Читать книгу Dad's Guide to Pregnancy For Dummies - Sharon Perkins - Страница 99

No doubt you already have the basics covered — setting up accounts on Facetime, Skype, Whatsapp, or Zoom, if you can. If you’re a servicemember, video chats are difficult, if not impossible. The timing can be off, especially if you’re on the other side of the world. You’re also presumably away to do a job, a job that may not be very flexible as far as sitting in the front of the phone or laptop goes. Getting your schedules synched can take some doing, especially if your partner is also still working on the other side of the world at a job without a lot of flexibility. And for some assignments, particularly in the military, you may be completely out of touch for weeks at a time.

The best thing to do in this type of situation is for your baby to be born at a time when you’re not fathoms under the sea and completely out of contact. But babies don’t always come when we plan them, which, if this is your situation, you’re undoubtedly all too aware.

One of the best things you can do in this type of situation is to make sure your partner has a lot of support at home; in some cases, this might mean having her stay with her family or having family members stay with her while you’re gone. She gets to make the decisions as to what kind of help she wants and for how long. Even if you and her mom are at constant odds at the best of times, this is the time where you just have to deal with having her mom, sister or best friend knowing more about what’s going on at home than you do.

After you’ve helped line up a support team, take care of as many of the household tasks ahead of time. Replace things that might need replacing before you leave, create an up-to-date list of repair people, get the car’s routine maintenance out of the way, and generally take everything you can off your partner’s shoulders before you leave.

It’s also important for you to keep up with what goes on during different months of pregnancy. This book gives you a lot of info on what happens during each stage of pregnancy, and you can find other books that go into greater month-by-month detail, such as Pregnancy For Dummies by Joanne Stone and Keith Eddleman (John Wiley & Sons). Knowing what’s going on at different stages allows you to ask relevant questions and to empathize with what your partner’s experiencing at different points of pregnancy.