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Antenatal Classes

      If you want to spend a lot of time looking at huge, panting women, then I suggest you rent a (bad) porn movie instead. Ante-natal classes teach you little more about the birth than you can find out for yourself, they are usually in the evening when you’d rather be watching telly, they take ages, and there is always the possibility of them whipping out a ‘birth video’, from which you will never recover. What can be useful about these evenings among the dungarees and bored men, is that you get to know where the maternity ward is, you might meet women who will be your friends for many years, you can try out some labour positions which you will never use, and you will discover how hard a plastic baby is.

      If you are going to go then find out about classes near you from your midwife, and book early—there are usually six sessions to go to, and they can book up quickly.

       You’re Eating For How Many?

       2 February. 8 p.m. Five months pregnant with number three.

       All of a sudden I’m SO fed up with feeling big. I feel that I should be eating more because the baby must be beginning to need more now, but I just seem to be expanding in all the wrong places suddenly, and I really hate it. My legs are huge and I’ve got that horrible big-pregnant-face thing back again. I’m trying to stick to fruit for breakfast, a light salad-y lunch with some chicken or something, and lots of veggies for dinner with some carbs, but maybe that’s not enough. Yes, it is enough. It was fine last time, and the bump is definitely getting bigger so it must be OK. God, it’s so hard to know if I’m getting it right. If there’s anything wrong with this baby I will always blame myself, but if it all turns out fine and I’ve turned into an elephant I will wish I hadn’t pigged out so much. Either way I’ll be wrong, so I’ll just try to eat sensibly. Fat chance, ha ha.

      So, so, so, so many of my friends dread becoming fat during pregnancy. In fact, they’re so convinced that pregnancy will turn them into a big blob of lard, that it’s one of their main reasons for putting the whole thing off a little while longer. This completely baffles, and also rather annoys me, for two reasons:

      Firstly, what’s wrong with getting a little bigger? Maybe pregnancy is a good time to lose the boyish hips and develop a womanly curve or two. Secondly, being pregnant doesn’t mean being fat. Not all pregnant women swell to the size of a salad-dodging Sumo wrestler. It all depends on how you decide to play it, and how much willpower you have. If you have no willpower at all, then now is a good time to start cultivating some.

      The great news is that you can have a baby and still get into your normal jeans on the way back from the hospital—you just can’t button them up for a few weeks. Toned thighs and abs are still a definite possibility, and unless there are medical reasons which cause excessive weight gain, it’s very possible that you will go back to being roughly the shape you normally are. Like all desirable things, you just have to work at it, and in this case that means really, really, really hard.

      When you are pregnant, you will get bigger. It’s mainly just your stomach and breast regions which will go a little crazy, and to be honest that’s hardly very surprising: there’s a person growing inside you, and it’s got to go somewhere. Unless you have some really weird internal arrangements, like no vital organs at all, then the only way is outwards, hence the big tummy.

      And the breasts thing is fantastic! Even the flattest of flatties develop heaving bosoms worthy of a Merchant Ivory production. Any man (or woman) who has cause to be fumbling around the region will be delighted with your new arrivals. Embrace these new curves: flaunt them, feel them and enjoy every inch, because when the breast-feeding is over, so are the breasts. Gone!

      Anyway, so far, ‘bigger’ is OK. It’s a good kind of bigger. The trouble starts when you feel you have to eat enough to feed your growing baby as though it’s running a marathon in there or something. It’s not. It’s just hanging around, swallowing, stretching, sucking its thumb occasionally, and growing a teeny bit. Hardly enough to merit a full extra meal, if you’re honest.

      ‘But it needs to grow—I must eat more!’, you will cry, washing down another granola bar with a full-fat latte before polishing off your husband’s pain au chocolat and wondering if just one more doughnut before lunch might be in order. This is absolutely fine, if you don’t mind turning into a bus. It’s not fine if you want to recognise yourself in a few months’ time.

      WARNING!!: This strong sense of having to eat tons more than usual is reinforced by absolutely everyone you know telling you to, and tirelessly offering you calorie-laden nourishment, which you would never normally have (honest). Resist! Resist! This goes doubly for your parents, and about ten-fold for any in-laws you may have acquired. Only visit these well-meaning people if you are armed with either a will of iron strong enough to decline their barrage of offerings, or a paper bag to pop any unwanted but forced-upon-you food into for future disposal. It sounds awful, but these desperate times can call for desperate measures. The alternative is just saying ‘No, thank you’ the whole time, which becomes very boring, and makes your mother-in-law think you hate her. Bad plan.

       But I’m eating for two

      No, you are not, or at least not in the way that it implies. ‘Eating for two’ makes it sound like you should be packing in two times the amount of food you would normally eat, or at least something approaching it. If you do that, as everyone from your second-best friend (your best friend will know better) to your favourite barista will do their damnedest to encourage, you will, as you so fear, become enormous!

      ‘Eating for two’ became my most hated phrase when I was pregnant (apart from ‘Oh, I had twins, too.’ I’ve never had twins, just huge bumps, apparently).

       OK, so how much am I supposed to eat when I’m pregnant?

      This is an impossible question to answer, but I can tell you what worked for me, and you can decide if you want to give it a go. Everyone is different, everyone wants different things, and I am NOT saying that this is medically or universally the best way to approach things, so please leave the lawyers out of it.

      For me it was a simple question of maths. I am 1.7 metres tall and I normally weigh about 50 kgs. At twelve-weeks gestation a foetus is, depending on which book you decide to believe, about 6cm long and weighs roughly 18g. Grabbing a pocket calculator for a second, I calculate that this made my three-month-old unborn baby about 3.5% of my height, and only 0.36% of my weight.

      So at this stage, going by our relative weights, it was more a case of eating for 1.0036 than for 2. Looking at a typical day’s food, that’s probably not much more than a few extra grains of rice, and maybe a couple of grapes.

      Not two Danish pastries, a mozzarella panini and a steak tartare, then? Errrr, no.

      Even at full term, when it is ready to be born, a baby is generally about 35 cms long and weighs on average 3.5kgs. That’s still only 7% of my normal body weight. In food terms, I make that one extra potato and a chicken wing, at the most.

       Can a baby really grow big enough that way?

      Babies do whatever Mother Nature has in mind for them. Most just seem to grow as big as their genetic make-up tells them to, and there seems to be little correlation between the amount Mummy eats and the size of her baby. I’ve known big ladies produce tiny babies, and skinny ladies give birth to whoppers. Que serra, serra.

      Using my very own geeky, logical approach, I managed to produce two 9 lb babies (which to you and me just means ‘ridiculously big’), and one 8 lb baby. I didn’t put on more than a kilo or two besides baby weight with any of my kids, and most of this was to be found in my maternity bra. I breast-fed all of them without any trouble at all, and so far they seem to be very strong and healthy children.

      Now, before you padlock the larder…

       Other Factors to Take Into Account (which mean you should up the food-intake)

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