Tag Archives: pregnancy

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Breastfeeding won’t make you skinny (and other postpartum pains)

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One of the many, many things women are told when they’re pregnant is that breastfeeding will make you skinny. “It literally melts your fat away!” “Your baby will suck you right back down to your pre-pregnancy weight!” Sounds great! Sign me up! What they don’t tell you is that for as long as you breastfeed, your body will basically stay “soft,” no matter how much you work out. Something to do with the hormones and oxytocin or something. Which is fine, as even at my smallest, I never had 6-pack abs anyway, so whatevs.

I also was constantly told that being in good shape before pregnancy, and keeping up working out as long as I did would help me soo much during childbirth and recovery, and would make me “bounce back” super fast after having the baby. That was so encouraging, and I totally believed it!

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5 ways to disguise your pregnancy in the first trimester

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I have a few friends who are currently pregnant. A couple of them are beyond the point of keeping it a secret, but one is newly so, and I am SO FREAKIN’ EXCITED I just can’t stand it. Anyhow, recently a couple of other moms and I were talking to one pregnant friend about how to be discreet in that first trimester, or however long you’re waiting to share your news.

I thought I was fairly discreet by just casually not drinking in those early weeks, but apparently many of my friends were suspicious… “We knew something was up when YOU weren’t drinking!” Gee, thanks! I mean, I know I live in beer city, and my girlfriends and I have been known to enjoy the occasional wine night, but was it really that unusual for me to decline an adult beverage?!? To be fair, most of our friends did know that we were trying to conceive, so they had reason to be be wary.

This shot was taken just a few days after we found out that I was pregnant. Shhhhh!

This shot was taken just a few days after we found out that I was pregnant. Shhhhh!

There are a few things you can do if you’re pregnant and you find yourself in a situation where you’d normally have a drink or two, like a holiday, concert, party, work function or just a normal afternoon at a local brewery. I did most of these when I was pregnant at one time or another, as we waited quite a bit beyond our first trimester to make it totally public, though at some point we started gradually telling close friends as we saw them. We made sure to tell those who know early that it wasn’t “Facebook official” yet, as there were people we wanted to tell in person or by phone, in a more personal way than finding out from a friend of a friend’s post that they tagged us in or something.

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Read to your newborn or their brain will shrink!

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Long before my son was born, and even before I became pregnant, I knew reading would be an important part of my child’s early years. My mom read to me early and often, and I credit that as one of the reasons why I had such a love of books, that grew into a passion for writing (remember me, the book nerd?). I wanted to pass on that passion to my child, so there was no question that we’d read stories every night from the time he or she was tiny to the time when he or she started reading to me. And then my child would write a best seller by age 20 and make millions from the movie adaptation, and we’d be set for life.

Lately, there’s been a lot of news about scientific evidence showing how awesome it is to read to your children (YAY! Go mom for doing that for me even before the “experts” said it was good!). But for it to really work, you have to start reading to them when they are tiny little babies. One NPR story I recently heard about it actually used the words “from birth” to describe when you should start reading to them. I’ll come back to that later.

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