If you’ve recently given birth to a beautiful child, your only responsibility is to get some good rest, to relax, and to gather your strength while holding your little one in your arms. As you move back home and get used to life as a new parent, you’ll rebuild your strength day after day, and now have a more important priority than you could have ever envisioned.
While it can feel romantic to give everything to your child without every focusing on yourself, the truth is that being the best parent you can be involves looking after number one. But what does that mean in practice?
Well, it means getting back into your self-care habits to the degree you can. But hitting the gym, eating perfectly and sleeping throughout the night every night might not be outcomes you can perfectly follow at the moment. After all, if you’re losing plenty of sleep due to your baby waking up at night, odds are you won’t have the energy for a full gym workout in the day.
However, there are certain exercises and habits you can take part in to overcome that sedentary or job-based exercise alone. In this post, we’ll discuss why gardening is the best of them:
Fresh Air & Green Environments
In the summer, occupying a garden space can be a lovely experience. If your partner is looking after your baby, then you can spare ten or twenty minutes in the garden to water your plants, to enjoy the environment, to dissolve some of your stress, and to feel a little less “contained” by the four walls of your home. This can be nice especially if you need a quiet moment to yourself, because sometimes our emotions can feel a little frayed after the intense new experience of bringing a child home.
As Intense As You Like
As we mentioned above, a lack of sleep and the requirements of caring for a little one can be tough on the body. For this reason, any exercise you do needs to be flexible, and offer you a range of intensity levels. Well, pulling weeds and tilling soil can be hard work, while gently planting seeds in pots can be comforting, as can watering plants. You get to decide how hard each project will be, and you only need to do one thing at a time.
Stimulating, But Not Overly Complex
From picking out the best lawn fungicides to trimming your hedges or painting your fence, restoring your garden can be mentally stimulating but won’t drain you of your mental energy. That way, gardening can become quite hypnotic as well as physically rewarding, allowing you to feel as though the “work” you’ve done has been put to good use. This means you can return from fifteen minutes of gardening while your baby napped, and not worry too much about a job left undone, or feel like you need a four hour nap to recharge.
With this advice, you’ll be sure to enjoy gardening even during post-pregnancy, as and when it’s best suited for you to do so.
