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Recovering from surgery is never something easy. But if you’re a parent who’s trying to recover from a workplace injury or other disability so that you can return to work as quickly as possible, having your kids climbing all over you at home isn’t necessarily going to be a benefit to your healing body. Knowing this, it’s wise to prepare for your recovery so that you can safely and quickly get feeling better.
To assist you in doing this, here are three tips for recovering from surgery when you have little kids at home.
Plan For Longer Than You Think You Need To
Coming into recovery from surgery without some type of plan is a mistake, especially when you’re a parent who will be responsible for the care of their children. So while you might hope that you’ll only need to put a plan in place for a few days or weeks, actually a better idea is to plan much further out than you’re expecting to be healing up.
The idea behind doing this is that, in the event that you don’t get healed as quickly as you’d hoped, you’ll still have people there to help your kids and your family. It’s much easier to let people know that you actually don’t need their help anymore than you seek out help in desperation. So when you’re setting up help with 24/7 childcare, transportation, or meals, try to put these plans in place for at least a few weeks.
Accept Any Help Offered
If the people in your life know that you’re about to undergo surgery, or that you’ve just had surgery, you’ll likely have a huge outpouring of help offered to you. And while it might be hard for you to normally accept help, or ask for help, at a time like this, you’re going to want to accept any help that gets offered to you.
To make this easier, you may want to write down things that you anticipate needing help with, be it taking care of your kids and pets, doing yard work, getting groceries, making meals, and more. Then, when someone asks if you need help or what they can help you with, you can have an answer already prepared.
Let Go Of Your Normal Expectations
Not only can recovering from surgery be hard physically, but it can also be very hard mentally and emotionally if you’re not prepared for it, especially if you’re used to taking on so much on a daily basis.
To help you through this downtime, try to give yourself and your family some grace about keeping up with normal household expectations. If your kids have more screen time than normal when you’re recovering, that’s totally fine. Once you’re feeling better, you can get things back to normal. But for now, set your expectations a little lower so you and your family feel less stress.
If you’re a parent who’s going to be undergoing surgery soon, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you prepare for your recovery while your kids will be home with you.
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