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May 27, 2006
Being Pregnant
Being pregnant wasn't easy. I know, I saw it all. And now you can too....Well not all of it, but at least a selection of highlights from May 2006 (conception) through February 2007 (delivery).
Getting pregnant and being pregnant takes a lot of time, let’s say a year or so, and for us at least that was when we found our lives starting to change in many ways.
Being American, and first time parents, we were perhaps overly cautious about factors potentially affecting the health of the mother’s body and therefore the fetus’s development. It is essentially impossible to go out in Amsterdam without encountering a lot of cigarette smoke, and it gets tiresome asking even one's friends to be more considerate of this: helping developing fetuses avoid smoke simply isn’t part of Dutch culture. So our social life started changing long before FM was born.
Sleeping patterns are also infamously affected by having a baby, but it is less widely recognized that disturbance in sleep patterns begins already during the pregnancy (though in our case it was nothing in comparison with what was to come). Nor is the change simply a matter of there being less or different sleeping at night: Talia’s energy levels fluctuated widely during the day as well and she was, on average, a lot more tired at most points during development. This, too, had an impact on our social lives.
In some way this pre-adjustment is helpful: if it all happened at the birth, when so much else is going on, the shock would really be too much. Better, then, to get used to the idea of always eating at home, occasionally inviting friends in, lots and lots of DVD rentals, going out pretty much only by day, and only the very rare special nighttime event where previously that had been our norm. Well, we’ve adjusted.
Want to hear something cool? Check out FM's in utero heartbeat: Baby's heartbeat.WAV
Posted by atshuldiner at May 27, 2006 9:37 PM