Things to Do Before the Baby
Image by Wikimedia Commons
As a 30-something married woman who has no kids, I get a lot of this from friends and family:
Image by Wikimedia Commons
“Enjoy your European vacation. Maybe it’ll be your last trip before you have a bun in the oven!”
“Enjoy your summer. Who knows what next summer might bring (wink)!”
“Enjoy that glass of wine now. Who knows how much longer you’ll be able to imbibe that good stuff.”
All of these (supposed) well-meaning comments highlighting my non-pregnant condition have got me thinking: What type of things should a woman be sure do before she is “with child?” And what about before she gives birth?
So I conducted some very unscientific research — it’s called Facebook and chitchat — to get to the bottom of this. All advice is by women who are/have been pregnant and/or have children. Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments section below.
What a woman should do before she gets pregnant:
Travel without an itinerary. Get lost. Enjoy it.
Get in shape. Being pregnant is hard work.
Hang out with your girlfriends. A lot.
Don’t drive yourself crazy refraining from sushi and peanut butter because it may be more difficult to get pregnant than you think.
Learn about your body and how it works.
Take a boudoir photo of yourself and give it to your partner. Accept the fact that your body will change.
Think seriously about where you’re currently living and whether that space will work for a child.
Savor the food you love — and indulge — lest you experience nausea in your first trimester and your relationship with food changes.
Do that crazy little something you’ve wanted to do but didn’t quite have the nerve to do.
Enjoy being able to go more than an hour without having to pee. When you’re pregnant you’ll be drinking lots of fluid for hydration. So you will be a regular visitor to the lavatory.
Go for midnight walks with a partner or friend
Once pregnant, what a woman should do before having a baby:
Talk to you partner about parenthood — what you’re excited about and what frightens you.
See dumb movies when you’re too big to do anything else.
Find a good support group, especially if you don’t live near family.
Take those embarrassing pregnancy photos.
Document your pregnancy.
Go on dates with your partner and/or friends.
Locate a quiet place/spot in your home that you can slip away to when you need to decompress.
Install the car seat. And have the installation checked by a professional technician.
Enjoy sleeping when you want to sleep. Enjoy waking up in the morning and lounging in bed — to your own schedule.
Enjoy going to the bathroom by yourself.
Travel some more.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
