I Had A Baby This Year. The Hospital Sends You Home With More Than Your Packing List Does.

i am in the fourth trimester right now, which means the hospital bag is recent enough that i can still picture exactly what was in it and exactly how much of it i did not touch.

every packing list on the internet has about forty items on it. a meaningful number of those items are things the hospital hands you for free, and some of the free versions are better than what you would have bought. meanwhile the things that actually matter in the first week home are mostly not on the list at all, because the list was written about labor and the hard part is after.

so: what they give you, what they don’t, and what i would have skipped. your hospital may differ and it is worth one phone call to labor and delivery to ask — they will tell you, they get asked constantly.

what they almost certainly give you

mesh underwear. the enormous pads. a peri bottle. usually the numbing spray and the witch hazel pads. a bulb syringe. diapers, wipes and formula for the baby if you are using it. a swaddle blanket. sometimes a nasal aspirator.

take all of it. genuinely, take it — it is billed into your stay whether it leaves with you or gets thrown out, and the mesh underwear is better than people expect. ask the nurse for extras before you are discharged. they will not be weird about it. they offer.

the peri bottle is the exception, and it is the one thing i would genuinely buy in advance

the hospital peri bottle is a squeeze bottle with a straight top. it works if you are willing to contort. the angled-neck kind sprays upward, which means you can use it sitting normally, which matters more than it sounds like it does when sitting normally is the hard part.

this is the one piece of advice from my own recovery i give people without hedging: fill it with warm water, and use the numbing spray the hospital gave you right after, not instead. the two together are the difference between dreading the bathroom and it just being a thing you do.

what runs out on day three

here is the actual gap. the hospital sends you home with a few days of supplies and postpartum bleeding lasts weeks. nobody tells you the second number.

Disposable postpartum underwear is what i would have in the house before you leave, because at some point you want to stop doing laundry about it. worth knowing before you order: these are sold as one listing per size rather than one listing with a dropdown, so check which size you actually landed on at checkout. same trap on the overnight maxi pads — buy more than you think and buy the overnight length, not the regular.

Witch hazel pads and perineal cold packs are both things the hospital starts you on and then you run out at home on the exact day you still need them. these are category picks — i am not going to pretend to brand loyalty about witch hazel — but having them already in the cabinet is the point, not which box.

the one nobody warns you about

the first postpartum bowel movement has a reputation and the reputation is earned. between the iron, the pain medication, the dehydration and the general situation, things slow down badly.

a stool softener is standard postpartum advice and most hospitals send you home on one, but “most” is doing work in that sentence and it is a bad thing to be out of. ask your provider what they want you taking and when — this is a real question for them, not for me, especially if you are nursing.

drink more water than you believe is reasonable. i am not going to be precious about which cup, but a large tumbler with a straw that you can drink from one-handed with a baby on you is the practical version, and the size is the feature. you will not get up to refill a small cup. you will simply not drink.

if you are nursing

the hospital may give you a sample of lanolin and it will be a sample. Lanolin and nursing pads are the two that get bought at 11pm in a panic, which is a bad time to be making decisions about anything.

i want to be careful here, because nipple pain that is not improving is not a product problem. it is usually latch, and latch is a lactation consultant, not a tube of anything. most hospitals have one on staff and most insurance covers outpatient visits. use them early rather than at the point of giving up. the cream is for ordinary early soreness, not for fixing something that is going wrong.

what i would leave at home

the going-home outfit in newborn size, probably. a full makeup bag. more than one phone charger, but do bring an absurdly long one — the outlet will be across the room and the bed does not move. three books. the birth ball, they have those. the nursing pillow, arguably, because the hospital has approximately nine pillows and gives them out freely.

also: the packing list told you to bring a coming-home outfit for the baby and did not tell you that a puffy coat does not go in the car seat. if it is cold when you are discharged, that is the thing worth knowing, not the outfit.

the part that is not a shopping list

none of this is the actual preparation. the actual preparation is knowing which symptoms mean call someone now — heavy bleeding, a fever, a headache that will not shift, calf pain, feeling like something is deeply wrong. those are the ones worth having on the fridge, and they matter for weeks, not days.

the guidance on postpartum care changed a few years ago and the six-week appointment stopped being the finish line, but the culture around it has not caught up. i wrote about what that actually means week by week, and it is more useful than anything in a bag.

and if you are still building the registry side of this, i made two of them seven years apart and some of what was on the first one is now federally banned, which tells you something about how much of this advice has a shelf life.

this post contains affiliate links and i earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. the peri bottle is the one i used and have opinions about; the rest are category picks — things i would buy, chosen on what the category actually needs, not things i can claim years with. i would rather flag the difference than let you assume. nothing here is medical advice; your provider knows your birth and i do not. #ad #WalmartPartner