To hate "say goodbye to xxxxx once the baby's here" comments

[m4rdybum]

Currently pregnant with my first.

I can't say I enjoy anything nowadays without someone remarking that I'll be waving it goodbye once my baby is born.

I'm not even going about big things, like impromptu weekends away (which I can't do anyway cause I'm skint) or going out on the lash (which I don't do cause I'm a boring fucker).

Someone told me very smugly that I won't be able to sit and eat my breakfast and watch telly for 10 minutes in the morning.

I get that things get hectic and sacrifices are made but I just find it so patronising - like people think I'm expecting it to be a doddle (which I'm not cause I'm a realist).

Fact is, it depends on the kids and a bit on your support network, but much of it is bollocks. I had showers alone and baths alone when I had small babies. I wasn't woken by crying every night. We still had and still have nights out, even big ones occasionally. I was able to do things with a toddler around.

Not, admittedly, watch telly, but you just have to do that when they're asleep!

I had: it will make your boobs saggy you know that right?

Why would you ever say that to anyone?

It's like a bomb going off it your life OP. I love it, but there is no respite.

Lolllllll.

OP: People keep making annoying patronising comments

Almost everyone in this thread:

@sweeneytoddsrazor "You will be able to eat breakfast watching t.v. However instead of Ruth and Eamon it will be Peppa and George"

Why?

you can never be warned enough, even if your baby is text book like my first.
you'll get comments about subsequent dc if you become pregnant again, you'll soon get used to it.

Also found his really irritating.
I can sit and eat my breakfast no problem with my 7 month old. A friend told me she could only shower at 2am when she had her first baby as she didn't have a chance any other time- I was horrified. Lo and behold, I can shower while baby sleeps or used to sit in bouncer in the bathroom with me.
Ignore the comments!!

What you'll be able to do depends on so many things. Before my kids I didn't have breakfast or a coffee before work because I got up with only just enough time to have a shower and get dressed. Now the little human alarm clock is up any time from 5am so i have to be up at 6am when my dp goes to work. I have loads more time to have a coffee Oh and if you get a nice travel mug the coffee stays warm enough to drink longer

I think it's a light hearted way of trying to warn you. I felt I should warn pregnant women. I knew it would be hard, knew I would be tired. But there was still the WtF have we done with our lives moment.

Neither of mine slept much, both screamed and cried when out down. Dh and I ate on shifts. I ate a lot of cold dinners!

I often didn't achieve anything in a day, including lunch. The first few months of ds' life (my first) were the worst of my life.

The first two months are worse than anyone can ever prepare you for. I hated pretty much every minute and couldn't believe anyone ever did it more than once. But it gets much better very quickly.

Also I now sit and have breakfast in front of the telly while DD sits on my knee and has hers and it's one of my favourite times of the day.

Well you can sit and have breakfast watching TV for 10 minutes, but in the early days that might mean no time to shower, dress and pack bag while baby sleeps, so you can watch breakfast TV OR leave the house before midday OR get the 1st load of washing on OR have an extra snooze to bring your total sleep hours up to 6 but it is unlikely you can do 2 and you definitely can't do all of them on the same day.

Load of absolute bollocks. You can still do things - just you'll choose the adjust them. (Having said that I would recommend going to the cinema as that tends not to make the cut in the first year or so ). We had more dinner parties in the first couple of years if babies than before or since. Get a reliable babysitter set up and pop out for a drink. Holidays and weekends away totally doable, just different but still lovely.

You are not mentally prepared for the possibilities there welsh.
Once you have been in sole charge of a baby all day (demanding, boring, relentless) you might find your attitude to band practice & football changes a bit.

I used to have people round to dinner and go to dinner at other people's houses. I'd put my baby to sleep on a towel on the floor.

I think the stress on getting babies into a 'routine' and being unable to do things because of 'the routine' is a bit of a trap - though perhaps it does work well for parents who feel reassured by a high degree of structure.

I think interrupted nights during the first year did make me feel rather zombielike sometimes. But I was still me and I did carry on seeing people and doing stuff I enjoyed.

However my DH has been told by friends that he’ll have to stop going to football (he goes once a fortnight atm) and will have to stop playing in his band.

This will be true, temporarily. Not forever. Football's a bit less of an issue but I am assuming the band requires a fair amount of practise time.

And hopefully, if you're not breastfeeding you'll get the same amount of time off (and if you are, you'll get it when you're in a position to express or combi-feed or whatever).

I bet the dinner party babies were the ones who lay still and quiet at baby massage. Mine screamed and wriggled around the floor. That's what he mainly did for the first year.

Its small talk. Youve no idea till youve had a child how your life changes. How it changes depends on the child which you wont know about. Some have it easy some have it harder. Its going to be a very interesting op which will test you in ways you never image but boy its worth it. I say that when dd screamed today whilst i was driving in a traffic queue and nothing i could do.

OP, your life is going to change a great deal, in ways which you cannot currently imagine (hopefully many of the changes will be positive ones).

So far as eating breakfast in front of the TV goes, yes, you may still be able to do this, but don't bet on it being uninterrupted. Especially when you have a toddler, who wants to watch Peppa Pig/ wants to eat the best bits of your breakfast (despite having their own)/ needs a wee/ has fallen over/ has just emptied a box of lego down the stairs/ has 25 questions about tractor wheels, etc etc.

Also, babies are very different. Some babies may sleep on the floor at dinner parties, others only sleep when help upright in their parent's arms in a darkened room. DC1 I could barely put down for the first 6 months.

I wish I had known how hard it was. Wish someone had told me it’d likely be rubbish at first and it’s ok not to enjoy it.

My first didn’t sleep for more than 20/30 minutes at a time from day one.

You might be lucky though my second had 3-4 hour naps regularly in his cot from birth.

Ironically enough, the best two descriptions of life with babies and small children that I've ever read were both written by men: A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away by Christ Brookmyre and A Man In Love by Karl Ove Knausgard. Neither of them make it sound much fun. If you get a kid who gets reflux or who is a bad sleeper, it can be very hard, very tiring and frustrating, specially in the first few months. I don't think there's any one thing that you can't do but it's about time - when someone has a baby they take in a job that is 12 hours a day during the day and 20 minutes out of every 4 hours, 7 days a week. Obviously if there's two parents in the picture that's shared but still, time is at a premium and a whole lot of things just drop out.

I also found it irritating when people told me all this stuff with a tone of barely concealed glee, and the thing about sleeping while you can is only rivalled in its stupidity by the "sleep when the baby sleeps" that comes after, but I do wish I'd heard a bit more about stuff like how long it would take for them to sleep through the night/ go 4h between feeds in the night and things like that. Somebody on here said "by about 12 weeks you'll get a bit of an evening back, sleeping through takes a bit longer" and that was incredibly helpful. I also read a couple of books about sleep - Teach Your Child To Sleep by the Millpond clinic and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth and they were very helpful in terms of setting expectations about how much sleep they could and should be getting. But I mean, Mumsnet will always be here for no holds barred advice post baby, assuming you get the time to post

I don't think anyone ever really knows until it is upon them. Best to be prepared for the worst in my view.