I managed to repeatedly leave the house with a baby and a toddler just 19 months older than his brother, and I know that you have to streamline your pre-outing process, or it’ll eat you alive. Here are my best tips for getting out of the house in a reasonable amount of time:
- Give up on the idea of being spontaneous, at least for now. The more prepared you are, the easier this will go.
- Create a staging area by the door where all the shoes, coats, hats, mittens, car keys, and the diaper bag go
whenever you’re home.
- Change it seasonally so that you don’t have to hunt down the mittens on a suddenly brisk October day or dig up the swimmies when the neighbors invite you to their pool one early summer afternoon.
- Now, keep the staging area stocked and at the ready, so you’re not looking for a shoe that’s ten feet away or a pacifier dumped behind the couch, when you’ve got five minutes to get out of the house.
- Repack the diaper bag every night. Make sure Hubby does the same, lest you end up with a poopy diaper or two and nothing to replace them with at the playground.
- Keep a stash of supplies and favorite things in your car. This means diapers and wipes, yes, but also socks, hats, and doubles of your kids’ loveys (teddy bears, books, pacifiers, etc.).
- Make sure you replace outgrown clothes and diapers from your car stash with new ones once a month.
- Add time to however long you think it’ll take you to get there, because somebody’s going to cry, and the baby’s head will need to be propped up, and you’re going to have to pull over to find the pretzels.
- Enlist help, especially in the beginning. Bring along a “wing-mom”—a friend or Grandma to help you—when the baby is little or at least until you get the hang of flipping open the double stroller with one hand while holding the diaper bag in your mouth.
- Be prepared to abort the mission. If at all possible, cut your losses and go home when the going gets tough. It’ll be easier on all of you.
Excerpted from Stop Second-Guessing Yourself: Baby's First Year by Jen Singer. Copyright Health Communications, Inc. (HCI).
Top image: Horton Group, stock.xchng
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