Taking Care of Yourself and Your Growing Baby When Raising Other Children
Whether your experience with being pregnant is positive or negative, pregnancy is hard stuff regardless. This miracle: creating a human life with the one you love and growing and nurturing your baby, is really hard. In reality, your growing baby takes your blood supply, your nutrients, your energy, all to build its own life. In fact, this baby needs nutrients so badly that if it doesn’t receive it from our diet, it will rob it from our bodies. Calcium is an example of this. If our baby isn’t getting enough calcium through diet, it begins breaking away at the calcium that builds our bones. More than ever, pregnancy is a time for self-care.
Self-care is usually the last thing on the docket when you have other children who you are responsible for. I realize that many mom lunches are crusts from our child’s sandwich. I’ve been there when we are out and about and your children eat all the snacks and mom is left starving. I’ve forgotten my water bottle countless times because I was busy packing diapers, wipes, food, and water for a mere one hour excursion.
We moms need a good reminder to take care of ourselves when we are pregnant because doing so is taking care of our child living inside of us. We can’t neglect that amongst the business of our other children. Here are some tips for taking care of yourself and your growing baby when raising other children.
Slow Down and Ask for Help
Maybe, this comes easy to you – but it doesn’t for me. I often try to be “super-mom” as my husband calls it. By nature, I am strongly task oriented. I will look at a given day and think to myself, “wash dishes, do laundry, take kids to the park, read stories with the kids, clean rooms, vacuum, mop, cook dinner, etc.”. I will set out to accomplish a task list, and no matter the circumstances – whether that is me not feeling the best, or the kids needing additional attention that day, I am determined to finish my task list.
Having kids has taught me that some days the task list needs to be ripped up and thrown away, and that isn’t failure, it’s adaptation.
Our life is no longer dependent on just ourselves. We have other variables now and they all have names that we lovingly gave them. Whether that variable is your toddler boy needing extra attention that day or your baby inside of you, take these variables into account and realize that what you could accomplish before kids and now is different. If you have older children, ask them for help. A sister, a mom, an aunt, a neighbor – ask for help. I do believe we were not intended to do this all on our own – especially when we are creating life inside of us.
Make Pregnancy Rules for Self-Care
This point builds on the first. I am a strong believer that unrealistic and uncommunicated expectations cause disappointment. When you are pregnant, set limits and rules for yourself. Make them clear, maybe even write them down. These are rules that you probably don’t have for yourself when you are not pregnant. Mine look like this:
Take a 20-minute nap/rest daily – mid-day. My children all have “quiet time” or nap time daily. When I’m not pregnant I usually use this time to get things done. When I am pregnant, I make myself lay down for 20 minutes first, and then get slightly less things done.
Take 20-minutes to focus on stretching or exercise daily. Getting active helps prepare your body for a healthier labor and delivery.
Assign yourself only one large chore daily. If it is laundry day, don’t try and sweep and mop the floors too. If you find there are things not getting done that need to be done, ask for help.
Cook enough food so that you only cook 3-4 dinners per week. I don’t know about you, but standing and cooking in the kitchen is much less enjoyable when you have had a long day and are pregnant. To put less pressure on yourself – cook larger portions when you cook so you can give yourself some days off from cooking.
Take a bath each night before bed (especially in the 3rd trimester). This was my saving grace in my pregnancies. In my third trimester, I took an Epsom salt bath almost every night after I put the kids to bed. This prevented me from getting restless legs in the middle of the night, and helped me wake up less sore in the mornings. Remember that Epsom salt can be dehydrating, so drink at least 1 cup of water while in the bath and soak for no more than 20 minutes.
Have a Nutrition and Wellness Regimen
I have derived my suggestions for a pregnancy wellness regimen from Sandra Ellis, a Master Herbalist and Midwife. Her program for nutrition and wellness is the best, most thorough set of suggestions I have yet seen – you can find them in her new book Mother’s Take Charge: Second Edition. Here is a sample of her suggested regimen.
Supplement Suggestions:
Take a good Whole foods, plant based prenatal vitamin
Wheat germ oil - 2 capsules 2x's/day
Liquid Chlorophyll - 1 Tbsp 2x's/day
Red Raspberry Leaf/Pregnancy Tea - 1 qt/day
Pure Water - 2 qts / day
Dietary Suggestions:
(Organic, if possible - try to make half of diet fresh, live food)
Fruits
Vegetables
Grains
Nuts
Seeds
Legumes
No-No’s:
No alcohol, drugs or cigarettes
No processed meat
No carbonated drinks
Avoid sugar, dairy and processed foods
Exercise:
25 pelvic rocks/day
50 Kegels/day
Walk 1 mile/day
Remember to take time to breathe deeply each day! You are doing great mama. Keep up the great work by taking care of yourself.