I started with Instacart when it only offered two stores and I was pregnant. I was looking at the budget one day and thought “that’s silly, I can go to the store.” I almost canceled it and then thought “well, maybe I’ll wait until after I have the baby. It might come in really handy postpartum and I won’t want to/be able to go to the store then.”
Fast forward to 33 weeks pregnant and we ended up with an emergency C section and a NICU stay. To say I was NOT in the mindset to go to the store was an understatement. We had no bag packed, our car was still loaded with the gifts from our baby shower (which I was in labor for) and we hadn’t expected a preemie. The four days we spent in the hospital were made so much easier with deliveries from our favorite stores. I got nursing bras and pajamas, loose sweatpants and compression undies to accommodate my C-section scar, snacks for the room and preemie clothes for the little man.
We arrived home with no baby and a half-finished nursery. I thankfully had my family to go set most of it up while we were in the hospital, but everywhere I looked there were reminders thatthings hadn’t gone according to plan. I will never forget the night I looked on the camera app that NICU provided to check on my little one and it said “offline”. When I called the hospital to see what was going on, they told me he’d been moved to another spot and that specific area didn’t have cameras. I crumbled. It was good news that he’d been moved up to a less demanding area, but that didn’t help the baby-less new mom. I felt disconnected from him, guilty that others were caring for him in his first days on earth and missed him desperately, all the while in pain from the 3 day labor and C-section.
I wanted to be that mom that handled it all with grace, but I wasn’t. I was broken and struggling every step of the way. I was overwhelmingly sad and when we brought him home I was terrified that something bad was going to happen again. Needless to say, going to the store sounded like an impossible activity. 4 months later came the COVID shut down and I definitely wasn’t going to expose my preemie kiddo to the unknown disease (spoiler alert, he got it in the first 3 months anyways and was totally fine.) I remember thinking “good thing I kept that Instacart subscription!” It exploded through the next 2 years and 3 years later has become something my family relies on. Not because I’m overwhelmed, sad, or scared any more…but because it gives me more time with my family, friends and sometimes with myself. It’s definitely something I don’t like justifying from time to time, and I know life would be fun going to the store with C too (maybe) but for me mentally it is completely worth it.
The moral of the story – give yourself grace to make your life a little easier from time to time <3
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