My son was 2 years 9 months when his baby brother was born. He's autistic so we couldn't communicate with him much to prepare for the birth. He's very sensitive to loud noises, very clingy to mummy and would bang his head and get scared when I tried to practice the "noises mummy makes when the baby comes". We don't leave him with other people and debated what to do about support people for him. We ended up choosing my aunt and two pre-teen cousins who live an hour away as he enjoys my cousins company, but they missed the birth anyway.
We tried reading Hello Baby but he was obsessed with a small selection of books and would mostly ignore us reading it. We watched some births on youtube and that seemed pretty good.
On the day he was beautiful with me in early labour, as labour progressed my H was able to be in and out with him watching the TV then he put him down for his sleep. He woke up about 1 hour before baby was born. I was getting loud then and my H was in the pool with me. My MW checked on him and he chose to lie in his room for a while. When he got up he was brought into the room for a bit but he chose to leave and spent the birth playing with playdough in the kitchen. He clearly knew things were not like normal but he coped well and it wasn't till about 2 hours after birth that he started to flip out a bit over all the people and fuss (my aunt and cousins had also arrived by then) so we asked everyone to leave. He was calm then, we had a good cuddle and my H settled him to bed for his evening sleep.
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