The last post started my small list of things to do when you’re readying yourself for a new kid.  Or a new all-encompassing something.  Here’s the balance of my suggestions for the checklist:

1. Create a plan for how you’ll take care of yourself.  If you got a person in your life or even if you went to a new job, you’d benefit from having in place the way you plan to live and stay alive during those first critical months.  I told my wife that it would’ve helped greatly if I could’ve come around month 4.  She hardly laughed.  I thought it was funny.  Those first months were brutal.  I still find myself telling people that I would have had an easier time emotionally if I could have surfaced a few months in, mostly because self-care was less possible.  I couldn’t sleep.  I walked too much.  I jumped up from quasi sleep when the boy moved, when the wife sneezed.  I learned how to care for the boy but not for me.
2. Implement above-mentioned plan as soon as possible but before your kid arrives.  Not much to say here.  You need to practice the pattern of your life early on.  The kid will so disrupt that pattern that if it’s not grained in, if it’s not second-nature, the plan will disintegrate.  Even then the plan was fall and crash and shatter.  The other day I went to exercise and I saw a friend, a personal trainer.  I waved and talked for a minute to Mimi, interfering with her client’s workout.  I knew her client didn’t care.  Personal training is torture so the pause was probably desired.  I told Mimi that I could count the times I had worked my fitness routine in the last year on one hand.  I didn’t have a way to “keep pushing play,” to continue exercising during those last eleven months. 
3. Decide what your measures of growth will be.  When I first started leading the staff at Sweet Holy Spirit years ago, before I knew about NC3 and what I’d be doing here, one of my coworkers challenged me on a particular decision.  I remember telling myself that that was the person, the relationship I wanted to renovate and change so that when I left, she’d be one of my best supporters.  It happened.  And that change was a marker for me.  It gave me a picture of growth.  When you start a new job, how will you know when you’re effective, when you’re wrong, when you’re at your best or at your worst?  What about the relationship you’re nurturing?  How will you know these things with a kid if you’re a new parent?  Decide what your pencil marks on the wall will be.
4. Tell your mother to help.  She will.  She’ll help you more than you want.  She’ll feed your kid black eye peas when he’s four months old and tell you she didn’t.  She’ll let the boy stay up later than he’s supposed to and she’ll devise a plan that’s different from the one you made.  Uh, for the record, my mama didn’t do this.  Not exactly.  My point is that mothers and family and loved ones are the best helpers when we’re faced with something new.  I am fond of repeating something a professor once said.  It takes the brain up to three years to adjust to a new role, to a major transition.  Let other people help you and give yourself time and grace to catch up to the role, to the relationship, and to its demands.

Would you add anything?