My wife and I are expecting our first child in February. Why must her idiot girlfriends (none of whom have kids, BTW) insist on freaking her out with horror stories, stupid superstitions, and old wive’s tales? With all the hormone changes she’s already crazy emotional as it is (one night a couple weeks ago I found myself apologizing for something I did in her dream). Please stop throwing more fuel on the fire. For example, back when we were looking into prenatal vitamins, one of her friends told her that the cheaper generic brands cause miscarrages. She knew someone who knew someone it happened to. Thanks to you, we’ve ended up spending over $100 going through a half dozen different brands before finding one she was comfortable taking. :mad: The latest was that if you brush your teeth during the first month after delivery, all your teeth will fall out. The friend’s cousin had a friend who’s sister this happened to. Now my wife agrees that sounds stupid, but has declared she won’t brush her teeth either, just in case it’s true. :rolleyes:
And stop telling us if the baby is a boy or a girl. You can’t tell from charms, or how you’re carrying, or numerology, or what foods you crave, or whatever. If any of that worked, the doctor would have done it that way already. I’ve been counting, so far it’s 4 votes for a girl, 3 for a boy, and one inconclusive (Her friend hung my wife’s wedding ring from a gold chain over her belly and said you can tell from the way it was swinging. The first trial said boy, but the friend said she messed it up. Second trial was girl, at which point the friend concluded the chain, at only 12K, didn’t have enough gold content to work properly).
Dammit, just shut the hell up already! You’re not helping!
Hie thee to a bookseller and get your wife a copy of Baby Lore. Seeing the crap her friends are spouting in its natural habitat of old wives’ tales from around the globe might reassure her that they’re all a load of bunk.
Then again, if she decides that everything in the book might be true… :eek:
I remember hearing such things when I was pregnant, especially with my first. I didn’t believe any of the crap then, and I must say, neither did most* of the girlfriends/old aunts who spun the lies either. Mostly it’s meant to be harmless fun to help bond and impart real wisdom to new mothers.
Once you’ve started taking it seriously though, yer’ fucked.
*We had cats when the bairns were little, and one old friend of the family nearly had a heart attack, claiming that cats literally suck the breath out of babies’ mouths causing them to suffocate in their sleep. She stormed off in a huff when I burst out laughing.
I agree that the people spreading theses stupid lies and rumors need to stop, but is there a reason your wife refuses to listen to HER doctor, and instead takes anecdotal evidence from 4 stops down the telephone game over honest medical advice? I mean, it’s pretty easy to ask your doctor “will my teeth fall out if I brush my teeth after I give birth?” He’ll say “no, but they might if you DON’T.”
The real problem is your wife is extremely gullible…I know the hormones are causing all sorts of crazy mood swings and attitude changes, but you need to bring your wife into the doctors office SOLELY to address these crazy things so the doctor can tell her the friends are bogus.
I know a woman who has a 1 year old boy. When she was pregnant, someone at her work said she shouldn’t lift her arms over her head or she’d have a miscarriage. We get a lot of laughs out of that one.
Now that I’m not that far from delivering (2 weeks…eeek) I can look back over my pregnancy and see that when these “well meaning” types spouted their advice/horror stories I should have just covered my ears and loudly la la la la la laed myself right out of there! Honestly, there is something about being pregnant that makes you a nervous wreck. There is a tremendous amount of information coming at you - both validly frightening and erroneous…My husband combated this hysteria by reading everything he could get his hands on (I read the books too, but for some reason all logic and good sense seemed to seep right on out my ears - especially in the first trimester)…He would say, “Dearest, it says in the book that a little bit of caffeine won’t make the baby have lower test scores in the future, become a serial killer, have one eye, have a fondness for the accordian…etc”
Jet Jaguar , the hormones can be fierce…Just keep telling your wife how it really is and eventually she will be able to calm down and relax a bit. Be firm about it though. She needs you to be the voice of reason to replace all the other ridiculous information she’s receiving… Good luck and congratulations!
What backwoods holler or third-world country do you live in that anybody could conceivably believe such things?
I think when the baby is born and the friends call up to ask about it, you should tell them the baby was born with flippers because your wife was startled by a dolphin at Sea World.
There’s a woman at my work who prides herself on being able to determine a baby’s sex by mixing Draino and a bit of mommy’s urine. After sloshing it around she predicted I was having a boy, twice, correctly. AFAIK she has NEVER been wrong!
All of the “good natured” advice can be wearing though. My FIL was constantly on me about drinking milk. I hate drinking milk. I told him I ate lots of cheese and leave it alone. He continued with this through my second pregnancy as well. Geez, I think I can figure out my diet on my own, thanks!
Oh, dear Og, tell your wife to brush her teeth. Contrary to what you may believe, pregnancy hormones make you more emotional, not more stupid.
Generic prenatals are fine. One cup of coffee a day is fine. To be safe, stay away from all alcohol and tobacco. And tell your wife she needs to strengthen her :dubious: muscle.
I don’t have kids, but have always been fascinated by the way some women go out of their way to mystify/scare/horrify new mothers-to-be. If I tell a friend I have cancer, I hope my friend will be supportive and sympathetic. So, if I’m expecting “a blessed event” it is ok for friends to tell me every wacko misquoted sick baby story they’ve ever heard or read on the Internet? At a time when my hormones are already doing things to me I’m not accustomed to having happen? I just don’t get it.
The “guess the sex” stuff is harmless and usually funny. The “old wives” were all 100% sure I was a boy back in 1960. They were 100% wrong.
Do you know the difference between a hormone and a vitamin? You can’t hear a vitamin.
And about half of those people will be proven right. And you’ll never be able to convince them otherwise. And the other half will remind themselves of all the other times they were right, thus discounting this isolated anomoly.
My own prediction: It will be a goat. Or possibly a human. Prove me wrong!
Some folks sure think so. Also they have the right to grab your belly whenever they want to, without asking first.
I tell my preggo friends that my pregnancies were awful, for reasons that are probably completely irrelevant to them, so I won’t tell them pregnancy stories when they’re expecting themselves. But I had two great births, so I’m happy to tell them about those if they want to hear some positive birth stories. It always seems, though, that if I start telling them about how well a birth can go, hoping to give them courage and a positive attitude, there’s always some woman in earshot who has to tell about her horrible birth and strongly imply that I must be lying. What do you do with these people? Last I checked, it was still illegal to forcibly remove their voiceboxes…
I believe telling those stories is as wired into us as forgetting the pain the second we hold the baby. I think they are, at a subconcious level, about bonding with each other as women and connecting to the new life. I don’t usualy like the new agey crap but it does seem to happen.
Oh, my gods, the Baby Lore. I was 16 years old and pregnant and all I heard from my mother, my grandmother, my step-aunt, all the adult women around me was how I shouldn’t watch horror movies because the kid would come out looking like Chuckie, and I shouldn’t raise my arms over my head, and there was no sense trying to do my hair because it wouldn’t hold a curl, and I forget what-all else.
And it only got worse after the baby was born. Don’t let a draft hit him or he’ll get colicky, give him some thinned out rice cereal in a bottle and he’ll sleep all night (at 1 week old!), his head’s going to fall off if you keep holding him like that…
My doctor told me to just smile and nod when they started talking (invaluable advice which I follow to this day for all kinds of situations, and which it might be wise for your wife to adopt) and carry on following his orders.
