As the waiting game continues, I thought I'd share some of the books that I've enjoyed over the last 9 months. Can this be considered the virtual nesting instinct?
The Pregnancy Journal
This was one of my pregnancy essentials (right up there with the body pillow). It is definitely my favorite pregnancy book.
As soon as you know your due date, enter it into the end of the book and then fill in all the dates backwards. Now you have a customized calendar that tells you every thing that's going on with you and the baby for the next nine months, from raisin stage to watermelon stage. Here's a hint: if you experience morning sickness you'll find that raisin stage is just about as uncomfortable as watermelon stage.
The Pregnancy Journal also features occasional tidbits about childbirth in other cultures and throughout history. These usually involve squatting.
Your Pregnancy Week by Week
If you want something more technical, this book is the way to go. I appreciated the sketches that show what the baby looks like inside you each week. Like the Pregnancy Journal, Your Pregnancy also tells you what size fruit your baby is at each stage. What is with the fruit comparison?
Warning: Some weeks are dedicated entirely to worst case scenarios. This can be upsetting at the time, but now that I haven't had to experience any of these worst cases I find those chapters strangely comforting.
There are also scattered helpful tips for dad, which I found incredibly helpful to me as they often include suggestions of how he should be pampering you.
What to Expect When You're Expecting
I'm certain I'm not the first person to recommend this book to you. It takes the month-by-month look at pregnancy, which you'll probably find is more accurate than the day-by-day or even the week-by-week. In some ways our pregnant bodies are machines, but some work at different speeds than others.
A sister of a friend of mine gave me some good advice about "What to Expect." She told me that right when she found out she was pregnant she bought this book and read it cover to cover. It scared her to death. She made me swear that I wouldn't do this.
I have a confession to make. I stopped reading this one at around 7 months. That's when my childbirth education classes took over. I preferred learning from a real person because I could ask all the questions I wanted. You can ask a book questions, but it might not answer.
The Girlfriend's Guide To Pregnancy
This is a great first pregnancy book to read, especially if you're like me and you were actually surprised when you realized that you wanted to be a mom. One thing about The Girlfriend's Guide that turned me off was the chapter that recommends that you don't exercise. I've exercised at least 3 days per week since my morning sickness subsided. For me exercise has never been about looking better. Before I got pregnant, I was pretty comfortable with being a normal-sized woman. Not normal like what magazines will have you believe is normal, but really normal. I still exercised because it made me feel good. That doesn't change in pregnancy.
You don't want to exercise to lose weight in pregnancy, but the other benefits are amazing. The jury is still out as to whether exercise will help me in labor, but it certainly made me feel better and sleep better. Of course, talk to your doctor about what kind of exercise you should do.
Baby Bargains
Don't start thinking about all the gear you need to buy until the beginning of your third trimester. It will make your head hurt. When you do start thinking about it, invest in this book. I'm not saying that your head won't hurt, but it may hurt a little less.
Baby Bargains tells you what you need and what you don't need and where to buy everything, from crib to clothes to everything in between. Sometimes what the authors of this book considered a bargain still seemed pretty expensive to me, but the book is still a great resource.
After I've proven that the stuff we've amassed is actually useful, I hope to post another page like this devoted to my gear recommendations. Whether I have time to do this will be another story.
Fit Pregnancy Magazine
Every time my mom came to visit me she brought me an issue of this magazine. If you like Self magazine in your non-pregnant life, you'll probably like Fit Pregnancy in your pregnant life.
I like the fact that this magazine interviews pregnant celebrities. I won't lie to you, I was secretly absorbed with the pregnancies of both Kelli Ripa and Catherine Zeta Jones. FYI: Catherine Zeta Jones had to have been lip-synching her performance at the Oscars. She's due a week after me and I get winded when I belt out one verse of Tom Petty's American Girl in the car with the windows rolled down.
American Baby Magazine
I'm not going to say that this is the best childcare magazine out there. It just happens to be another one that my mom gave me a subscription to. And moms know best, right? This magazine took over around the 8th month when I started to lose interest in what was happening to my body and gain interest in the being that was going to soon make her appearance.
One thing you'll learn in the later months of pregnancy is that there are several very different metnods of parenting and everyone thinks that their method is right. So far I prefer childcare magazines to childcare books because the magazines represent several different theories of child rearing, as opposed to just one.
Finally, I want to recommend Pregnant While You Work: A Practical Guide to Having a Baby and a Job. Yes, it was written by my mother-in-law. Yes, it was written nearly 10 years ago. Yes, it helped me adjust to the last nine months as a pregnant woman in the workplace. I wish she would write another book like this because she has a lot of really honest, useful and sane advice about the 9 months of insanity that is working while pregnant.
Recent Comments