This has only just dawned on me..

[HowWillIKnow247]

I'm heavily pregnant - baby is due any day now.

Although we've joked about it, it's only just really dawned on me how DP and I will never have the life again we do now, where we can just casually decide what we want to do in the evening or at weekends.

We've had fertility treatment for years and this is a much wanted baby. We are both over the moon and are so excited this is finally happening. We're so looking forward to everything we'll get to do as a family.

But it just dawned on me .. are the days gone where we just say "fancy going cinema this weekend?"

When I mentioned this scenario to DP, the response was "well we can't really because we can't take a baby into a cinema".

It's made me think about all the other things we do and places we go quite spontaneously.
(We've been together 10 years so it's always been just us and the dog).

Are there things you still do like this that haven't been changed so much after having a baby or did everything just completely change and you can't remember what a cinema looks like?!

Life changes, but is fun in different ways.

We don’t get any grandparent help with childcare, so dinner in a restaurant or a date cinema night costs x plus at least £45 babysitting. So those opportunities don’t come up often!

I loved baby cinema when my DC were tiny. 10am weekday showing with coffee and cake for £14 👏 Baby slept or bf throughout. Only really works under 10 months IMO, cos after that they don’t want to sit quietly in the dark.

I’d also take any big overseas holidays before they’re 7 months or after 3 years old, because travelling with a moving infant is zero fun!! We tried Thailand with a 12-month old and Bali with a 20-month old. We basically spent the whole time tag teaming and man marking a tiny child who wouldn’t stop moving 😂 Holidays now they’re older are a breeze.

Once you see your make ch longed for baby and feel the rush of love it won’t matter so much. You will never put yourself first for a long time but you’ll never notice.

*much

I actually found with 1 DC we could still do a lot of the same things, we just took her with us. Obviously nothing crazy but we travelled abroad with her lots, especially before she was walking and it was fairly easy. I have since had two more kids though and now my life is a LOT more restricted, it’s hard work taking all 3 anywhere and people are much less willing to babysit! Although they are all still very little and I’m sure this will change as they get older x

But you have a dog and I'd say that's pretty restrictive of a spontaneous life as well in many ways . Which is to say, yes your life will change but you get used to it and most parents say it is ( mostly) worth it.

You won’t be able to do thing as freely or often but when you do it feels 100x better than ever before!

You will find a new way to live your life. Different, but just as good.

At lunchtime today I went out with my DH and we looked at each other and said "we are out without the kids!" such glee. We held hands and skipped up the road.

Our kids are 32, 30, 23 and 17.
😂

I wouldn't change a thing.

Get used to leave your baby with babysitters or relatives from young age and you can have some sort of social life. But yes it will definitely a massive change.

Yes of course it will be a change but it isn’t forever :)

mine are teens now so we go out and leave them at home quite a lot

Once there’s a baby every thing will revolve around them. As they get older and you have childcare or grandparents helping then you get a break. Enjoy your freedom as you will now need to plan things differently. I only went to playgroups with other mums and I didn’t leave my son with his grandparents till he was 5 as he didn’t settle well. You could have a really good baby that’s a good eater and sleeper and if so it will be so much easier for you to get out and about

Others have said it but the biggest change, particularly with my first, was the fact leaving the house was not as simple as putting on my shoes and bag and deciding to leave. It suddenly meant packing nappy bag, dressing baby, changing baby and dressing to redress after a lovely mess, making bottles, sorting buggy, trying to even get myself presented half human and realising it had been 45 minutes since I wanted to leave rather than 45 seconds. I did however love every sleep deprived minute looking back (they are 7 and 11 now). Yes life changes but for me personally I wouldn’t change it back for the world (even if I might be secretly counting down the years to independent teenage hood so I can leave the house without them). Good luck OP 💐

I haven’t been to a cinema since 2016! Yes having children totally turns your world upside down but they are little for such a short space of time and before you know it they’re off to school and life starts getting back to how it was before (a bit!). It’s a cliche but it really does go too fast, so milk it for all it’s worth. Hope all goes well xx

I found only having one child we could still be somewhat spontaneous within reason (ie we couldn’t just decide to go away for the weekend and leave our son with someone on a whim, we probably could get either my mum or my nan to have him for an evening if we had last minute plans come up). Now I’ve got 3 it’s harder, but my youngest ones are only 2 and 6 months. No-ones had all three at once yet, which is fine and there’s no expectation for anyone to either! I imagine the spontaneity will eventually come back when they’re all a bit older though as my family are willing to have them, just a 6yo, 2yo and 6 month old all at once is a bit full on at the minute.

Yes, everything changes, but you will get used to it. Maybe you will not be able to do things for a couple of years that you take for granted now, but eventually the baby will be old enough to take to the cinema. Things that are easy to do now may be impossible to do for a while, but then they will just be difficult and require planning, and then they will be easy again when the kid(s) get to be teenagers.
We are in our seventies now, and can do anything we want, but we have an "empty nest," and I miss the kids.

It's all a trade off. You have had a wonderful ten years, and now you will have a wonderful time with a family, God willing.

Also agree with this. My eldest was very adaptable, would happily go to nanny and grandad. It’s taken a lot of work for my middle to be comfortable being left with both sets of nanny and grandads, partly lockdown meant he didn’t see anyone but us for months and months, partly he’s just a very different personality to my eldest and everything just takes a bit longer for him. He loves his nanny’s and grandads though and always has a wonderful time with them now!

You can’t take baby to the adult places you used to go like the theatre, cinema, nice restaurants etc.

It’s not fair to everyone else. Babies are a handful, can be unpredictably noisy and take all your attention, so you wouldn’t want to anyway. It would be too stressful.

I also wouldn’t book and plan trips away from baby before they’re even born - even at 8/9/10 months you will probably find you don’t want to leave them and even if you did want to you may struggle to.

It’s really not as easy as “oh X wants to babysit!” And you hand over the baby. You have everything from feeding to sleeping to contend with.

Sorry but this is mostly a load of rubbish!

Lazy weekends do not exist with young kids. I sometimes daydream about the idea of a lie in, bingeing a netflix series during the day and then getting a takeaway. I never appreciated that a lazy weekend was a 'thing' until I had kids...now I am busy from 6am until 7.30pm every weekend and the idea of staying up past 11 fills me with dread! Haha!

We didn’t see much change in our social lives when DS was a baby, we loved having people around and continue to have them around with a baby. In the early months we invited people for dinner “between feeds” and once DS was sleeping through the night it was pretty much back to normal.

Once DS was in nursery we used to ask one of his nursery nurses to baby sit. Holidays were never the same though.

To be honest with you, I found life post baby completely different to our life before and I struggled with it for a very long time.

its funny because to me it seems that every stage of children bring with them new challenges but you suddenly remember the old ones are gone.

my three year old is going through a phase of saying "hello daddy" and giving me a hug every time I come in the door - if I've put the bins out for 2 minutes or been away for 2 days working - honestly you can't compare that to anything else I love it so much I am already sad for when she eventually stops doing it !

as others have said life changes completely - it's a lot harder in some ways but also way more meaningful

DH and I still go to the theatre and cinema, just alone 🤣 You can take a very small baby to the pub for a couple of months until they become noisier/more aware but yes, things will change! The spontaneity goes as an evening/day alone together has to be well planned in advance! I also had this realisation and it came as a shock! 🤣

We go to the cinema once or twice a year without the kids. They’re old enough now to enjoy 12A films so they come along to those. When they were younger we had lots of semi spontaneous day trips, weekends are now taken up with activities and parties so the only spontaneous things in our lives are play dates, takeaways and the occasional cafe trip. The latter 2 usually when we have no food in because we’ve been so busy with the aforementioned activities.

It isn’t going anywhere, so much as that for years, everything is a LOT more planning and hassle and thinking and m, I dunno effort to keep momentum. Nothing happens without a ton of your energy to power it. I would happily get in the car and ‘just’ drive due three hours if I needed to. No biggie. I’d probably go for a wee before I got in the car, and I might even make a coffee or grab a breakfast bar. With DD (who is 12 and an awesome traveller, but strongly opposed to anything she hasn’t independently decided on herself), you have first have to peel her out of bed and have the standard clean-your-teeth-everyday-means-everyday-yes-that-includes-today argument. Then cook breakfast and clean up, gather the appropriate snacks, water bottles, blankets, lost sweatshirts - nooo, not that one it’s lame. The other one (that was lame yesterday) - other weather appropriate outfits, clothing or equipment required, tablets, power packs because she ‘forgot’ to charge it, round up headphones, more snacks, have a row about why we need to go anyway and why can’t we stop for snacks on the way, have another row about how she is to go for a wee, even if she ‘doesn’t need one’. Get in the car, lock up, see they opened the bedroom window after you checked them all, go back shut the windows, get in the car, get halfway to the motorway and glance down to see they don’t have any shoes on. When questioned, they will say you ‘didn’t tell them’ they needed shoes. I’m spent before we even leave!

Being other peoples’ brain (including their motivation) is beyond exhausting. At least they can’t argue when they’re babies!

In case no one has mentioned it before. Some cinemas have baby friendly screenings where you can take your baby.
Google 'Odeon Newbies'
I used to love doing this with my first child. You can go with your husband, local mum friends or just you.