Pregnant with a toddler- honest views please

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Did anyone have a good experience of being heavily pregnant and having to look after an active 20 month old toddler?
I’m a nanny and just found out I’m pregnant. I’m looking for honest views either way thanks!

I’m currently 28 weeks pregnant with a 21 month old- my partner works away and I have no other support so do 95% of it on my own. Also working part time in a stressful job. I’m finding it tiring but manageable tbh but 1) I don’t really have a choice and 2) it will hugely vary depending on how the pregnancy goes!

I've found that my toddler needed a lot more attention than my newborn. 16 months fast forward, it is easier, but still hard work.

I’m worried that I won’t be a me to look after my charge properly while heavily pregnant.

Had twins whilst working full time and had a toddler (23 months when twins arrived).

It was fine.

What are your working hours? Surely unlike pregnant mothers you get a break and sleep uninterrupted?

My DC1 was 16 months old when I gave birth to DC2….the general pregnancy tiredness hit me harder in that pregnancy than it did first time around, but other than that, I was pretty much ok getting on with everything as normal.
Towards the end, it was a bit harder to get DC1 into the car or into a pushchair, but I figured out a way that worked.

Yep, had this many times. The only thing that really changed was that I didn’t carry them around at all anymore due to fear of ligament damage due to hormones softening ligaments. To provide consistency DH ceased carrying as well and we did it right from the start when found out I was pregnant so it wasn’t something we introduced later that they may associate with new baby. Instead we used ‘now that you are a big girl/boy, you do it this way’. Do things like not lifting them up to car seat but making them get into footwell, and then up to seat, then onto car seat themselves, so you just clip them in. Not using a high chair but getting a toddler booster into a normal chair and strapping them into that, using those little light, mobile stairs so they can get up themselves. Stuff like that.

It really depends on the pregnancy. I had no problems keeping active and was still scrambling up the upper levels of soft play and high climbing frames until the day before giving birth. Some women are bed bound in the last few months and then it would be a struggle (mums of toddlers would resort to screen time, but probably not ideal for a nanny).

Mine was a bit older (4) when I was pregnant, but I didn’t find pregnancy particularly challenging. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do. In your case, this is presumably your first pregnancy? With my first, I was doing 10-12 mile hikes at the weekend into 3rd trimester. I was at the gym 12 hours before I went into labour (and I’m not a particularly fit gym bunny).

The benefit for you is that this isn’t your child, so you get to go home and go to bed and get a good nights sleep and not be up all night with a waking toddler. And you get weekends to rest.

I would just be mindful of how any issues later on may impact on your employment. If I needed to go into hospital for monitoring, no one really cared because I have an office job. At most, I might miss a couple meetings. If it means your employers need to take a sudden day off work, you will need to be a bit more careful of communicating your needs so they can plan ahead.

I think it depends on the pregnancy. I was so exhausted with my first that I ended up finishing work (office job) at 32 weeks and then I spent the next 7 weeks lying down. Second time round I was still going on massive walks pushing DS in the buggy at full term and climbing up soft plays.

I had pregnancy sickness with both of them , it was pretty awful having to leave DS to go throw up (he'd get left in the living room with the TV on or put in the cot if we were upstairs) which you can do if it's your own child, it's trickier situation if it's not.

I think it will be easier than if it were your second child as you won't have broken sleep and you go home at the end of the day.

I struggled from about 34 weeks though tbh, it was rough.