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

This past weekend my husband and I flew to Cancun, Mexico.  We spent four nights in Shangri-la, while our son stayed at home with visiting grandparents.  It was our longest time away from our son.  The weather was nice.  It was slightly overcast part of the time, but as long as I could sit in a lounge chair by the pool with my husband beside me, I was euphoric.  Blake was thoroughly entertained and happy at home, and the grandparents were thrilled to be with him.  What could go wrong?  Me.

Apparently, I need to take a vacation from my brain.  For the first day of my trip, it just wouldn’t stop the movie reel: what if our plane crashes?  What if Blake desperately cries for me for hours?  What if they put him in the warmer pajamas but the heat is turned too high and Blake overheats in the middle of the night?  What if they forget to read him “Goodnight Moon” at bedtime?

What if I shouldn’t have left my baby?   (more…)

Mothering: The most exhausting test of endurance I have ever experienced.

Not only does this sport require tremendous energy and money, it also requires parents to be constant activity planners.  That’s where moms Heather Flett and Whitney Moss come in.  They make parents’ lives a little bit easier with their creative blog www.RookieMoms.com (I guest blogged for them last week about 5 activities to stay in love, even when you have young children!) and book. Meanwhile, their book  The Rookie Mom’s Handbook: 250 Activities to Do with (and Without) Your Baby expands upon the blog by sharing helpful, funny and totally necessary advice for new moms, making it a great baby shower gift.

One of their blog posts, 25 Activities to Try During Your Maternity Leave, was oh so fitting for me because (more…)

At first she thought her husband was the sweetest thing ever. Once they saw the pink line revealing her pregnancy he began offering to carry anything and everything in her hands (grocery bags, shopping bags and even her heavy purse!). He’d clean the dishes so she could rest at the table; repair the computer so she wouldn’t have to bend down to the floor to reach the hard drive.

What a wonderful husband, she thought. And then he started on her love of tuna fish sandwiches. “If the doctor says you shouldn’t eat tuna more than twice a week, there must be something wrong with it. I don’t want you to eat ANY tuna while pregnant.” They argued, he won. What if something happened to the baby? She couldn’t live with the guilt of the tuna.

Then he was drinking beer. She wanted a sip, just a sip. “Are you crazy????” No sip. She began to lie about her lunches to hide the fact that she ate bologna (a prepared lunch meat – also on his do-not-eat list). This pregnancy had turned her husband into a paranoid barrel of overprotective obnoxiousness.     (more…)

Most people think about the New Year as a good time to lose weight, exercise more often or stop smoking.  But when one is pregnant, the New Year means something entirely different.  We stop dwelling on our appearance and start thinking about who we are, our purpose in life and what values and lessons we can share with our baby-to-be.

Taken from my journal during the time that I was expecting, here are my six New Year’s resolutions for becoming a better person, a better parent and a better partner:

1) Give Grandparent Goodness.
Pay more attention to the soon-to-be grandparents.  Cherish them for all that they give to us and for all the ways they care about us.  Call them more often.  Recognize that we are going to need them much more than we had ever imagined.

2) Be Happily Married.
Fight less with my spouse.  Once a baby enters the family, there is so much more to bicker about, so put on my mediator’s hat now and learn to fight less and compromise more before a little one is around to listen to our arguments.  (For tips on how to stop bickering with your spouse read my article on Web MD.) (more…)

I asked my twitter buddies “what’s your biggest pregnancy pain?”  Turns out I wasn’t alone in the pet peeve department. Here are the five pains that topped the list (I had three of them):

1) Nighttime trips to the bathroom

It makes sense that one would have to pee a lot more in the third trimester with all our organs squeezed into a small space. But peeing five times a night in the first trimester when the embryo is pea-sized? What’s that all about? Turns out that the amount of blood in our body increases dramatically when we get pregnant, causing our body to process more fluid and well… let more of it out.

2) Sciatic pain, otherwise known as “Oh, sh-t, I can’t move my leg!”

I was in the bathtub when it came on in the second trimester. I had to scream for my husband to help me out of the tub. I literally could not move on my own. For two days afterward I had to lift my right leg with my hands because I couldn’t let my right leg muscles move on their own without suffering intense, sharp pain. Thankfully that pain subsided with a week or two, though it can last longer for others. The pain results when the sciatic nerve, which runs from under the uterus to the legs, becomes inflamed from pressure or injury. Here are some tips to combat the pain. (more…)