While this is one of the most comprehensive guides on month-by-month development of your baby that I have read, it also tells me so much more than what I wanted to know.
I bought this book when I was pregnant with my first son, Max. I was about 24 and knew nothing about babies or how it would feel to be large and round and swollen with child. I didn’t have a clue of what I was in for in the delivery room, or what would happen when I first tried to nurse my son. So this book was basically my ’’pregnancy primer’’ and newborn care road map.
The book was expensive, but my husband and I were more frivolous spenders back then, so money felt like no object (at least until after we started buying large quantities of diapers). I snapped this book up at the local Waldenbooks store in my neighborhood’s mall, along with the companion book ’’What to Eat When You’re Expecting.’’
If you are expecting wonderful photos of babies in utero or of differently shaped mothers-to-be in various stages of development, you’ll be disappointed. The illustrations are badly drawn and very few and far in-between. Grab a copy of ’’A Child is Born’’ instead, even though it is horribly expensive.
The best part of this book are the question-and-answer sections where women ask the author questions that they would ask their obstetrician. Eisenberg explains delicate and frequently unmentionable things very sensitively. SHe also gets very frank about things like skin tags, stretch marks, varicose veins, loose stomach muscles, sciatica, water retention, and chloasma, which your mother might not think to tell you about until AFTER you have begun to experience them.
The opening chapters deal well with issues such as the proper amount of weight to gain. According to What to Expect, the ’’textbook’’ weight gain is between 25 to 35 pounds, with women who gain around 22 to 25 pounds going ’’back to normal’’ within around six weeks. It breaks your weight gain down into factors such as increased blood volume, fat, water retention, uterine mass, and the baby him or herself.
I felt that the chapter dealing with maternity clothes left a LOT to be desired. I would have liked it if they had provided a listing of different catalogs from maternity clothing lines that you could order from. Suggesting bikini underpants that could be worn below the belly was ridiculous; when your stomach expands, your backside expands quite a bit, too. You also lose your hip bones from the spreading of your waist, so those underpants only stay up when you end up with a wedgie.
What to Expect already broke down the amounts of nutrients that you need per day, and what to look for in a prenatal vitamin. They didn’t need to even write What to Eat When You’re Expecting, especially since the recipes were work-intensive and time-consuming. The recipe for buttermilk pancakes actually had to sit in the refrigerator overnight after you made the batter. That doesn’t even sound appealing. The recipe for french fries (called Best Odd Fries in the book) involved nonstick cooking spray and egg whites. If you coat potatoes in egg white and try to bake them, they stick badly to your baking dish, and nonstick spray doesn’t help. The Best Odds recipes did make good use of green and yellow fruits and vegetables, but they also included ’’bulk bin’’ ingredients that you would have to keep a large volume of in your house, like dry nonfat milk, whole wheat flour, oats, soy protein, you name it. And how many people usually sweeten everything they cook with apple juice concentrate, when granular sugar is so easy to pour?
Last but not least, the last few chapters deal with communicable diseases, treating your illnesses while pregnant, safe remedies, and pregnancy complications, as well as the potential for pregnancy loss. There is also a ’’Dad, It’s Your Baby Too’’ chapter that my husband actually kind of liked when I left the open book in the bathroom one day. I thought it was slightly sparse in information about how to cope with chronic conditions that you have before you get chronic, such as epilepsy, asthma, and diabetes.
My favorite book on pregnancy is still Vicki Iovine’s ’’Girlfriend’s Guide’’, even if it is irreverent.