It’s no secret that life gets a little more complicated when you bring a new baby home. In this Partner Perspective, Matt is sharing some of his postpartum dad hacks to help make life feel a little smoother in those early newborn days!

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Welcome back to The Birthing Bestie Blog, and another Partner Perspective with Matt, my partner! Today we’re talking about Postpartum Dad Hacks, and Matt is going to share with you a few things that he found helpful in the early postpartum days.

(FYI: I don’t usually know his answers ahead of time… and apparently, he doesn’t always either 😆)

Partner Perspective: So hack number one is to field visitors that are coming to see your baby. Coordinate times and days, whatever that looks like for you and your significant other. Be the one to take point, coordinate and figure that out with everybody because it’s a huge help!

Doula Perspective: And be the one to say “No”, if that’s the answer for the day.

Partner Perspective: Correct. The answer doesn’t always have to be “Yes!’ There were days in our specific situation where we just didn’t want people over, and being the one that coordinates and lets them know was a big help.

Partner Perspective: Another hack is to do things around the house. Dishes, laundry, cleaning and things like that. It’s a huge help to both of you. You’re both going to be tired, but if your partner is breastfeeding, that’s obviously something you can’t do, and that’s something that your significant other is going to be up all hours of the night doing for your new child. So do all the other things so that they can rest when they can. 

Rest will be precious, so take advantage of the time that you can rest, but it usually feels better to rest when other things are already done and taken care of.

And another hack with that: If you’re too tired to do the chores… REST! You can put it off if you need rest, and by no means should you feel like you have to have the cleanest house when you have a newborn. But when things need to be done and you do feel rested, just take the initiative to do them so that your significant other can enjoy the rest… because there will be times that they can’t rest and you can!

Doula Perspective: That’s a really good one. And to piggyback off of the first hack with communicating with the visitors, if you really want to maximize both of your rest, have your visitors help with things around the house. Have a chore list up on the fridge that they can see, or with part of the partner’s ownership of coordinating with the visitors, give them a task to do when they come!

And that won’t make sense for every visitor that comes, but the majority of people who are coming to visit you, your family and your new baby, are going to be people that you are close enough with and who you should feel comfortable enough with to one, set boundaries around visits, but also ask them to help out! Whether that be doing the dishes, washing bottles, doing the laundry or tidying up. 

Those first two hacks can really go hand-in-hand.

One more to wrap us up?

Partner Perspective: We had a meal train where people could gift us GrubHub or DoorDash gift cards or could sign up to bring us food and it was a massive help to not have to figure out what we were going to eat.

We were also able to take advantage of grocery delivery services. Not having to leave the house when all I wanted to do was rest, was awesome. The last place I would have wanted to be at that time would have been a grocery store. So it was so nice to have groceries delivered to our doorstep. But even more so than grocery delivery, the meal train was great!

Doula Persoective: Yeah, and to hack your hack again… Probably the most known meal train service is just mealtrain.com, and as Matt said, you can send GrubHub/DoorDash gift cards, and you can also, as the person receiving food, block off certain days so that you don’t get overwhelmed by all the food.  

One thing I remember about the meal train, and this is NOT a complaint, but I remember there were back-to-back days that people would bring us food, and we almost couldn’t eat it fast enough and didn’t have enough room to store it all… again, not a complaint, but it can get overwhelming. So if you use mealtrain.com, you can always go in and block off or skip a day so people don’t bring more food when you have plenty.

And one more hack to hack your hack (tongue twister!), If you have a meal train, you should absolutely accept all the food that is coming your way, but it doesn’t mean that you should have to field visitors. So if it’s one of those days where you don’t want visitors, but you have someone who wants to bring you food, put a cooler on your porch and have a note on top that says thank you, but you’re not accepting visitors at this time. 

I have a cooler signage template you can download at ebbirthing.com/resources-for-mama that you can go grab and it essentially says “Thank you for your contribution, please text us to let us know that you’ve left something, we’re not having visitors at this time.” And that way you don’t have to entertain people just because they are bringing you food.

Alright, Mamas, that’s a wrap on this Partner Perspective on Postpartum Dad Hacks. Send this to your partner, and if you have any hacks that you want to add or things that we left off, share them with us! We want to know what made your life easier in the postpartum phase so that we can pass them along to other mamas who are joining the new life of parenthood!

Always feel free to slide into my DMs on Instagram at @ebbirthing, or email me at ebbirthing@gmail.com. 

And if you need any other support in your parenthood journey, I’m just a click away! Until next time, Mamas!