Category: Pregnancy

Help Me Bootstrap a New Podcast!

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I’m launching a new podcast this summer!

Startup Pregnant: a podcast about women in leadership, work, and life.

The podcast shares the stories of women before, during, and after pregnancy and into early parenting. From working, to building businesses, to accelerating your leadership, to growing families, I’m interviewing women on their lives and livelihoods and what they’ve done to grow both.

We’re looking for our early sponsors — help me bootstrap our first season:

If you’d love to see this podcast get rolling, head on over to Patreon to support us.

  • Micro-sponsors: We’re looking for micro-sponsorships, so you can chip in anywhere from $1/month to $4/month to help us build momentum and record an amazing new podcast to add to the airwaves. For the cost of a cup of coffee each month, you can become a backer!
  • Show sponsors ($100): Got a company or project that you’d like to advertise? We’re looking for companies that are a great match for this audience that would like to sponsor one episode per month. You’ll get a 30-second advertising spot in the show every month for as long as you are a sponsor.
  • Master patron ($250): Get listed in the show’s front notes as a sponsor, a shout-out feature story about your company (90 seconds) in one episode each month, which I will work with you to craft to perfection. The story will land in the first 22 minutes of the podcast. You’ll also be listed on the podcast page of our website as a featured sponsor.

There are lots of different options to sponsor the podcast. Help us bring the stories of women in leadership, life, and work to the airwaves!

Support us on Patreon and sponsor the Startup Pregnant podcast!

About the podcast: what are we driving towards?

The podcast looks at deep human question around what it means to become a parent, to grow a business, to embrace a body of work, to deal with failure, to shift in identity, to learn, and to grow. Throughout both “Startup” and “Pregnant,” we look at what it means to undergo these most profound transformations that come with creating new things from scratch.

Startup Pregnant isn’t strictly about startups and pregnancy; instead, it’s about the deep transformative power that growing businesses and babies taps requires, and how we change as a result.

Transformation isn’t easy, in fact, it’s often painful, but it’s one of the most beautiful parts of being a human.

The podcast will address questions like:

  • What can business learn from women and pregnancy, and what can pregnancy learn from business?
  • How did the growth of your business or family affect how you showed up in the world? What strategies did you use to learn, grow, and adapt?
  • How can we re-imagine what women in the workforce can look like?
  • What do you wish your CEOs and colleagues knew about pregnancy and the journey into parenthood?
  • Does parenthood change your work life, for the better? How does it change your creativity or management style?
  • How do these powerful forces of feminine energy, willpower, and strength intersect and provoke better entrepreneurship, invention, and collaboration?

We’re Launching in July/August 2017:

  • We are bootstrapping most of the first season of the podcast.
  • When we hit $100 per month in backing, we’ll prep the launch of season 1!
  • When we hit $250 per month in backing, we will improve our sound quality, audio mixing, and production.
  • When we reach $500, we we will begin preparing seasons 2 & 3.
  • Check out our Patreon page for more details.

Join me in my podcast (and my mission) to share deeper, wiser, and more profound stories of women at work.

Support the podcast here.

In my own experience of being pregnant while working at a Y-combinator backed startup: it isn’t easy. But like so many things in life, it’s worth it. In fact, many parts of it challenged my bones, my soul, and my stamina unlike anything else I’d experienced — like most things in life that are hard, it was also unbelievably worth it.

The podcast is a way to bring women to the table to have a conversation about what it means to be a woman in leadership and in work, all while raising families.

If you are like me and enjoy contemplating the absurdity of growing a human inside a human, if you don’t mind the stress of figuring out just exactly how a business will survive, and if you don’t mind the chatter of voices that wonder constantly how, exactly, you’ll pull this off — then you can laugh, cry, and wince along side me as I take you inside the stories of women working on great endeavors.

Should You Call A Pregnant Woman Fat?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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I snorted when a book I was reading admonished against telling a pregnant woman she was “fat.” Yes, of course. That’s probably a bad call. Instead, however, it recommended that rather than the word “fat,” you kindly refer to the additional weight gain as “Maternal Storage Tissue.”

Because yes, that’s what every woman wants to hear.

“Damn, your maternal storage tissue is looking finnnneee.”

No thank you.

My body is getting bigger, and I think it’s beautiful.

Women gain 25 to 35 pounds (according to American standards, and for many woman, it can vary even more) for each pregnancy. The weight is divided up into different places: our blood volume nearly doubles, we carry more fluid (both inside our uterus as amniotic fluid as well as throughout our bodies), we create an entirely new organ from scratch (the placenta), and we build a human being (who weighs roughly 7-8 pounds, again with variation depending on your kid).

Also, our breasts swell up quite a bit – they can double in size in the first part of pregnancy, and then double again once you deliver your baby and if you begin breastfeeding. I keep buying new undergarments online because I keep outgrowing them! (One downside is that no, retargeted advertising, I do not need to see pictures of underwear all over the place while I’m working during the day.)

In addition to this fluid and human gain, we also gain fat storage deposits. Beautiful, gorgeous, lovely lady lumps.

I weigh myself each week (top of the morning, after my morning pee), to get a reading on how my body is changing from a mass standpoint. What surprises me, however, is how everything is shifting and changing beyond just my belly and boobs (my “front bumps,” as I like to joke).

I pulled on an old pair of jeans to see how they would fare if I left the top unbuttoned — there’s a fancy pregnancy trick where you can loop the top button together with a hairband or rubber band to make your pants fit longer) — but surprisingly, it wasn’t my belly that caused them to feel tight. I got them up about mid-thigh, and my jeans said NOPE, not going to happen.

Apparently my thighs are building out some maternal storage tissue and my tush is also starting to gain a bit of weight.

Here we go, mama.

Another area that surprises me is the bottom of my bra line — where the bottom of a sports bra hits, or where the bra clasps together. I thought that my rib cage would stay fairly consistent in size, even if my belly and breasts swelled outwards. Apparently, however, as a baby grows inside of you, your stomach gets pushed upwards and your rib cage can expand outwards to accommodate the extra space. Bras that have a single-fasten strap or a fixed elastic band no longer fit, because I’m bigger around… everywhere.

When I’ve watched friends go through pregnancies in the past, I watch them in the year before the birth and in the year after. Everyone seems to swell beautifully throughout the year, rising in size and shape, putting it on in different places, each body accommodating the changes in their own ways.

These teachers also show me the rhythm of the slow decrescendo post-birth; bodies taking three, six, nine months to gradually come back to a form of strength and shape that is similar, but not necessarily exactly the same, as before. The plump middle is a gorgeous time of ripening, exactly as it’s meant to be.

What I was surprised to discover, is that the maternal storage tissue is not just for the pregnancy: it is our way to provide food for the baby after it’s born.

It’s not just the pregnancy part of childbirth that needs you to add weight to your body. It’s the need to provide food and fuel for a rapidly growing human that causes our bodies to pack on pounds like we’re about to hibernate for a year. We are the primary food and fuel resource for a brand-new infant, and we need to be prepared accordingly.

Why is a baby born at nine months? By most accounts, humans are born “too early,” to survive outside of the womb. Conventional wisdom (and science) holds that if babies stuck around inside for longer, they would get too big, and we wouldn’t be able to get them out through the narrow hips and size of the birth canal.

Yet more recent scientific theories speculate that the 9-month gestation period for human babies is cut short at nine months not because of the size of the head and the brain, but because of the metabolic needs of the fetus and the mother.

This theory suggests that hip width might not be the limiting factor. We might be giving birth to babies at this early stage because if the fetus stayed in the mother any longer, the mother would no longer be able to provide food/energy at a fast enough rate. That is, the metabolic function of the mom’s body reaches a peak point where she can no longer digest and provide enough nutrients for both her body and the fetus.

(Anecdotally, I know that I am already constantly hungry, and eat all the time. I wake up and eat in the middle of the night, I eat constantly throughout the day, and I still feel a sense of hunger even when I would normally be very full.)

Beyond the anecdote, however, this made me realize that much of the job of the mom in the first 3 months of an infant’s life (and really, the first 6 to 9 months, or whenever they start eating solid foods on their own) is to provide an unlimited source of fuel and energy for their offspring.

Unlimited source of fuel for a baby that’s going to grow rapidly.

Hence the packing on of pounds earlier on in pregnancy, before the baby gets bigger.

Maternal storage tissue.

It all makes sense.

(I got your back, kid.)

Life is Change

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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One detail of pregnancy that’s eye-opening is how fast everything changes. Week over week, there are new developments, changes, symptoms, changes, and side-effects. A few weeks ago, the little guy could hear us for the first time. There were kicks. There still are kicks (and punches!). His neuro-motor functioning is changing. He’s growing so fast inside of me, and I’m growing so fast on the outside. The scale doesn’t lie: every week I’m a new number. And it’s real: holding plank pose in yoga is much more challenging with added pounds in the middle!

Change is necessary, change is constant, and change is scary. Change is much like love.

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As C.S. Lewis writes:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”  ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I find myself leaning on writing, reading, and hearing other people’s stories to understand everything that seems, at times, to be a whirlwind around me.

I take photographs to document change, to witness what’s going on inside of me. I asked Alex to take some photos of me (here at 24 weeks) as my body shifts shape and sizes, expanding to accommodate a new person joining out lives:

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And don’t let these photographs fool you too much — it’s easy to see a simple story in the image. It’s all of it: the highs, the lows, the confusion, the ambling, the laughter, the tears. I am grateful for people who share their stories with me about how hard it can be, how confusing, and how up-ending. There isn’t a perfect story that we’re searching for, a moment that captures effortless bliss. This is the journey, all of it. As Gilda Radner writes:

“Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.” ― Gilda Radner

Every day is a new day.

Every day is different.

Record It While It’s Happening: Rachel Cusk on Emotions, Mamahood, and Becoming a Parent

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Even though dragging myself out of bed and dealing with morning sickness does not make it fun to keep up with my writing habit, I also know that these feelings are fleeting. They won’t last forever, and I want to capture them while they’re here, so I can remember what it’s like.

I have no idea how many kids we’ll end up having. Alex and I have ideas for what we think we want, but then there’s what happens in reality. Knowing that the future is always uncertain makes me recognize that despite our best plans — there’s a possibility this may be the only time I’m ever pregnant. For whatever reason, I may only have this one time. I use this realization to remember to cherish right now, however many extra hormones it includes.

It seems like time is moving so slowly, like I’m muddling through a vague fog of fatigue and barfing, and yet everything is moving so quickly. I’ll be a hormonal messy pregnant mama-to-be for about four more months, and then… I’ll be a mama. And I will have crossed the threshold from independent lady to parent and the rest of my life will be different. Time moves forward.

As Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work, a documentation of the gravity of pregnancy and becoming a mother, these thoughts and feelings around pregnancy only last for a brief moment, and then they disappear.

“My desire to express myself on the subject of motherhood was from the beginning strong, [but]… a few months after the birth of my daughter Albertine, it vanished entirely,” she explained, and while she had the urge to write this book, she lost it after she gave birth for the first time. And so, “I wrote this book during the pregnancy and early months of my second daughter, Jessye, before it could get away again.”

She writes in a manner I find refreshing and real. I tend to prefer books that are honest about depression, loneliness, philosophy, and struggle — a book that says pregnancy and motherhood are miracles and the best thing on the planet would be chucked out the window as fast as I could waddle over to the window to throw it.

In her cataloging of the process, she talks about the dark side of pregnancy and how having children affects your identity, your ability to work, and your relationships with people around you. As a novelist, she confesses that this type of open disclosure is often too much for her: “I have merely written down what I thought of the experience of having a child in a way that I hope other people can identify with. As a novelist, I admit that I find this candid type of writing slightly alarming.”

The book is not a tribute to the glory days of motherhood, but a frank assessment of what might be to come.

“I am certain my own reaction, three years ago, to the book I have now written would have been to wonder why the author had bothered to have children in the first place if she thought it was so awful,” she confides, and I find myself feeling a wash of relief to hear that someone else has catalogued and documented the array of complexity around how it feels to enter into parenthood.

For parenting and motherhood is not always easy. And the burden is largely on women, despite how much our society is changing, we will still hold the biological accountability for bearing and bringing to life new human beings.

“Women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth: some dread it, some long for it, and some manage it so successfully as to give other people the impression that they never even think about it. My own strategy was to deny it, and so I arrived at the fact of motherhood shocked and unprepared, ignorant of what the consequences of this arrival would be, and with the unfounded but distinct impression that my journey there had been at once so random and so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all.”

Across the experience, as my life shifts, I am reminded from Cusk to write, write, write.

Don’t stop writing. Document what I’m feeling and thinking, and explore inside of the feelings that shift and grow across my time becoming a parent. Watch as this landscape of emotions shifts and moves month over month, minute over minute. Capture the range of expressions and they come and go. Explore what it means to be this person, in this moment, right now.

To write about what is happening is to validate your own thoughts and emotions. I attempt not to layer judgment on top of it all, but rather, to examine what arises. What fears do I have about what’s to come? What societal rules and norms do I feel guilty about breaking? What decisions am I making and how are we embracing (and deciding) who we want to become next? What is it like to be this person, in this time, in this body, right now?

I Don’t Want To Be Good At This

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Sometimes we get really good at things in life that we have no interest in being good at.

Today began as some of the less fun pregnancy days have begun — I woke up at 3am, my stomach hurting, my mouth dry, thirsty, but scared to drink water — afraid that if I drank water, I’d begin vomiting. I woke my husband up and I said, “Food, food, would you get me food?”

One of the only combats against morning sickness is having a bit of food in your stomach at all times. If I wake up too much in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, I have to eat, otherwise I’ll start vomiting.

Now, at 22 weeks pregnant, I’m also hungry in a way that I haven’t experience for a long time. My memor tells me I felt this way as a 3-sport athlete in high school and again in college sports. I’m hungry. I eat like crazy, but I get physically full in my stomach really quickly (that baby doesn’t leave much room inside for food). So even though I feel completely full, I still feel ravenously hungry. I have to wait to eat (torture!) because if I over-eat, I get heartburn or I start vomiting from over eating.

My stomach seems very particular.

I continue to eat every 30 minutes until my hunger pangs finally go away. The process begins about every two hours. My job is to eat.

I texted my sister to tell her about it, and I mentioned that having a baby was “like having a parasite that eats everything I’m trying to eat and feeds off me.” She responded quickly, “remove like from that sentence and you are correct.”

Today, I ate at 3 AM: curried chicken salad, and not just a bite. I fell back asleep around 4 and slept until 6:18 AM. I woke up still feeling nauseous, and began the day. It’s now 6:43 AM. I’m drinking two cups of tea with names Stomach Ease and Mama-to-Be. I’m hoping the feeling subsides.

I started feeling better around the fourth month of pregnancy, but not entirely. The first three months have been filled with vomiting and sickness most mornings and evenings. Luckily, it’s more sickness and queasiness than actual vomiting. Also, for some reason it slows during the middle of the day — either my subconscious mind doesn’t want to vomit while I’m at work, or something about leaving the house helps jolt me out of the pattern of sickness.

Thankfully, I haven’t vomited in too many public places.*

Also fortunately, I am not losing weight (only what feels like my dignity to throw myself on the floor and expel whatever I’m trying to keep in my stomach). They say that morning sickness is a sign of a good, healthy pregnancy and less of a risk for miscarriage or other problems.

A strange side-effect of vomiting for pregnancy is that I’m getting really good at having a gag reflex. Mind you, this is not a skill I want to have. At all.

When I brush my teeth, sometimes my body thinks, “Oh, this again! Here! Let me help!” and I’m like, “NO BODY, I’M BRUSHING MY TEETH.” When I cough too hard, my abdominals flex, and they’re like, “wait, we know this! we can help!” My body is entirely too helpful in trying to do the thing it thinks I might need to do. My automatic reflexes are developing habits I don’t want to own.

Foods like yogurt or anything with creamy textures strangely make me begin to gag. Taking vitamins on an empty stomach is a recipe for disaster.

I can’t explain how humbling and floor-relegating having to puke all the time is. You just feel weak, stupid, and tired.

Vomiting is one of my least favorite activities, and usually if I have to do it, I run to the nearest receptacle, grab my stomach, lurch to the sink or trash or toilet, vomit until no more food comes out, continue to purge even though there’s no food, and then cry weakly to my husband to get me some food because, contrary to everything my body is doing, one of the only things that will stop the expulsion is to eat.I rinse out my mouth, spit out water, clean it up, focus on slowing down my breathing, wait until it gets back to normal, and take a slice of an apple, a piece of a hardboiled egg, or a small cracker and try to eat it. Breathing slowly and evenly helps.

Having to vomit makes me feel like I’m weak and somewhat worthless. It reminds me of the way that dogs look at you when they’re pooping in public, like, “don’t look at me, I’m busy doing this thing I don’t want you to watch.” I feel a small sense of fatigue and embarrassment just writing about it.

Please, please, please, I beg my stomach, please settle. Peace.

Peace.

Most mornings begin around this pattern, waking up, needing food, avoiding vomiting, then having to pause for a while and let my body reintegrate into a life with movement. Afterwards, as a good friend described to me about her own pregnancy, “you just have to sit and wait for a while.” The resting begins. You rest, you recover, you let your body acclimate to the new reality, you settle your brain down, you let your body relax, you drink water, and you attempt to begin the day again. On a bad day, this cycle happens twice, and it takes until about 8 or 8:30 to be ready to start the day. On the even worse days, it takes until maybe 9 or 10 AM to settle, and I’ll (occasionally) decide that working from home is probably best for that day.

I have not missed much work, as in “work” where I get on the subway and go to my job and work from the office. I am lucky to get to work from home a few days a week already, since our office culture allows remote flexibility depending on what projects we’re working on. This has been a godsend.

There was one particular day where I had a packed schedule of meetings, with the first one kicking off at 9 AM. The process of vomiting was kicking in, in bad form.  Around 8 AM I realized that my body needed more time to sit, and in honoring that, I’d be late for work. I emailed Mattan: “I’m going to need to be late today. I need to stay in Brooklyn a bit longer before I can head in.”

I never told him why or what was happening, and it’s strange, then, to turn around and put my work clothes on and head in to work and then begin, as always, as usual, as Sarah, at 10am, at a job. No reference to the vomiting. No reference to the morning. In the past, I’d roll out of bed and start writing or head to work. Today, I just spent 4 hours preparing myself to be able to leave for work. In a past life, I would exercise, I would write, I would cook, I would do so many things. In this current life, I have the flu, non-stop, every morning.

 

*I have a secret map of all of the places I’ve stopped to buy orange juice (a surprisingly effective way to stop morning sickness for me), and all the places I’ve secretly or not-so-secretly vomited in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I see this city in a whole new way.

He Chose You

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Some mornings I wake up around 4 or 5, either because I have to pee, or because the baby is kicking me. I have been having a hard time falling back asleep after I wake up, so I started going to morning yoga early in the day. Figured I might as well calm my mind and bring more harmony to my body if I can’t sleep. And normally exercise, no matter how tired I am, gets me back to sleep again the next night.

Today, in my morning yoga practice, I ran into one of my favorite teachers. I hadn’t seen him in months. He saw me and his eyes opened wide at my five-month pregnant belly and he whispered, “ohhhh, congratulations, what an honor to be bringing a new life to this world.”

He closed his eyes and paused and then continued:

“This baby chose you. He wanted to come to life, and he chose you to be his vessel, you two to be his parents. Not only that, he wanted to live here, in this time, in this age, in this place.”

“How wonderful that you get to be with this person. How beautiful that he chose you to be his parents.”

It’s hard to put into words what hearing this meant to me. I’ve worried so much about what’s coming, and felt the (at times intense) effects of being pregnant, and I’d lost sight of the bigger picture.

I settled into my (much modified) yoga routine and practiced.

The Best Pregnancy Things (Clothes, Tools, Tips) I’ve Found So Far

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I knew I had to dig in and actually buy some maternity pants when I could no longer hike my yoga pants up any higher. With my old pants, I either gave myself significant camel toe (not attractive), or I ended up with a thick elastic imprint around my waist (not comfortable), or both.

More often, it was both.

Since my belly was going to continue to expand, and this wasn’t a case of “if I sleep 12 hours tonight, drink a lot of water and take a good morning poop, I’ll fit back into my jeans,” I realized it was probably time to buy some maternity clothes.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I was so reluctant — maternity jeans are THE BEST! Having clothes that fit, and are comfy, stretchy, and yet supportive is a wonderful feeling. When your body changes, find, borrow, or buy new clothes that make you feel great. It’s really challenging to feel good about yourself when you feel like crap in what you’re wearing.

(My friends who are not pregnant yet keep asking me to write everything down and record it for them, so these posts are for you!)

Here’s what I’ve found so far that I adore.

Maternity Pants

Maternity pants are actually not that fussy! They’re actually wonderful. Lots of pants nowadays look like regular jeans, but they have more stretch in them and come with an elastic waistband. I’m not a regular J.Crew shopper, but was surprised to find that they carry maternity clothes that come in tall sizes (win!). These jeans in dark denim in tall are perfect for people 5’10” and fit like skinny leggings. But look like jeans.

The Belly Fit Jacket Extender

My mother sourced this brilliant creation. Instead of buying new jackets to cover up your bump in the freezing winter, buy a jacket extender! It takes some finagling to find all the right zipper information (what’s a coil?), but your existing jacket should have zipper identity numbers on it and you can buy a jacket extender that’ll take your favorite winter coat and make it fit your belly — and your baby, once it arrives!

Belly Band

There are a number of options for $10-$15, but I found the reviews for the Bellaband to be the best and spent $28 on this Belly Band. It’s long enough to go over the top of your belly and tuck in below pants for a little extra comfort and smoothing out, and you can fold it down over your jeans if you’re just shifting sizes. I have some hip and pelvis separation happening, and having an extra band wrapped around my hips has been a relief throughout the day.

Maternity Shirts and Tanks Tops

These extra-long tanks and these short-sleeve shirred tops by Liz Lange for Target Maternity have been the perfect $10 top. Super soft, comfortable, easy to wear. (Hat tip to Kate Northrup, who shared these with me!)

Giant Underwear

Stay with me here. I got a great recommendation to buy underwear two sizes too big, and it has been one of the best things ever. Buy those low-rise hipster panties (I love Hanes cotton underwear for about a dollar each on Amazon), and buy them two (or three!) sizes too big. They will look absolutely gigantic on your bed when you take them out of the package and you will giggle and wonder how they will fit without falling off. Somehow they will fit like a dream, and your booty, belly, and expanding thighs will sigh with glorious thanks.

Storq!

While the clothing is a little expensive for me (socks and underwear at $34 a pop each? I’ll spring for the dollar kind), I splurged on the dress and leggings and they are divine. I appreciate their philosophy that simpler is better, and you only need one dress and one pair of pants to make it through your pregnancy stylish and comfortable. They are biased towards tall, athletic or more slender body types, however, and I find the pants to be a little thin (in between leggings and tights) — if you’re looking for structural support or you have a sturdier, shorter body, these could be annoying. (As a tall lady, I’m grateful for long pants!)

A Body Pillow

It takes up a lot of space in the bed, but it is also a divine luxury. As sleep becomes harder to come by, and your body harder to lug around (or lie down at all), having support all around you is wonderful. I’m using a borrowed pillow from a friend (somewhat like this), because you only need it for the later months of pregnancy, and I believe we’re passing the pillow around from friend to friend as one lady after another gets pregnant. In New York, space is very hard to come by, and storing a giant pillow is not something many people want to do.

Earplugs and a Great Eye Mask

They say that snoring is a side effect of pregnancy, and by month 4, I was not only snoring, but I actually snore myself awake now. Hence the earplugs — I get up enough to pee as it is, no need to keep waking up just to hear myself snore.

An Empty Plastic Bucket That Is Super Easy To Clean

I had some bad bouts of morning (and night) sickness, and would often be sick by the end of the day. Many of my dinners didn’t stay very long in my body. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and continue the sickness. (It sucks.) One thing that helped us was keeping a small plastic bucket by the bed.

We learned quickly that not making it to the bathroom or the kitchen sink was messy to clean up, and short bucket made it easy to clean.* (I’ll probably write a lot more on morning sickness and how I dealt with it in another post.) For now, an easy-to-clean bucket. And a husband or partner that will help you clean it out. I am so grateful to Alex, who said that if I could handle the vomiting part and growing a human, he’d do the duty of cleaning up after me. When I told him how much I appreciated it, he shrugged and said, “it’s gonna be this and then poopy diapers, right?”

*Alex, upon reading this post, said it might be worth mentioning that he got these aforementioned skills while in college, learning the value of an easy-to-clean bucket after a little too much of the boozy beverages. College, preparing you for parenting in more ways than you know…

A White Noise Maker That’s Also A Humifier

We use The Wirecutter and The Sweet Home for recommendations and they’ve consistently recommended this humidifier. We got it and it’s easy to use and clean, just need to replace the filter ($12) every now and again. Because of all the dryness of winter air and the fact that pregnancy hormones can clog up your nose and dry out your sinuses, humidity is very useful.

With regards to birthing and parenting advice:

The best advice I’ve received so far about planning ahead for birthing, parenting and setting up a nursery is this:

First, don’t buy that much stuff for the baby in advance

You don’t need a ton of things, and every baby will be different. In some cultures, it’s considered bad luck to buy things before the baby is born. (In American culture, we custom-design fancy nursery rooms for each new baby.) We’re of a more minimalist sensibility, and want to buy just enough, but not a million things. Almost everyone I’ve spoken with says it’s easy to drown in stuff, buy too much, and go crazy. The baby doesn’t need as much as we buy for it.

You won’t know how big your baby is going to be either, so if you can, don’t go crazy on clothes. My mom told me that none of us fit in the infant-sized clothes, so if we did get things, start with 3-6 months sizing and go up.

That said, a few shopping trips here and there really woke us up to the reality of what we’re doing, and opened up conversations about who we want to be and what we want in our family.

Try not to turn the pregnancy into (too big of) a research project

My friend Lindsay offered one piece of advice that I loved: “The birth will last you ten, twenty hours or so. Parenting will last forever. Right now you have time to read and explore. Read more about parenting than birthing!” I LOVE this advice and reminder.

Lastly: have people around for moral support

I still think our hyper-connected world still misses out on deeper connections, and my energy in New York is focused on developing closer, more meaningful relationships with people I love.

There is no substitute for having good conversations with pregnant ladies a few months ahead of you for timeline logistics of when to do stuff. Ditto for having conversations with ladies several years ahead of you for moral support and cute pictures and reminders of why we’re doing this and that it’s worth it.

Little Quips on This Not-So-Little Pregnancy

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

This is post #5 in my month-long writing challenge. Join me here.

I find pregnancy to be quite weird. My body has taken over. It’s running a long-embedded script I didn’t know I had inside of me.

I’ve taken to writing short bits on twitter under the hashtag #pregrealities.

Something about Twitter makes me feel like I actually exist, or something. Confirmation of identity. Proof of existence.

Or I’m just talking out loud to myself. Whatever. I need to talk.

A warning, though. Don’t ever look up the hashtag #pregnancy. It is too alarming and too strange. Just don’t do it.

I’m like, let’s get dinner. Hubby says, sure, I’ll be about 45 minutes? I say great, I’ll see you there in 45 minutes. I leave for the restaurant.

(I’ll have two dinners, no problem.)

The confusing feeling of being both physically full but still RAVENOUS. No more room in stomach. Must eat again in 1 hour.

Tall pregnant ladies don’t look pregnant when they most need to: months one through four, the vomit months.

Everything about this pregnancy is confronting my need for, and my sense of, control.

CEO comes over, says ‘Hey wanna smell this new startup cologne,’ ME: NO PLEASE NO—He sprays it. I’m dying.

Will I have a big bump or a small one? Will I be a waddler or a speed-walker? I CAN’T KNOW! I WON’T KNOW! I have control issues.

Thinking about this won’t make it go any faster, will it?

It’s a good thing I’m not being paid to organize this. If my mind ran the pregnancy, we’d obsess over the weirdest shit and other things wouldn’t get done.

I’ve gotta stop serving the portions at dinner. Hubby and I are gaining weight at the same pace. Only one of us is pregnant.

5 months in and already I feel like I can’t eat fast enough for this baby.

Sometimes I eat food and I feel the baby punching up towards my stomach like he’s trying to get the food faster.

Everything on my front side is ballooning outwards. My boobs have never been this big.

Actually, my boobs are starting to rest on top of my stomach. This I distinctly do not like.

Wait, wait! Make it slow down! I’m not ready yet!

Only four months left? Oh, shit.

I made a joke about falling down and dropping dead and my OBGYN looked very worried. Maybe my sense of humor is too dark. #Don’tJokeAboutBabies

I bet there are some people, when they get a pregnancy announcement from a friend, are like “Damn. Another friend lost.”

Never read the mommy blogs. Just don’t do it.

Well gosh, everyone has advice! Thank you so much!

Why do they all want to rub my tummy? I’ll rub YOUR tummy. Does it feel weird when I rub your pot belly? K.

No, I have no idea what the heck I’m doing.

Yes, I work at a startup and I’m pregnant. I might be insane. Did you ever think I wasn’t?

When you have to write out your maternity policy because you’re building a startup (and a human) from scratch. #StartupPregnant

OH: “Where is the baby exactly?” #InMyUterus #WhatIsAUterus #OhGod

The list of things pregnant women should not do is like a cracked-out version of everything everyone gives up for Lent. Except… who gives up going to the sauna for a 9-month lent?

I’m gonna have a nice Bourbon when this is all over.

I have a baby boy inside of me.

Pregnancy is so strange, and so weird.

If I forget for a second that I’m pregnant, my body definitely reminds me.

I can feel you kicking inside of me. You have a tendency to kick me in the stomach whenever I start eating. You hungry too? I know, I know.

Hey Little Mister. I took you to see Star Wars today in the theater. Your dad says it’s the first movie you’ve seen in the theater. We’re training you right.

I can’t believe I’m growing a person.

I can feel myself slowing down, and it actually feels all right. I like this. There’s a sense of peace growing.

When I look around at all the men in the world, I realize, I’m growing one of them.

We were sitting on the train today, you and I, on our first trip down to Philadelphia. Already you’ve already been down to Philadelphia and on a plane to Colorado and in a few weeks we’ll be taking you to Kentucky.

If you’re anything like your mama, you’ll be a bit of a traveler in your future. If you’re anything like your dad, you’ll love cuddling up with a good book and staying warm by a fireside (or in a sauna).

We found out you were a boy and I said something like, “the Little Mister in here wants a lot of food,” because you made me super hungry again, and your name stuck.

I have no idea what we’ll name you when you arrive, of course, but for now, you’re in there.

Thanks for choosing me to be your mama.

We feel so lucky that you’re going to come into our lives.

We’re scared about being parents, but I think we’ll do a fairly decent job at it.

I hope we can teach you a lot and give you so much love and support and space.

Space to enjoy being a child, space to play, space to grow up and grow wise and become whoever you’re going to become.

I can’t wait to meet you, Little Mister.