Mumsnet - The Complete Mumsnet Guides: Pregnancy; Babies; Toddlers

by Morag Preston and the Mumsnet Mums

Illustrated by Charlotte Meyer

To Mumsnetters everywhere whose intelligence, compassion and wit make parents lives easier every day.

Pregnancy is, somewhat idiosyncratically, the second in our series of Mumsnet Guides, following closely on the heels of Toddlers. And truth be told, at no time in our lives do we have quite so many burning questions as when were pregnant, except maybe when were three and just learned how to use the word why?; but, as said, thats another book altogether. You pee on a stick and suddenly you are catapulted into a whole, previously unknown, universe of responsibility, not to mention discomfort.

Youd be mightily unlucky to get all the minor ailments that are painstakingly detailed in most pregnancy tomes, but if you got none youll most likely be preserved for the benefit of scientific research. As one Mumsnet member wrote recently, Pregnancy might not be an illness, but if you had half the symptoms and you werent pregnant youd think you were dying, wouldnt you? Whether its exhaustion, indigestion, constipation, backache, nausea, piles, insomnia, restless leg or carpal tunnel syndrome, everyone seems to have a their own particular bugbear and most will have an unappetising cocktail of them.

And we havent even mentioned the hormones yet the ones that will see you weeping uncontrollably at the merest glimpse of an Andrex puppy.

Added to that, these days, it can feel like you need a twenty-four-hour newswire to keep you up to date with the latest guidelines on WHAT PREGNANT WOMEN SHOULD NOT DO. Blink and youll miss the fact that shellfish are off the menu. Then on again but only if they are thoroughly cooked and piping hot all the way through And without a degree in food science you might struggle to establish exactly which cheeses are pregnancy no-nos. If soft ones are off limits, how soft is soft? And what about Feta or, for that matter, the deliciously runny one at the local deli that claims to be pasteurised?

And those are just the first gusts in the hurricane of questions that will engulf you over the next few months. Should you bother with ante-natal classes? How much maternity leave will you need? What tests should you have and what should you make of them? What kind of birth should you have? What equipment should you buy? Is teal best for a boy or a girl? How will you know if you are going into labour? Or indeed how to ripen your cervix, if youre not? What on earth is a mucus plug anyway?

Every day the Mumsnet community helps a fresh battalion of prospective mothers to navigate the perilous waters of pregnancy, from their first tentative post of Could I be pregnant? to the moment those very waters eventually break (usually over your best Havaianas).

If we at Mumsnet HQ had a pound for every Mumsnetter whod lamented, if only theyd found the site earlier, when they were pregnant with their first rather than with their third child, Id no doubt be writing this from a plush Kensington suite rather than a shed in Kentish Town.

Given that youre reading this, we hope youre one of the lucky ones who have discovered this amazing bunch of women (and a few amazing men) right at the beginning of your journey as a parent because, as one Mumsnetter memorably puts it, once you deliver the placenta, they insert the guilt. Rest assured though, Mumsnet will be with you every step of the way.

All of which may leave you wondering why you are reading this book, and not sat in front of a screen chewing the fat in a Mumsnet antenatal club. Its true that to feel the full experience you need to log on and plunge in. But a while ago we realised that, without us ever planning it that way, Mumsnet Talk had turned into the most amazing archive of wisdom. Whereas existing pregnancy manuals offered you the wisdom of a single Stoppard or Kitzinger, Mumsnet could bring you the collected wisdom of a million parents. Just as Wikipedia has rendered almost obsolete the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so we wondered if there was a way to capture the wisdom of this remarkable crowd.

We hope a Mumsnet pregnancy manual might be different from the usual in another way too. If Mumsnet.com is such fun to read that some members have begged us to ban them because they are spending too much of their lives on the boards, might it not be possible, despite the piles and constipation, for a pregnancy book to be a good read too? Even with a thread on the grisliest of subjects, it is not unusual to find yourself chuckling over the keyboard. One member captured the wonderfully batty serendipity of the site a while ago: You know, you start a thread about vaginal discharge and within a few posts you find yourself recommending a reasonably-priced shed or telling all about the little hotel you stayed at in the Cotswolds.

And if traditional pregnancy and parenting guides purport to reveal the right way to give birth, our firm starting point is that there isnt one right way most of the time to do the parenting thing. If there were a Mumsnet philosophy it would be something along the lines of theres more than one way to skin a cat, so read this as a book of optimistic suggestions, rather than a users manual. What we provide is a range of options compiled from the hard-won know-how of what has worked for thousands of others; somewhere in here will be answers that work for you and if theres not we hope that at least well distract from your varicose veins for a while.

Justine Roberts (Co-founder, Mumsnet.com)

P.S. Huge thanks to Mumsnetter Boco who we found hiding her enormous artistic talents under a bushel somewhere on our vegetable, pulses and wholegrains forum. She translated my frankly incomprehensible briefs into the remarkable illustrations youll find in this book, and only very occasionally told me I was being unreasonable.

P.P.S. Mumsnetters go by a weird and wonderful array of pseudonyms. JackBauer for instance isnt the real Jack Bauer or if he is, do bear in mind that youve probably only got twenty-four hours to read this book before some kind of particularly nasty, global catastrophe.

In this chapter ...

Congratulations what a result! Not everyone remembers exactly when they actually got pregnant or where, but, chances are, you will recall with perfect clarity the finer details of when you first saw that thin blue line. After all, having spent most of your adult life trying to avoid getting knocked up, you have finally hit the jackpot. Its a total heart-stopper; hopefully, in a good way.

But here the confusion starts. It might say Rapid Response on the package but using a pregnancy-testing kit to work out if you really are up the duff suddenly becomes impossible when a news ticker in your head is flashing, Life-changing moment alert while youre thinking, damn it, what do all these lines and pink splodges actually mean? How long is a minute? Is my pee strong enough? Should I wait until morning? It cant possibly be true. The test must be faulty. I knew it I should have bought the more expensive one

Its quite normal at this stage to rush out and buy a few more tests, rather than investing more sensibly in a bumper pack of iron tablets. But one, two, three pregnancy tests later, it will (sort of) sink in that you really are pregnant.

Now how do you feel? Thrilled? Excited? Let us hope so. Totally terrified at the same time? Definitely. Hell, no one has prepared you for this. Its wonderful. And daunting. Youre taking a giant leap into the unknown. Even breaking the news to your other half can be a challenge. Will a text message do the job? Should you buy him a T-shirt with Im the Daddy on it? Should you scream and jump up and down with excitement? Or just sit on the loo in gobsmacked silence until he realises youve been gone for an unusually long time?