Class Overload?

When you have a baby you can sometimes feel pressured to keep up with an endless flow of classes and groups, starting with Baby Massage when you have a small baby, then maybe Baby Yoga and as they get older there's swimming, music, dance and ballet to name just a few!

I did actually find these classes a really good motivation for getting me out of the house and meeting other parents in the early days of being a mother, (you know those days when you could quite happily stay  in the house 24/7 going through an endless pattern of sleeping and feeding until the days and nights merge in to one another...) but I felt like I overloaded myself with classes to some extent.

I often found myself running ragged, leaving washing undone and dishes on the side just so I could run out to a Baby Sign class where my child would spend half of it screaming and the other half inside my blouse breastfeeding, and I paid £5 for the pleasure, as well as the bus fare to get there! So why do we do this to ourselves? Is it just a case of peer pressure, Is being a new mum like being back at school trying to keep up with the latest trends?

And then there's the costs of uniform or equipment, you start to feel like you're letting your little one down if you don't buy them everything the teacher recommends, but how do all the other mum's afford it on maternity pay?

Don't get me wrong there are some classes that both me and my babies have had a real benefit from, but others I feel were a waste of both time and money!

If I was to choose one class that I would recommend to friends and do again it would have to be Baby Swimming, we went to classes at a local private pool run by a lovely company called Aquanauts and both my children loved it, starting at an early age of 4 and 5 months respectively, they learnt social skills as well as being comfortable and safe in water and I made some really good friends, (well when you share a tiny changing room you don't have much of a choice do you?)

As for the costs, we paid on a termly basis so family and friends would contribute for birthday and Christmas presents, and it was much better than a house full of plastic toys that would barely get played with! Of course there are other things that you need to buy for you little on to go swimming, but we found Konfidence Babywarma's and Nappycova's to be really great value and once they were too small for my babies they had really good resale value! Always thinking of the pennies!

Did you do classes with your babies? Did you feel under pressure to do them all? What was your favourite?




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