The Pregnancy Series: Prepregnancy

Books on pregnancy and babies are almost like books on food. You could read into infinity. Although at first I felt overwhelmed, now that I'm contemplating baby number 3 in the not too near future I love the options. It's like ice cream. Most of the time you might be fudge type of person but then one day you want a root beer float so you get vanilla and perhaps on another occasion you go with sorbet just for kicks. Each pregnancy has been different and that has come across not only in the baby and the birth but also in my reading.


How do we make a baby?
As anyone trying to have kids can testify, it's difficult to want something so badly and be able to do so little about it. While preparing for attempting child number one, I read  Get Ready to Get Pregnant by Michael C. Lu.  I can't completely recommend it since it came across a bit dogmatic. I also can't testify to the effectiveness of any books regarding fertility since that doesn't seem to be a problem for us. (Don't worry, we have plenty of other problems.) But what I loved about the book was how it gave some of the control back to me. I felt like I could do something about the outcome of trying to get pregnant and the physical well-being of our children. While I found the try and then wait game stressful, at least I felt like I was doing something to help things move along.

Wait, can we order that baby in blue?
For baby number two I really wanted a boy. Coming from a household of girls I desperately didn't want all girls.  Too much estrogen in one house can get . . .  exciting. We were only planning on having three kids so if the second wasn't a boy I already knew I would be stressing about the third child. One day I was talking to my aunt who said, "You know there are lots of things you can do to increase the odds of having a boy" "Really????"

I admit I was skeptical at first, but I checked How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby by Landrum B. Shettles out from the library and read it anyway. Apparently sperm for males swim faster and sperm females live longer and tolerate an acidic environment better. So according to Shettles, if you figure out when your ovulation occurs, time the intercourse right, and adjust a few other things you can increase the odds of having a boy or a girl. It made sense to me so I spent two months tracking my basal temperature and we gave it a shot. Nine months later VOILA! out popped Branden. He was even born the month that I wanted. I've also heard really good things about Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler and plan to read that before my next baby.

Special diet special baby?
At present I'm trying to figure out how to improve our diet as a family, and I bumped into  Deep Nutrition by Catherine and Luke Shanahan. I didn't find the entire book worth reading, but she did have some very interesting ideas. The first was her explanation of how diet drastically affects how our genes are expressed over multiple generations. This makes sense to me considering the wide range of health issues and allergies that seems to be growing rapidly in children. The other idea that resonated with me was the idea that while we are unaware of how malnourished we are it shows up in our children. For the first child a mother's body can takes nutrients from her for the baby but for later pregnancies, especially those close together, the body cannot provide the same level of nutrition and the baby is often just slightly less "beautiful" and thus healthy. Our first child is quite attractive and while our second is a darling he's just isn't as show stopping as his sister. They were born about two years apart (vs. the 3 to 4 years the book recommends.) Obviously there are a lot of other factors involved, but we're going to give the whole "make a baby with better epigenetic expression" a shot starting with our diet now. I still have a bit more exploration to do, but more on my foray into the world of "good diet" is coming up.