Heat's Editor-in-Chief Lucie Cave continues on her pregnancy journey...
When you're pregnant it's like someone has put a golf sign over your head saying 'Please tell me every single story you know about having a baby, especially all the gory bits'. At the first sign of a bump underneath your top, people you haven't heard from in years are suddenly scrambling to impart words of wisdom and well-meaning horror stories surrounding everything to do with motherhood from birth, to how to get them to sleep to how to deal with your husbands own ‘pregnancy pains’.
Here’s some advice I’ve accrued so far…
• Put cabbage leaves on your nipples to stop them getting sore
• Do hypno-birthing
• Get a maternity nurse
• You don't want to put him in nursery until he’s at least two
• Eating spicy food will make your baby have a bad temper
• When he falls asleep on you make sure you put him down straight away
• When he goes to sleep in the daytime, hoover right next to his head so he's used to noise
• Don't eat lemons, they make your baby hairy
• Make sure you get a car small enough to hit your kids round the ankle when they’re naughty
• Eating too many oranges will make your baby come out with a tan
• If you have sex when you’re pregnant you’ll poke the baby in the face and it will have a fear of willies
• If you have an epidural you can’t feel how hard you’re pushing in labour and you’ll tear your fanny up to your bumhole and need a colostomy bag for the rest of your life
• If you have a glass an a half of wine a day its actually ok*
• Eating kebabs will lead to ugly babies
• If your newborn cries a lot it means he doesn't like the name you chose and you need to change it
(* I especially liked this one)
...and the best bit of advice came from my husband Ben’s mum, who warned - 'Make sure you keep Ben away when you're breast feeding because he'll probably want to try it.'
But it’s one thing getting all this well-meaning advice from peoples mouths, it's quite another Googling stuff because you can’t sleep. Last week, in the middle of the night, during one of my many midnight wee trips, I sat on the loo and made the mistake of Googling ‘How much does your baby look like its scan picture?’ (I was looking at a recent photo on my phone from a 32 week scan and wondered how realistic his little nose and lips were).
The accompanying words that emerged in the search bar were quite telling…
‘My baby scan looks like an alien’
‘My baby scan looks like a monkey’
[oh and if you type in ‘I find my baby… ‘ the first three search terms that come up are ‘boring’ ‘annoying’ and ‘ugly’..]
After that I accidentally found myself in a Mumsnet black hole of discussion that centred around women worrying what their baby will look like...
‘In the pics she looked exactly like the aliens from The X Files! Or maybe Gollum!’ wrote one, while another said, ‘Mine was quite frankly terrifying …. It looks like something that will try and gnaw its way out when the time comes. It's a full skeletal frontal head shot, with fang buds’. Another described her scan as looking like, ‘A Yorkshire terrier in there.’
And if like me, you accidentally find yourself plummeted into the scary world of Mumsnet it will take a good few attempts to fathom what the hell all the acronyms mean…
One mum wrote, ‘DS3 looked like the dessicated corpse of an Egyptian mummy that I had just seen in the British Museum. They gave us a photo that I refused to show to DS1 & 2 in case it was too scary..’.
DS, it turns out means ‘darling son’ while DD is ‘darling daughter’.
Then there was someone going on about her DH, another moaning about her MIL who was a PITA (Darling Husband… Mother in law.. Pain In The Arse… ). Seems there’s nothing there isn’t a weird abbreviation for – from SWI: shagging with intent (eg. trying to conceive) to SWOI: shagging without intent (not trying to conceive…). And if you’re not in a happy place then you might find yourself with a STBXH: soon-to-be-ex-husband.
When I asked my husband Ben if he’d heard any good advice for what to do when you have a baby he just replied, ‘Babies do come out of your bum right?'
@luciecave