(Editor’s Note: Shona Murray has been running a series about her pregnancy and experience on her site, Not So Common Sense Blog. Today’s post is the first of her five posts we thought would be a fun additional Mid-Week Funny. Next Tuesday we will feature an interview with Shona as part of our Titus 2 series asking serious questions about pregnancy at 45 and giving birth in America. Until then, enjoy this funny look at her experience from her perspective.)
By Shona Murray
A Scottish immigrant to the USA, age 45, and having a baby almost ten years after number four is, perhaps, slightly unusual.
What’s changed since my last one on the baby front, and what is different to back home in the old country? A whole lot of things, not all sensible.
For one thing, at 45 I am considered “high risk.” I don’t know where that leaves the multiple pregnancies of forty-something’s in generations gone by.
Let’s look at the latest:
Do’s and Don’ts
1. Don’t eat Great Lakes fish; full of mercury.
Just when I had been eating loads of it after my husband’s fishing exploits last fall. What a waste of good fish.
2. No more than one coffee a day!
Apparently, a study somewhere showed more than one coffee per day increased the number of miscarriages or pre-term births. One poor woman I read of who had a miscarriage felt guilty that she had been drinking a daily Starbucks. Poor lady, I hope someone told her that is not what caused it.
3. Mandatory daily vitamin pills the size of bullets.
Sorry, can’t swallow them without almost choking. OK, I do take the odd one here and there. My preferred option: EAT YOUR FOOD.
4. Don’t change the cat litter and don’t touch hamsters!
Yippee! Finally, a great excuse to get the kids to change the litter, by making them feel guilty. 🙂 Guess what?! The cat’s pregnant too! It’s a toss-up which of us will pop first. It had better be me, and then the cat is someone else’s problem. I’ll be too busy.
And not touch the poor hamster? She’s really cute.
5. Get lots of sleep (a luxury for moms).
6. Sleep on your left side (what if I can’t sleep on my left side?)
7. Don’t sleep on your back.
You may block your vena cava -an important blood vessel – and die (I think I’ll know long before then if I’m cutting off my circulation).
8. Don’t sleep on your belly.
Any pregnant lady who can actually sleep on her tummy deserves an award.
9. Get good appropriate exercise.
The safest and most productive activities apparently are: “swimming, brisk walking, indoor stationary bicycling and low-impact aerobics (taught by a certified aerobics instructor)…”
This must be for pregnancy #1!!!
No mention of vacuuming, picking up several times a day after kids, weight lifting 5 gallons of milk and the rest of two cart loads of groceries at the store, filling and emptying the washing machine, cleaning bathrooms, scrubbing floors….
That would be pregnancy #5!!!! They just forgot to mention it.
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Shona Murray is from Scotland, but moved to Grand Rapids, MI, USA with her pastor husband David and four children in 2007. While David now teaches full time at Puritan Reformed Seminary in Grand Rapids, she is a homemaker and home schools her two youngest children. She loves the Lord and His Word, the Bible.
Her interests include: medicine (she worked as a Family Doctor in Scotland ), pastors’ wives issues, home schooling, books, and the general interface between the Word of God and the world around her.
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