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

You find out you’re pregnant.  You start shopping, or at least thinking about it.  When is it reasonable to buy maternity clothes?  8 weeks? 12 weeks? Second trimester?  Do you have to be showing before you start looking at cribs and paint colors?  Is it ridiculous to stop moms in the street to ask them about their stroller?

One of my closest friends just entered second trimester.  After nearly 10 weeks of waiting, she has released herself from the hold of “no shopping until…” and off she went to buy and buy and buy.  Her husband thinks the shopping is a coping mechanism to deal with the pregnancy.  I don’t.

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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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There’s no one way to manage it all, but we can certainly learn some tips and tricks from each other.  Momslikeme.com recently came to me to share advice for their readers about how to meet the demands of motherhood and business. Read momslikeme.com’s interview with me here and tell us what you think.

Are you planning to work after you have your baby? How would you answer those interview questions?

When Fox News called to invite me to be their on-air relationship expert to discuss a revolutionary new idea taking hold in Australia – marriage as a seven year contract with an option to renew – I figured it was just a light media-made topic put out there to have some fun on the morning show Fox & Friends. I was wrong.

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My friend Lena had a plan. An advertising executive at age 32, she was going back to work after her baby was born. She and her husband jointly made enough to rent a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan as they saved money to buy a house in the suburbs. She figured that if she could hold onto this job for 3 or 4 more years, they could buy their dream house. But, things didn’t turn out that way. Three months after her baby was born, when Lena went back to work, she found herself distraught with guilt over not being with her daughter. The work that was once so important to her now felt like a chore that prevented her from being with her family. Lena decided to quit her job and her family moved to a less expensive apartment in the suburbs so she could be at home with her daughter.

Consider yourself lucky if you are like Lena and have the ability to choose whether or not to go back to work. According to the U.S. census report a little over half of American women with a child under 1 were in the U.S. labor force in 2002. Most women have to work because of financial needs, and they have to return to work rather quickly. There are state by state laws, but at the federal level, which is the national minimum, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) mandates up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for childbearing or family care over a 12-month period for eligible employees.

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