How To Care for Your Family While Postpartum with No Help

I don’t know your reason for not having help while postpartum, but as a new mother (even if you already have children) you’re in the right place to find practical tips from a stay-at-home mother of three children & homemaker on how to care for your family and home after birth!

As a woman who is still experiencing the season of life, that gives life. Sometimes you find yourself in a pickle, when you don’t have anyone to call on. To come over and wash your dishes or do your laundry. After giving birth to a precious baby, don’t jump up and do every chore or cook every meal. To stress and stretch yourself to such lengths would counter act your healing, which is top priority. So you can still continue to thrive post baby!

Maybe it’s a real situation where you don’t get along with your mother-in-law or even your mother. And you’d rather not have them come over to help you with the daily homemaking chores. Don’t worry I’ve got your back in this article! I’m going to list all the easy ways that you can keep your house clean, keep food on the table, keep your children clean and maybe even have a work lunch for hubby.

Table of Contents

• The Power of Prepping Meals
• Keeping a Clean-ish Home
• Caring For Your Children
• Avoid Excessive Screen Time
• Keeping Up with Your Hygiene
• Don’t Forget Your Furry Friends
• Stocking Up on The Goods
• Keeping a Happy Home
• Latest Posts

Table of Contents

• The Power of Prepping Meals
• Keeping a Clean-ish Home
• Caring For Your Children
• Avoid Excessive Screen Time
• Keeping Up with Your Hygiene
• Don’t Forget Your Furry Friends
• Stocking Up on The Goods
• Keeping a Happy Home
• Latest Posts

The Power of Prepping Meals

Meal prep is a wonderful step that you can take in your first trimester and even your second trimester. If you’re feeling up to it. Chopping up onions, prepping vegetables, making one pot Ziploc bag meals and prepping breakfasts. Knowing those meals are going to be a hit with your family.

Having meals prepped in the months or weeks leading up to your birth, will greatly increase the happiness meter in your home. Especially if you don’t have anyone coming to bring you any meals. Unfortunately, many women aren’t a part of a group or have family members that are aware that you need a nutritious meal postpartum. In order to keep your home functioning, keep your children happy and husband fed. The best thing to do is to prep one pot meals once a month or every other month whichever works for you.
Cook enough meals for 3 months postpartum to give yourself enough time to get back on your feet, just toss your prepped ziplock one pot meals into the oven or in your instant pot (if you have one). That way when your newly postpartum looking after your newborn baby cooking will not be a hassle from now and the next 3 months.

If you have a deep freezer this is where it will come in handy, if not plan on getting one while you’re pregnant before the third trimester so you can begin storing meals.

If you’re a mama who’s going through some extreme back pain during pregnancy and can’t even stand up for long periods of time (like me) and a stickler for specific ingredients in your food; I would suggest instead of meal prepping yourself just go to the store and buy healthy frozen meals and stock up on those in your deep freezer instead of making them yourself.

Keeping a Clean-ish Home

This one might be easier or harder depending on if you have no children or if you have a lot of children.

• Have bigger children old enough to place their dishes in the dishwasher after they’re done eating.

• Have your children wash their dish completely and set on the dish rack to dry.

this is easier if you have a bigger child because they’re old enough to work the dishwasher and press a buttons properly and even load the dishwasher pods without eating them lol. While you’re pregnant especially during your third trimester towards the ending of your pregnancy nesting is going to happen naturally so you’re going to be going through your home like a mad woman cleaning up everything.

When the baby is born your house will already be clean, if you don’t have any children and this is your first baby the house should be fairly clean after doing a spring cleaning on your own. Maybe even employing the help of hubby along with you. If none of this is possible then consider hiring a cleaning service to go through the house and clean up everything for you.

If you have older children and they are willing to clean up (without it causing stress on you) then go ahead and ask them to do it. Continue keeping up the good habits like throwing away the bathroom trash when it gets full, replacing the toilet paper roll and giving the tub a scrub before it gets really grimy and dirty.

My advice is to immediately wash any pot when your done using it, maybe it’s a sheet pan or instant pot just go ahead and wash it while it’s still warm. It’s easier to wash, that way just wash it with hot water and soap and the grime and grit will come right off. This will minimize the amount of pile up dishes you have at the end of each meal in your sink. I’m taking my husband’s tip with this one.

If you make a spill on the counter do your best to clean it up right away don’t wait, just quickly wipe it away. Otherwise, it will get hard and stuck, by the time you get to clean it.

Caring For Your Children

Some people might say that it’s easier when you have bigger children.
The hardest thing for me was keeping up with my boys hygiene, because I choose arguably one of the most difficult hairstyles to keep up with (when I wasn’t pregnant.) During this time I would recommend you to lower your standards a bit I know that sounds weird but…

bathe your child every other night or get hubby to help bathe the children. If that’s not possible and he works certain hours that just wouldn’t be feasible for your child, then every other day it is.

Avoid Excessive Screen Time

Another good thing to prep for your children are fun Montessori games while you’re pregnant so that when you’re postpartum they have all sorts of activities to get into that you have already sanctioned that are okay, to mitigate the excessive screen time that might occur because you are out of commission, and you need them to be quiet just to be frank.

Keeping Up with Your Hygiene

Keeping up with your own hygiene is very important during postpartum and really any point in your life but mainly postpartum of course because you just had a baby and being for perineum clean in your vagina clean so in order to do that it kind of need time

my suggestion is to before having your baby make a postpartum basket filled with all things that you’re going to need postpartum if you’re aware of what those things will be I will leave a list below and just a helpful idea was for what you can do. Taking what we call a cowboy or just really just a quick wash up at the sink can really do some good and a pinch of time when your baby is taking a nap and she or he may get up very very soon instead of taking a long luxurious back when your husband gets home you can be employed to look after the baby while you take your shower to get cleaned up.

If you don’t have anyone coming home to help relieve your baby the best thing you can do is when your baby is sleeping put them in their baby chair or in their car seat if you don’t have one and put them in the bathroom with you on the floor while you take your shower or cowboy. I used to do this with my son and he would just love being in the bathroom with me as a newborn while I took my shower he never cried so maybe it might work for you as well.

Before giving birth I stopped off on some new skin care products so that when I had my baby I don’t have to worry about my skin because sometimes you can forget about yourself when you’re doing with a newborn babe think about yourself before you have one you’ll do better in the future to make sure you take care of your skin and make sure it’s just as soft and supple as your baby’s skin. I keep all my skincare products in my basket in the bathroom so that I can easily grab them right after I get out the shower quickly apply them and then get back to being mama.

As for my hair the type of hair that I have I’m lucky enough that I can leave in a protective style for Max 3 months and my hair will still be okay it’s being protected and it’s growing plus it’s a style that I can wash my hair throughout those 3 months so if you don’t have the luxury of having an effective style just create a hair washing plan and a hair styling plan for one would be good for you to style and wash your hair or just hire a hair stylist to come over and do your hair if you can. If you can’t do any of those things just put on a head wrap girl or bandana and call it a day!

Don’t Forget Your Furry Friends

Throughout my pregnancy my oldest son has always been helping me take care of our cats even up until the day I gave birth to my daughter I was doing cat chores making sure they were fed because he was at a birthday party having an awesome time, if you have older children and put them to help you take care of your animals give them a schedule

and help them help them keep it until you’re ready to take over again I just started taking over the duties of looking over the cats at my second month of being postpartum so if it’s not too much if you don’t have any help at all to just get a free feeder for your animals so that you don’t have to get up every morning and feeding your animals they will already be fed.

Stocking Up on The Goods

Stock up on things that makes you like paper cups paper plates from Costco the enormous bags will keep you for the next 3 months you don’t want to have to deal with dishwashing at all I totally feel you and I’m there with you 100% just by some paper cups and paper plates. Stock up on things dishwashing liquid dishwasher pods trash bags toilet paper things like this so that you won’t have to go out to the store you won’t have to tell puppy to go out to the store you have everything you need right at home with you while you are recovering postpartum.

There’s nothing worse than having to run to the store for every little thing and being left alone when you just want to cuddle your husband and your newborn baby. This is the best time now more than ever to get a membership at your local wholesale store like Costco BJ’s or even Sam’s club so that you can have a large amount of everything that you need from baby diapers to baby wipes lotion shampoo all those things are going to be extremely necessary where your postpartum period.

Keeping a Happy Home

Don’t stress the small things yes it’s easier said then done, but as a postpartum mom
who was stressing out about almost everything her kids was doing that could be considered “annoying” or “rude” it’s not healthy or good for your mental space.

You need to be calm blissful and at peace the best you can. And the first step to doing that is looking at the bigger picture and realize that YOU just had a baby and your hormones are shifting and that needs to be respected even if the people can’t or don’t know how to respect it.

You can respect yourself first and allow yourself to be calm and comfortable in the most odd situations.
This is something that you have to make conscious decision to do and let that choice sit in your subconscious undisturbed no negative thoughts about how you can’t do it, because you can.

Also a lot of mommy bloggers miss this one when helping other moms prepare for baby
The rule apply to your partner as well. Don’t sweat the small stuff, he left his socks on the table again, oh he left the seat up and ughhhh He’s just being annoying lol. He’s adjusting as well too and honestly this isn’t the best time to pick fights and get into crawls over trivial things.

If your in a situation like most mothers in America today, your husband is out working all day and you have to hold down the fort. These tips will help you remain sane during your postpartum period and throughout motherhood.

Latest Posts

• Easy From Scratch Homemade Sourdough Naan Bread
• No Knead Homemade Sourdough Sandwich Bread from Scratch
• Homemade Simple Plain Sourdough Bagels
• Top 5 Easy Sourdough Discard Breakfast Recipes
• The Best Almond Flour Chocolate Chip Cookies