Visits from family who live further afield when baby is born?

[Cafeaulait27]

I’m getting ahead of myself as it’s ages until my due date, and hoping everything goes well and we get to bring a healthy baby home.

I just wondered how others managed/plan to manage family visits after baby is born if they live far ish away?

My family live at the other end of the country and usually they would come and stay for a weekend and stay in our spare room (we live in a 3 bed town house) which is fine. But I’m feeling like when we have a newborn it might be better if they stay somewhere else locally and just visit us during the day, as the nights will be full on for us with all the feeding and nappy changing and getting used to it all (we’ll be first time parents) and I feel like having parents/siblings etc staying will be stressful and we’ll just want time to ourselves to adjust.

Just wondered what others have done/will do? Not sure why but it’s bothering me a bit, maybe I’m worried about upsetting family if they are expecting to stay as normal. We haven’t discussed it yet

DH and I have started having this conversation although there is a long way to go yet!
We don't live near either family.
If it were a 4 hour drive my dad would happily do that and back to see the grandchild for an hour, no doubt about it.
MIL is the type to want to stay over when she travels 20/30 minutes!

I don't know how we'll manage the situation but we are thinking the first 10 days or so we won't have any visitors so I can lounge around doing skin to skin/feeding etc and then we could have visitors when hopefully I've got the hang of it a bit.
I know my mum would be super helpful with household tasks (she always is when she visits) but there is a risk she would try to take over a bit with the baby so I'd have to be firm. MIL would want to be waited on.

There is also the issue with some smokers in the family and we would not want them near the baby after smoking, I don't care if they wash their hands and change top, the smell lingers.
I know we're going to be accused of being really PFB about that.

Both our families live very far. Mine are a different country and DPs 7 hours north. We have booked an Airbnb around the corner for both of them. My dad is coming in time for the birth for 14 days and then his mum for 11 days after that.

It worked really well with the last baby.

If you are planning breastfeeding, I found it helped for the first couple of weeks just to be able to flop a boob out while sitting on the sofa, without worrying about being subtle in any way - even with my parents I felt the need to cover up a bit and this made it trickier to feed in the early days.

My mum is certainly keen to be helpful, but I’m not good at accepting it and felt the need to ‘host’ still. With first DC she stayed for around a week - I’d say it averaged out as equal amounts extra help and extra hassle! With second we stuck to shorter visits.

I live abroad and my family is not even allowed into the country at the moment (thanks to Brexit & Covid), so I'll be lucky if they can visit at all. If they do, there is no way I would let them stay with us, it would be too much.

Be really explicit with what help you’ll need.
My family came but cooked for all of us and came with the expectation of taking care of us all (I’d had a c section too).
If you’ve had a clear conversation that they are welcome but you won’t be hosting and in fact could do with them helping you, then you won’t feel this pressure.