After writing about the car, the suitcase and the flight home – it's time to connect it all into one guide: how to properly plan the stay itself, those weeks in the U.S. that begin with waiting for the birth and end with flying home as a family. This period is a strange and wonderful mix of honeymoon, parenting boot camp and bureaucratic race – and planning determines which of the three wins.
Start with the key question: when do you fly? The common recommendation is to be in the birth city around week 37-38, and not to anchor to the due date – roughly a quarter of births come early. Book flexible tickets, and plan a default for a very early birth: who flies immediately, and who wraps things up at home and joins.
Now – where do you stay? After dozens of journeys I've accompanied, the formula has pretty much stabilized: an Airbnb or extended-stay apartment with a kitchen and washing machine, within a 20-minute drive of the hospital where your surrogate is delivering. A kitchen – because a month of eating out grinds down budget and soul; a washer – because a newborn produces laundry at industrial pace; and proximity to the hospital – for pre-birth appointment days, and especially for the scenario where the baby stays a few extra days in the ward and you shuttle back and forth. Also check for a flexible cancellation policy – your start and end dates will change; that's almost a promise.
What else goes into the plan? Think of these weeks as three chapters. Chapter one, the wait: strange days of anticipation – use them to learn the area, final gear shopping (car seat!), and time with your surrogate. Chapter two, after the birth: everything revolves around the baby and the U.S. passport – this is when the tracking table from my Israeli-registration post works hard. Chapter three, waiting for the final documents: actually the calm part – baby in arms, bureaucracy in the background, and a chance to breathe. Many families remember precisely these days, just the three of you alone in the world, as the sweetest of the whole journey.
And budget, roughly? A month's lodging, a car, food, companions' flights if any, and contingencies – plan a range rather than a number, and lean on the emergency cushion I wrote about. Don't forget travel insurance for yourselves for the entire period, including automatic extension if the stay runs long.
My tip: choose an apartment with a comfortable sofa and a nice view from the window. Seriously. You're going to spend long hours there with a baby asleep on you, and it's the difference between "we were stuck in an apartment for a month" and "we had a family honeymoon".
