ExpectingWords.com - Helping expecting couples find the right words at the right times

Two days after I gave birth at a hospital in Manhattan, my husband and I joyfully embarked upon our ride home with our new baby boy. We videotaped our efforts to hail a cab (we decided a cab would be easier than parking our car in a garage blocks away), fumble with the car seat and buckle in our baby boy. As I tended to my boy in the back of the taxi, everything was wonderful, until I overheard the driver joke to my husband sitting in the front seat, “When she’s due? She looks like she still has a bun in the oven.” NOT FUNNY! And my husband didn’t miss a beat admonishing the driver. But, having been through nine months of pregnancy, I had already heard it all.

I don’t know of any pregnant mom who doesn’t have a story that begins with, “You won’t believe what someone said to me!” Often, I couldn’t.

1. “You look like you’re getting fat.“
My friend, who avidly reads this blog (thank you!), announced her pregnancy at work about four months in. Her boss’s response? “Oh so that explains your belly bulge. I didn’t think you were the kind of woman who would let herself go like that.”

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It is sooo much fun to buy for the little baby in your tummy. I remember looking at all those little pants, and shirts and hats and socks and I could not believe that I would soon have a child who fit into those tiny little cotton clothes.

My husband was the opposite extreme: He was superstitious and thought that buying anything before the baby was born would be a terrible jinx. So we compromised and I only bought the absolute necessities the baby would need as soon as we arrived home from the hospital.

As it turned out, our compromise saved us a lot of money. There are many items that you won’t need at all and others that you will get as gifts, so let me share the secrets I learned as a first-time mom.

1. Don’t buy mittens. They will not stay on a newborn.
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A babymoon is a trip for moms and dads-to-be to spend time together and nurture their relationship. Why babymoon you ask? Because it’ll be your last peaceful vacation for many years to come. You know all that well-meaning advice that makes you wonder why you decided to have a baby? “Sleep now because you’ll never sleep again!” “Go out to dinner now because you won’t have an uninterrupted meal for at least five years.” And I remember the heart-warming advice from a real estate agent friend: “take pictures of your house because soon enough you won’t remember what it looked like before your living room became a jungle gym.”

Sadly, all that advice is true. So if you have the time, plan an old-fashioned stay-in-bed-late vacation. Whether you can drive to a nearby getaway and stay at the Marriott, or take a week’s trip to Aruba, it’ll be worth your while, as it was for these babymooners at Baby GaGa and these over at Babyzone. A great time to do this is during the second trimester when the mom-to-be tends to feel less nauseous than she felt in the first trimester and less tired than she will feel in the third trimester.

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The Duggars’ 19th Pregnancy
Is it really any of our business?

What Pregnant Women Should Know about H1N1
Read what the CDC has to say.

Job-related Claims of Pregnancy Bias Were Up 14% in 2008
When the economy sours, things get tough for everyone, especially pregnant women.

Early Maternity Leave Reduces C-Sections
New study shows that moms who take at least one month off before their due date were four times less likely to have a C-Section. While it’s true that many of us don’t have the luxury of taking an early maternity leave, perhaps this information will encourage all of us to take it easy and ask for help toward the end of the pregnancy.

Celine Dion Announces her Pregnancy, Really, Really Early
I did the math with the help of Babycenter’s Due Date Calculator. Her spokesperson said she was due to give birth next May, and she announced this on August 18. Um, at most this means Celine was 5 weeks pregnant at the time of the announcement. Is that too early to go public? What do you think?