Pregnancy

Some of you might know that I’m a bit infertile. So yes, I have a biological child and currently a lovely pregnant belly, and yes, it took some prescription drugs and lots and lots and lots of sex and maybe even some other stuff that’s none of your business to arrive at this point of motherhood. My point is that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to conception.

One of the first things you’ll read if you are looking for tips and tricks to get pregnant is that you should stay in the horizontal position, with your hips lifted, for some number of minutes after intercourse. I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but an upward-tiled pelvis is not the key to getting pregnant (or not getting pregnant.) There are hormones and fallopian tubes and other complicated things at play.

(Perhaps putting on a one-piece black unitard after sex will help you conceive?)
Let’s just consider how many people throughout history have successfully achieved pregnancy without sliding a couple of pillows under their butts. Some of you probably got pregnant in an entirely vertical position. At least one of you did jumping jacks after you had sex, specifically hoping not to get pregnant. And some of us will have our hips raised as high as our hopes for twenty-five consecutive cycles and not get pregnant at all. And this is why I find this product hilarious:

Conception Curve, the Positioning Pillow

From the Conception Curve web site:

The Conception CurveTM Positioning Pillow is a contoured pillow cut to fit the shape of a woman’s body. It is made of sturdy polyurethane foam and can easily support women of all shapes and sizes.

The satin soft cover is hypoallergenic and easy to keep clean. There are convenient side handles that make it simple to pull the pillow under your buttocks.

My favorite part is this excellent benefit-oriented copy:

NO MORE MESS

Why soil your good linens every other day? Pillows are meant to support your head, not the other end! Conception CurveTM Positioning Pillow is lined in a water resistant material so you can wipe stains away without worrying about getting the foam portion wet.

So order yours for just $85.00 at ConceptionCurve.com.
——————————————
OBVIOUSLY this is not a paid product review.

“Is today your due date?” a woman called across the park this morning.
“No,” said my husband, laughing.
I chose to ignore the exchange, instead helping Julian with his sand toys.
“Must be soon,” she concluded.
“Not really,” said Ryan. “Two months to go.”
“Wow,” she said. “Oh, wow.”
I just stood there like the stunned whale that I am.

Happy Mother’s Day to me!

Picture taken at 32 weeks 0 days, aka 7 months for you non-birth-mothers.

A few months ago, I was the audience of Heather’s constant complaining that no shirts were long enough to cover her pregnant belly. She, however, has a tattoo that peeks out from above her pants’ waistband, so her final months of pregnancy are a nice opportunity to show that off. She is also in possession of that peaches and cream skin thing, so her hard, round belly looked like a delicious scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I don’t have a cool tattoo, and I have a map of the Los Angeles freeway system rendered in blue veins across the sides of my stomach, so the fact that my shirts are no longer meeting my pants is now irritating to me. This is not a view of myself I want to share with the world.

Before I file a lawsuit against Motherhood Maternity for portraying themselves as sellers of maternity clothes that last through a full pregnancy, not just until seven months, I might consider giving myself a humorous temporary tattoo. I think these are quite funny, and so is pretty much everything else sold at perpetualkid.com.

(Thanks GoodyBlog for the tip)

Everyone responds differently to pregnancy weight gain and subsequent pregnancy weight loss. Yeah, I know. And I guess each pregnancy responds differently too. Fine.

I’m a big believer in the nine months up and nine months down school of thought, but I have to admit I’m just real impatient! At this point (seven weeks and one day out), I don’t even have my eyes on non-maternity pants. I’m just aspiring to smaller and smaller maternity jeans:

Yesterday, I started wearing Whitney’s XS Old Navy Maternity jeans. Before that, I was wearing Erin’s size M Old Navy Maternity jeans. And I still have my eye on Laurie’s (life-changing I’m sure!) Seven Maternity jeans. In fact, I’d rather squeeze into them than wear my real pants. Sick, right?

In real life, I don’t pay top dollar for jeans. I’m comfortable in the $30 range and might even go up to $50 if I thought they were perfect for me. Unfortunately, I must confess that I did splurge on my own $100 maternity jeans under the mistaken notion that I’d wear them every day for 10 months or more and they’d make me happy with my changing body all the while. The two pairs that I tried were a bummer from the get-go.

The Bella Dahl Jeans had a belly band that rolled up making them lumpy most of the time and also hard to pull up. I paid about $98 with tax for the jeans and another $10 to have them hemmed.

The nice folks at Maternity Xchange allowed an exchange. Yay! I dropped an extra $12 to get some Earl maternity jeans that were notable for the lack of band. Instead, they have some spandex in the pocket area that expand and contract without looking all maternity. Cool, I thought. Welp, the dang things just don’t stay up. Saggy. Are they too big or too small? I never could figure it out. I tried them from five months pregnant through seven weeks post, each week. I guess I’ll keep trying… what the heck do I have to lose at this point?

And I’ll keep trying to wedge into those Sevens too. At least I can wear my super-long maternity shirts.

Of all the extras that the evil woman at Mimi Maternity has tried to pawn off or upsell at the checkout (creams, potions, cord blood banking, college savings), these faux food bars are my absolute favorites. At the time, I bought the Baby Needs Chocolate Bellybar to use up my gift credit so I would never have to darken their doorway again (that’s a hormonally-charged story for another day).

Anyway, I loved it! Love love loved it. In fact, just thinking about the one single (overpriced) bar I had that one day eight or twelve weeks ago makes me tear up and salivate. It was tasty with pretty good ingredients and just a little too expensive to turn into a habit.

Maybe you can add them to your registry or tell your mate that having them on hand will help curb your pregnancy mood swings? Good luck scoring a case!

I am packing for the hospital to go have my second baby and I *wish* I had not already donated my stupid Christmas socks. They would have been perfect:

• Red. For obvious reasons.
• Snuggly warm.
• Non-skid. Also for obvious reasons.
• Reindeer pattern. I care much much less if anything happens to them than if I had these little beauties from Paul Frank.

So, let my lesson be your lesson!

Here are my criteria:

• Ends with a vowel or an R
• Probably 2 syllables maybe 3
• Definitely not in the top 20, hopefully not in the top 100
• Sounds nice with “Holden and”
• Doesn’t sound like a dog’s name

That’s it… please help me. I love one name and my husband doesn’t love it (yet) so we may be screwed. Sure, if I have another 44-hour labor, maybe, just maybe I’ll get my way… but I’ve gotta cast a wider net in case that doesn’t happen!

I was prepared to not like the Bella Band. Heather had already been pregnant for 4 months when I became pregnant, and didn’t have much positive to say about it. However, I was excited about any invention that came into existence since my last pregnancy, albeit skeptical. If this is such a great thing, why didn’t we have it in 2004? It wasn’t exactly the dark ages back then.

My friend Quyen, (who gave birth this week to Baby Jack!), gave me her Bella Band and said it wasn’t useful. I put it in my top drawer, thinking I’d check it out when I started showing. Or not.

A few short weeks later, I was showing, and having lunch with Joanne, who raved on and on about her Bella Band. She has three. She wears them AND sleeps in them. Then, my cousin’s partner, Layla, a pregnant woman with a supermodel’s body, pulled hers up and revealed to me that her designer jeans were not maternity, but simply unbuttoned beneath her Bella Band. And so I was sold.

I got mine out of the drawer and slid it on over maternity jeans that are still too baggy around the hips, but that I fully expect to grow into as my ass expands over the next 5 months. Problem solved.

This thing is useful, but not perfect. You may be yanking it up every 20 minutes, but perhaps that is half as frequent as you’d be yanking on your ill-fitting clothes without it.

In summary, there are four scenarios for wearing the Bella Band:

Scenario 1- You want to wear your favorite normal jeans, but they are too tight due to the bun in your oven. Solution: Wear the jeans, but don’t button and/or zip. Wear the Bella Band over the jeans. You still have the wash, pockets and length of the jeans in which you feel the best.

Scenario 2- You are anxious to wear your maternity pants, but they are too baggy around the waist. Solution: Wear the maternity pants, but with Bella Band over them as a more snug waist panel that will keep your pants up.

Scenario 3- Your belly is so enormous that your waist is far larger than your hips, and no pants will stay up. Solution: Wear Bella Band as an extra snug layer to keep your pants from sliding down the mountain that your lower torso has become.

Scenario 4- Your belly has begun to take over your entire body and no shirt on this planet is long enough to cover the whole thing. Solution: Wear Bella Band around your waist to cover that skin that lives in no man’s land between your pants and shirt.

And finally, I can foresee a post-partum period where I wear the Bella Band for support around my newly flabby, spongy belly, especially as my maternity pants get too big. And, especially if I have a C-Section, it will be comforting to have the extra layer.

P.S. It comes in green. I like that.

Sometimes, I want to eat up all the advice flung at me with a huge spork. I want to memorize and internalize every piece of random information falling from the lips and fingers of moms-of-more-than-one. Come to think of it, I was this way before Holden was born too… I obsessively watched Whitney (or so I thought) and I read more than my fair share of books… only too be completely shocked and flabbergasted at how being a mom actually felt.

With that defining experience behind me, there are some days when I want to interview all of my friends who ever birthed more than one baby, read Ben & Birdy til the cows come home, and pour over advice in websites. And then, I feel shocked and exhausted and realize (more than the first time), that it will be what it will be… that not every word needs to be memorized and not every (different!) great idea followed. We will find our own way. And, yeah, it will be super hard.

My pal, Whitney, knowing about all these quirks of mine, made me a beautiful book of wit and wisdom of from the moms-of-two that we know. She included sage advice from our real life friends and some online friends too.

And, I got a surprising extra dose of good advice from an unlikely source this morning: Fisher Price: My Mommy is Having a Baby. Read it and weep.