Lots of useful advice when gestating a tiny human

Since not all the readers of my blog are necessarily also readers here on the group blog or my friends on Facebook, you may not know that I am currently in the process of growing a tiny human inside me. This comes after more than seven years of trying to get pregnant and nearly two emotionally taxing and occasionally very depressing years where every few months I went through time consuming, expensive and at times really rather painful IVF treatments. So I worked HARD for this tiny human, who will make his (yes, it’s a boy) arrival in February, if the doctors are correct, or sometime in mid-January if my Mum’s intuition is the one we’re going by.

In the many years I’ve been trying to get pregnant, I probably read pretty much all there is on fertility tips and old wives’ tales on what to do (or to avoid) to help increase fertility. So many years of watching my weight or trying to eat specific diets or exercising more, or possibly reducing exercise (as some experts claim that exercising too much can also be bad), reducing stress and the always helpful “just try not to think so much about it”. There’s a lot of opinions out there, and huge amounts of well-meaning advice, but what should one listen to and what is better to ignore? When one of my best friends, Ida, got pregnant with her first child a few years ago, she bought this book. She found it incredibly helpful and when it was confirmed that after four previous IVF attempts that only ended in heartbreak and failure, this fifth one had been successful, she lent it to me.

Emily Oster, the author, is an economist and uses her powers of research and knowledge of statistics to go through all manner of “it is known” pregnancy advice to check what actually makes sense to follow and what you may be better off just ignoring. Quite a lot of medical advice is based on very outdated ideas, and if you consider all the well-meaning opinions of friends, family or opinionated parts of the internet? Well, a lot of that is just plain scare-mongering. Through her research, Oster tries to find out exactly what lies behind all the various advice, usually presenting several sides to an issue, specifically so the reader can make up their own mind with regards to what they want to do in THEIR pregnancy.

Full review here.