There goes your RPG schedule! Good luck,Flutterby.
Best of luck to you.
As for any advice, mine would be to start drilling it into your husband/boyfriend’s head that anything said in the delivery suite is likely said while under the influence of major painkillers, and not to be taken to heart. My wife said some pretty nasty things to me while in the midst of labor, and I made the rookie mistake of taking them personally. Fortunately, her sister was in the room when things were said. The next day, she told her what was said, and my wife had absolutely no recollection. Unless he is told well in advance and often, he may be hurt by what you say while under extreme duress.
Other than that, have fun making him wait on you hand and foot. My wife woke me up at 3AM one night, complaining of a craving for air-popped popcorn. I spent the next 2 hours going from Wal Mart to Wal Mart (there are 3 within a 25 mile radius) looking for an air popper. When I finally got back home, she was fast asleep, and on my side of the bed! My son is now 3. Only within the last couple of months did she admit she had no such craving, she just wanted to see what I would do.
Lots of great advice no? Listen, don’t think you cannot do it without the epidural…Maybe you can handle the pain without this painkiller that may or may not numb you entirely…
My wife did it naturally, twice, and was happy she didn’t have te epi. Do not, however, wait too late. If you are more than 8 dialted and ask, you will not be able to get it anyway. My wife waited late and asked because she was induced,so before the iv fluid finished running, to prevent dehydration, she had to push.
The pushing and exertion is really something to watch, I do not envy you...About the epi… be very careful if you decide to get it and you have any amount scoliosis. I had 1 epi, out of 3 births, and ended up with a very nasty spinal headache b/c of it, and I only have a very tiny degree of scoliosis.
Also, do everything you can to make the place you deliver calming, relaxing, and comfortable. Adjust the temp, dim the lights, bring soothing music… whatever makes it comfortable for you. It will make a world of difference. 
Thanks for the advice people. I always find this board helpful for stuff.
Actually I’ve already been cranky (actually I think I’m getting depressed again. I should be working right now but I blew off work, partially because I feel like crap and partially because I really do not want to plaster on my happy Tim Horton’s face and serve coffee to a bunch of creepy old guys and drunks) and the father has noticed. He’s not my SO btw but we do live together, and he is very excited about the baby as well as his family is.
Been doing my best to eat well, have been taking vitamins (got the ones the doc recommended as well as folic acid). I’m due in December… which came as a surprise to me as I have been on BC (until I figured out that I was pregnant) and I didn’t learn until about a week/two ago. Probably didn’t help that I was sick for about 3 weeks with various colds/flu on top of having ‘morning’ sickness. So I just thought my body was just being extremely messed up and drained from being sick constantly.
John Carter There are already plans under way to turn her (his Mom says it’s a girl though we don’t know for certain) into the demon child as a part of plots as some organizers are our friends. I’ve actually seen other couples who had children have had their children become actual parts of plots. It was pretty interesting. Of course they were babies at the time and we played in places easy enough to get to and drag all the various stuff needed to take care of kids.
During labor, pushing is *** exactly like pooping***.
Shirley is right, and if you do think you’ll want the epidural, use every opportunity between now and then to build muscle memory - the epidural makes pushing really hard to feel.
Constipation during pregnancy - nature’s way of getting you ready to push.
Enjoy it as much as you can. Keep a journal. Get plenty of rest. See lots of rated R movies and go to dinner spontaneously. Cause these things are about to become rare events for the next dozen years or so.
No kids, but speaking as a family member who has loved watching and helping my cousins/sisters through their own pregnancies - use your family! It’s been awhile since my cousins had their babies, but I wanted to do anything I could to help them, both during their pregnancies and after the babies were born. They didn’t ask for help as much as they wanted because they didn’t want to impose, but we both wish they’d asked more! Don’t be afraid to rely on family and friends to help you out - especially since, if you’re a brand new mom - you’re going to be tired:).
Ava
Ava
Go to the movies as often as you can before December.
Go out to eat often and enjoy long leisurely hot meals while you can.
Don’t expect to wear pre-maternity clothes home from the hospital.
Men’s over-sized shirts purchased from the thrift store are just as good as any maternity top. If you find any maternity pants you like, buy four pairs of them, right then.
Your feet may get a little bigger or wider. Don’t freak out if it happens. By the end of the pregnancy you won’t be able to see them anyway.
If you get a video of the sonogram, make sure you label it and pop out the tab.
Relax and enjoy yourself. Sleep in as often as you can.
Oh, one other thing. Unless you plan to ban Disney from your house, buy any DVDs/tapes you come across. (Like Toy Story/Toy Story II which will soon be unavailable again.) Unless you’d like to rent them 40,000 times from Blockbuster.
Avoid The Aristocats and the cartoon version of 101 Dalmations. Sure, they’re cute at first but they will drive you insane after hearing them over and over and over. twitch
Balto is a great cartoon kids flick. There’s no singing in it. You will appreciate this. (Don’t get the second one though-singing.)
Remember that as long as the end result is a healthy baby, it doesn’t matter what happens during the delivery. (coming from someone who had a last minute c-section).
My daughter is a beautiful, happy, healthy four month old, and I’d do it all again tomorrow if I had to
-
Check out BabyCenter for some good articles (and forums if you’re into that)…another online source is the misc.kids.pregnancy newsgroup.
-
Do a baby pool online…they’re fun.
-
We liked the Dr Sears series of books…YMMV
-
Get yerself a boppy pillow when you’re close to due date.
-
Conga-rats!!
Congratulations! I agree with all the advice given, but just wanted to add: Make the most of it! Being pregnant for the first time is the most amazing experience - each stage of the pregnancy is just astonishing, and towards the end you won’t believe your tummy could ever get that large!
Also, bask in all the attention you receive whilst pregnant, because once the baby’s born, everyone will ignore you! I found this very hard to put up with, I loved being the centre of attention!
Once again, congratulations - I wish all the best to you and your babe - take care of yourself.
Hey!
Well, I’m still pregnant (23 week and counting down) and peanut butter give me the worst heartburn!!!
Ditto with drinking a TON of water. I have a filled bottle at my desk at work at all times and right when I get home. It does help!
Ditto with Kegels. My mom’s ob (35 yrs ago) told her to stop and start her urine in mid-stream while pregnant and every day after. (A good way to remember to practice Kegels IMHO).
** My mom swears that is why she’s had no “incontenance” problems and she’s now a happy and healthy 55! Then again, she’s had only 2 children, so I can’t speak for those women who’ve suffered more labors than that!
Prenatal yoga is great for calming your mind and stretching & lengthening your muscles. I recommend Prenatal Yoga with Shiva Rea.
** If you’re tired. Rest. Don’t feel guilty about it. I’m no expert but the first 3 months I beat myself up feeling guilty about not having energy to vacuum. smacks head Listen to your body, it’s trying to tell you something!
Good luck!!!
**one more thing…
I bought a body pillow from Thecomfortstore.com. Down/Goose Feather filled. LOVE IT. Highly recommend it. It was well worth the $46 and the cheaper brands (Wal-Mart, Sears) did not have enough stuffing to do any good IMO.
Take care!
Don’t listen to the horror stories. Chances are, your pregnancy and delivery will be wonderfully uneventful. And if they aren’t, nothing will be helped by having worried about it for months ahead of time.
Although they’re adorable, don’t waste the money on a complete wardrobe of newborn clothes unless you have good reason to believe your baby will be small. Most babies grow out of them so fast you won’t believe it.
The first weeks after the baby is born can be hard, sometimes very hard. Get your support system lined up and practice saying “Yes, we’d love some help!” and “No, sorry, but we’re just not up to visitors right now.”
My advice:
-
If you read ANY birth stories online, read at least 200, so you have a reasonably balanced picture. And keep in mind that women who have healing to do over dramatically horrible experiences are far more likely to post birth stories multiple places - so filter for good ones, too.
-
The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby is my favorite pregnancy book. Very ‘you have a brain, here’s the info, you pick what works for you’. I don’t like the What to Expect ones much, now that I’ve got more experience.
-
Morning sickness (aka all the time sickness): Ginger helps, especially if your digestion has slowed down. Whole lemon, washed and sliced in slabs into cold water helped me best, of everything. Even sniffing sliced lemon helped (kept some in a baggie in my purse). Also make sure you don’t get blood sugar crashes (eat enough protien, stay away from high glycemic index foods when possible, see glycemicindex.com for a searchable database). If you throw up often (more than once an hour, or more than three times in a day) call the midwife/OB. Keep those numbers in mind for baby, too - they’re the same for infant/child dehydration.
-
respect your exhaustion. One common comment I hear is that gestating (first trimester especially) is comparable to walking 20 miles a day. There’s a reason you are exhausted, so rest.
-
Respect your aversions, and your cravings, within reason. If you crave ice or plaster/dirt/rocks, go to the doctor, you may be anemic. If you crave sweets, you may actually be having blood sugar crashes, so protein and low-glycemic-index carbs will help more than sweets will, plus they’ll prevent cycling cravings for sweets (and prevent havoc on your insulin levels, which will be out of whack due to pregnancy in the third trimester anyway, as your body fattens up the baby by pushing blood glucose levels up - gestational diabetes is when your system goes too far, too soon, on that plan). But indulging now and then isn’t bad, necessarily. (oh, and what you eat flavors the amniotic fluid, kind of prepping them for what flavors to like later! Cool, huh?)
-
Get a support group. Online is good. My online forum isn’t free, but I like it anyway. (StorkNet)
-
If you want to breastfeed (or try), it may help to join LLL by about 6 months pregnant (or Nursing Mothers, Inc., or another lactation support group). You’ll then have someone to turn to at 3 AM when you can’t get baby latched, who knows what they’re talking about. If you’re freaked out about breastfeeding, try the book So That’s What They’re For - it will help. And check to see if lactation consultants are covered by your insurance. If you have any troubles at all, it is worth calling them right away. No medals for suffering if there is a solution available.
-
Consider what you want from your pregnancy. Body, mind, heart, and soul. If you have fears, don’t indulge them, examine them, so they don’t prevent you from having the experience that will satisfy you most. We tend to fear the unknown, and things we have been conditioned to fear. It is possible to overcome conditioning. And it is possible for conditioning to make things like labor much worse than they need to be. Avoid negativity, in your medical staff and in your social world. I highly recommend Birthing from Within for working through any pre-existing issues with pregnancy and labor. I also recommend HypnoBirthing for the same process, only individualized. After one labor with Bradley Method (quite decent) and one with hypnotherapy (with pitocin) and no pain at all (except crowning, which wasn’t bad), I’ll never do it without hypnoptherapy again. Not perfect for everyone, but worth checking into. No worries about drug side effects, or interventions domino-effects, and if you still need meds, you’ll know you gave it the best shot possible (and will probably have reduced the duration of needing meds, too). The same applies to the other methods (Bradley, certified Lamaze).
-
Before going along with any ‘of course this is what we all do’ or ‘this is what you need to do’ procedures or choices, ask yourself 1) if they are really the only option, and 2) who told you they were, and 3) what agenda that person had, and 4) whether you might not need more data, time, or perspectives before taking action. Almost always, there is more to consider. If you don’t give yourself the chance to make thought-out decisions, you are far more likely to regret the choices you made. Check out your assumptions, they may not apply to you.
-
Regarding labor, two main bits of advice: 1) get a doula - they reduce your chances of a c-section, and of even needing pain meds, help your partner focus on you without having to remember everything, and give you an extra body to cover for when your partner has to pee or eat. 2) learn a natural method of pain management (certified Lamaze - not hospital-class lamaze, Bradley, HypnoBirthing, Birthing from Within - the good classes take a lot of sessions, and require practice)… meds do not always happen on time, or work, or may be contraindicated. It is really essential (IME) that you have a functional, practiced, gut-level-trained-in coping method, even if you plan on using pain meds. I know far too many women who suffered needlessly because they didn’t get the results they ‘planned’ to get from meds, and didn’t have any kind of backup plan. The backup plan for ‘give me drugs’ is ‘practice for natural’, not ‘scream at the staff and hit everyone in sight’.
-
Even if you plan to go natural, have a backup plan. Know what meds are best for what situations, so you can make reasonable choices if you need to change paths. Also, if you plan for natural, with the lovely image that women are made for this and have been doing it forever, STILL take a class. We’re no longer used to managing our own endorphin levels in response to pain, or relaxing through discomfort, etc. Without living mostly medicine-free for your whole life, you’ll need the practice to get to full skill level.
-
Take notes, or get a journal, or email people with updates throughout pregnancy and save the emails. They’re really cool to read later, and a nice record to compare to with a second pregnancy (should you have one), when you will not be able to remember when you felt a first kick, or if you were really this sick the last time.
-
if you are at all prone to depression, do two things: 1) take DHA supplements now if you don’t eat at least 3 servings of fatty ocean fish per week (because a low level of DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and algae, is directly linked to depression in pregnancy and postpartum, and the supplements are as effective as meds, or more for some people), and 2) take meds if you need them. There are meds that are safe for pregnancy and breastfeeding. You being depressed before or after the baby is born does affect the baby - depression is contagious to babies, and they will exhibit depression symptoms well after the problem is resolved in the mother. This is really, really important for later neurological and social development, and attachment issues, as well.
-
When you are freaking out over something, talk to the baby about it. It isn’t weird, it does help a lot of women, and it can help you feel more sane (as odd as that may seem at this point). Especially if there is a procedure you feel might impact the baby (such as amnio), talking to the baby about it will help clarify how you really feel, and will also make you feel less selfish/guilty/whatever (it feels more like a joint decision that way, instead of an imposed one - and since pregnancy is often run by emotions, what it feels like counts for a lot!). (IME)
-
Keep in mind that pregnancy is a truly huge mental and emotional and spiritual (if you lean that way) process, as well as a physical one. Many of the emotional upheavals are in response to the mental/emotional/spiritual changes, not just the physical ones. This is okay. You’ll adjust, though birth will amplify some of it beyond all expectations. Ask your partner/etc. to be patient, to never let you see them roll their eyes, and to just give you a hug and tell you things will be okay if you flip out. Reassurance is helpful, even when they don’t know what is wrong, and you don’t either!
-
Consider midwifery. Most midwives practice in hospital settings, so we’re not talking ‘better have a home birth’ here… But the outcome numbers are better, across the board, for midwifery births - fewer c-sections, episiotomies, etc., no increased risk to mother or baby, and those results are corrected for pregnancy risk (no ‘well, they only do low risk’, but ‘when comparing equal levels of risk, midwifery outcomes are better, including lower morbidity and mortality’). Higher satisfaction levels, too. There are horrible midwives, as well as horrible OBs. There are great OBs and midwives both. The difference is not the obvious stuff, but the model of labor attendance they employ. Hospitals that use the midwifery model of care (whether OB-and-midwife or midwife primarily) generally have much lower c-section rates, even with the same cross-section of patients, same area, etc.
-
Make sure you feel respected by your care team. And make sure your care team isn’t pushing you towards less healthy outcomes for the sake of keeping you within some standard curve of pregnancy or labor (without clinical markers indicating a need to do so). The baseline is wanting a healthy baby, but some care teams are more concerned with the risks of ‘outside the box’ (even without any sign of something going wrong) than with the health implications of interventions they apply to keep you inside the box. A respectful care team will listen to your concerns, and will explain not only what they want to do, but what other options exist for the situation, and at what point those options go away. It is far easier to be happy with a last-minute, definitely necessary c-section than with one that happened because they didn’t listen or tried to rush you without reliable clinical markers indicating sufficient cause. It is far easier to accept meds when you planned on natural if the approach is one of trying all the options, keeping track of the clinical markers, and offering guidance with respect. (I’ve had an OB try to scare me into a c-section that was not actually indicated if she’d looked at my whole chart… she later admitted she was wrong across the board, but the lack of respect still colors the memories, even with a short, natural, pain-free birth … and compared to the long, medicated birth the first time, with full respect offered by the backup OB and clinical markers used as the primary guide for care, I can tell you the respect makes a difference!)
-
Speaking of which, don’t trust late-term ultrasound measurements for size estimates. They are barely better than flipping a coin, and asking the mom for her best guess is as accurate.
-
If you want to know the risks and/or benefits of a procedure, you can’t do better than the Cochrane Medical Abstracts (try Medscape.com, or do a search). Want to know if nipple stimulation is as good as pitocin for induction? They’ve got the data (it is actually better - same rates of success, no hyperstimulation of contractions, fewer other implications). Evidence-based medicine. Nothing like it!
SD on babies:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=178910
SD on labor:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=179250
SD on pregnancy:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=170180
If you can’t stomach those horse pill prenatal vitamins, don’t forego them altogether. Ask your doctor if you can substitute a comprehensive OTC multivitamin. There are lots of studies that indicate folic acid, etc., are essential for the developing fetus.
Walk, walk, walk! It makes you feel better and keeps your weight down.
If you can swing it, buy a videocamera and decent camera now. You’ll use it a lot and it’s a great visual record for all of you.
Enjoy being pregnant the first time. The second time will go by in a flash because Wee Butterfly #1 will be demanding all your time.
Congratulations! Babies are the best things in the world.
We recently had the “weirdest craving” contest over a lunch with a few co-workers. My boss’s wife had recently delivered and he related that what she craved was… Baby Powder. Yep, she would eat baby powder. Sprinkle it in her hand, lick a fingertip and eat it off her fingertip. She would snack on it pretty much constantly he said. Now that was pretty odd, but I still hold the title for being able to relate the weirdest craving during pregnancy.
My mother-in-law, my wife’s mom, craved freshly burned paper matchstick heads dipped in water. She would open a booklet of paper matches, tear one out, strike it and let burn for just a second before she blew it out. A quick dip in water to moisten it and then she would bite the head off and chew it up and swallow the masticated cardboard.
Her OB just shrugged. Damn it is hard to shock those folks.
Enjoy,
Steven
Communicate with your care providers----write down questions so you won’t feel rushed out of the exam room. Call your nurses and ask them anything. If they’re busy they can call you later. Tour your birth center. I worked high-risk Labor and Delivery and now work post-partum in a very busy hospital. I see OB docs all day. Feel free to email me, but get to know your doctors and nurses. Congrats!