 7 weeks old. I'm 28, 29 in Nov and we are done now. I'm glad I had children young, always wanted them before I was 30.

Hi gangle. I had my first baby at 29 and was the youngest in my NCT group. I think whenever you have a baby you probably get a degreee of that 'oh my god what have I done' feeling no matter how old you are, as it is such a change to your life. I met my DH when we were young, so perhaps that's why we ended up being the first out of our friends to have a baby. I'm now 32, DH 34 and this year LOADS of our friends are expecting babies, so that must be a popular age to get down to it!

Personally, I wish we had started trying a couple of years earlier, as we now have 2 kids but would possibly like a third, but are unlikely to try after I'm 35

hi Gangle and welcome

A few of my mates were asking me when was i gonna have a baby? i said when im ready but i wasnt sure when i would be ready though...one of my friends said to me that You will never be ready!...i had a baby a month before i turned 30 and its was perfect timing as i had a long hard think - well about a year!...before i decide to have a baby and i love her to bits

I have been lead to believe that the quality of your eggs goes down rapidly from age 35, and your risk of down's syndrome or the like goes up significantly from that time. Fertility decreases gradually, but the fertility rate in books says that it drops significantly after 35, and that applies to all pregnancies, but it is an individual thing. Having said that I did not have my first until I was 35 and my second when I was 36 and now contemplating a third child at 39!!!! One collegue of mine waited til she was 33 and then immediately went into premature menopause so could have no children, whereas other women are naturally concieving children well into thier 40's and beyond.

I think that is always a case that you say "oh no - what have I done", when you finally get pg. But it is a journey that has many rewards. I think the fact that you are already contemplating it, suggests that now might be the time for you!?

don't even think about the right time.

people think about it too much.

Trust me, being (temporarily) fatter, having a less exciting career and a less than perfect relationship with your dh ( again temporarily) is a small price to pay for the joy a child can bring.
Go for it

Hi there, and welcome. I wish I had discovered mumsnet before, or even during my pregnancy!

I know this is not terribly helpful, but I don't think there is a categoric answer to your question: it's whenever it is right for you.

I think I was really worried when I was pregnant that my life would never be my own again, but dd is now 6 months old, and I don't begrudge a minute that my life revolves around her. I just count myself eternally grateful that I have no financial pressure to return to work. But then, I had already given up a career to do my own thing, so that was not really an issue for me.

With regards to getting fat, I actually found, to my surprise, that when I was pregnant, I was happier with my body image than I have ever been: I was pregnant and proud of it. This must have showed, because I had more compliments on my appearance when I was pregant then before or since. What I did find really weird was the changes taking place in my body, especially as for the first time in years my body was doing things that felt, well, alien, and because it was my first pregnancy, I didn't know what was 'normal'. I found the book 'What to expect when you are expecting' really useful, and in this forum you have the benefit of anonymity to ask all those questions that you are too embarassed to ask your midwife, which is why I wish I had found it earlier!

Dh was absolutely terrified of becoming a father, but now he is completely enchanted with his little angel. He didn't make an issue of the fact that for a couple of months after dd arrived, all I wanted to do in bed was sleep, but I guess that might be more of an issue for some men. It is a bit of a transition going from being a couple to being a family, but neither of us have any regrets about becoming parents.

However, the days of getting ready to go out and being out of the house within five minutes are long gone - it took a while to get used to allowing at least 15 minutes to dd's kit and dd into the car to go anywhere!

Good luck, whatever you decide.

Right time to have a baby is about 9 months after conception...

Re: getting fat and unattractive, we all get older and find it more difficult to lose weight whether or not we have children. I certainly get more excercise running around after my toddler than I ever did on an average day pre-children (and I used to have a 14 mile round trip to work by bike).

No you won't have the same relationship with your hubbie, but that will change in 2, 5, 10 years anyway.

Re: fab job, its up to you how you choose to juggle children and job. Plenty of people do both. No their lives aren't perfect, but whose is?

Re: loss of independence - depends what you mean. You will have complete freedom to go to the zoo, legoland, build sandcastles run around pretending to be a dragon and not look stupid as long as you have a young child in tow.

Its good to think about how your life will change before you have children. However, its also good to remember that the messy, painful difficult bits of life aren't aberrations from the perfect life that you think you should be leading, they are life and you can't avoid them, with or without kids.