Christmas with a New Baby

The first Christmas with a new baby in the house is very special particularly if it’s your first; it brings a whole new meaning to the celebrations.  The Christmas I had when I was pregnant with my first baby was lovely because I was not at work, I spent my time at home nesting watching family Christmas movies and I had time to do lots of home crafty things.

The following year when the new baby was born I was at home on my own in the evenings when my partner was working.  I spent time making a beautiful homemade stocking which was lined and had snowball trim around the top.  The whole family’s focus is on the children and of course they get thoroughly spoilt!  In recent years as my children are older Christmas is still a special time but in a different way, we cook homemade mince pies and make presents and wrap them.  Again I love the evening when I sit down in front of a nice film and wrap all the presents; I try and put extra effort into wrapping with ribbon and tags.

Obviously a new baby is too young to understand what Christmas is about, but the sheer fact that it is surrounded by friends and family means they should understand that it is a special time of year.

You can find that Christmas becomes stressful, that is especially true when you have a new baby as there is often little time to get things done. I would always recommend that you plan well ahead, try and make things easy for yourself and only plan to do things you realistically have time for.  You must also learn to except that you might have to drop plans if you become overwhelmed.  Last year I bought loads of frozen pastry and mincemeat with the intention of mince pie production. I had to accept that I really didn’t have time to make them and even my quick versions where I spread the mincemeat on pre rolled pastry, roll and slice into spirals, still wasn’t viable.  The thing was that I thought carefully and realised that the frozen pastry could be used at another time and the mincemeat lasts for ages and no one says you have to have mince pies at Christmas!  Once you accept you can’t do everything and it doesn’t make you a failure just sensible, you will have a much more enjoyable time.

Enjoy your Christmas with your new baby get friends and family to help and make sure you don’t have to cook the dinner, you should be the one waited on, not the other way round.  Prepare anything that can be done in advance way ahead of time, make lists of what you need to do and cross things off each day a couple of months before.  Most of all relax and enjoy you time, you can never have it again.