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Home › Articles › Preparing for Baby › The Ready Position

The Ready Position

Preparing a Functional Space for Baby

By I.J. Schecter

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You probably remember your Little League coach hollering at you to get in the ready position: knees bent, glove open, one foot slightly in front of the other, weight on the balls of your feet.

Now it's time to assume the ready position again – this time for the arrival of your baby. You've read endless articles about preparing yourself for sleepless nights and the importance of giving your partner a backrub whenever she needs one. Now that you're well versed in the mental and emotional sides of parenting, you need to snap into practical mode and ensure you're physically prepared, too.

Once the baby arrives, you'll be juggling lots of balls, and you won't have time for getting rooms in order. Creating a highly functional physical environment for Baby will make it infinitely easier for you to operate on little sleep and tenuous mental capacity. Here are four important steps to undertake prior to the baby's arrival.

1. Pare
The baby's imminent arrival serves as a great excuse to attack your own space – with extreme prejudice. After all, before you can create a functional space for your baby, you need to ensure your own living space is well organized so you're not tripping over laundry baskets or hair dryers on your way to the baby's room in the middle of the night.

"Many parents-to-be focus so much on organizing the baby's room that they forget to organize their own space as a complementary step," says Joel Monson, father of a 6-year-old and twin 3-year-olds from Toronto, Canada. "Most people don't realize how little time they'll have once the baby arrives. Doing even a bit of work on your overall space can prove [to be] a huge benefit to your emotional well-being during those challenging first weeks."

2. Plan
Before making specific decisions like whether sleepers or onesies will warrant the second shelf of the changing table, step back and assume a global perspective toward your space. Talk about what should go where in a general sense. Don't commit to precise schematics just yet. Your goal is to make large-scale decisions about where things will go, such as cribs, gliders, changing tables, clothes and – often the biggest space occupier of all – toys.

"In the pre-baby stage, the first task is to find space for all the paraphernalia that comes with an infant," says Kathy Waddill, author of The Organizing Sourcebook

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