The pregnant woman’s guide to nutrition

Disclaimer: For those of you who found my blog through a google search about eating the sponge off your sponge hair rollers, or anyone else trolling the internet for legitimate advice on nutrition in pregnancy, you’re in the wrong place. I don’t actually know anything about nutrition in pregnancy, nor do I particularly care. I’m just doing the best I can and desperately trying to keep it together through what feels like the 100-month pregnancy from hell. Oh, and I’m pretty sure my fetus weighs about 25 pounds by now, so find a better source for your nutrition information.

Throughout this incredibly long pregnancy I’ve been picky about where I got my pregnancy advice. After reading such internet drivel as, “Staying hydrated will prevent you from going into premature labor,” and “If you’re uncomfortable in your third trimester it’s because you have bad posture,” I pretty much stuck to advice from my doctor, my mother, or the National Institutes of Health. Occasionally I would look for something in babycenter.com or WebMD, but they always seem to imply that if I don’t eat 95 servings of cauliflower per day my baby is going to come out of the uterus hooves-first. Not to mention that Linda Murray, the executive editor of babycenter, pissed me off by saying in a New York Times interview that pregnancy “ruins” women’s bodies. (I sent her an e-mail saying that if she feels that way she probably shouldn’t be the executive anything at a pregnancy website. To my everlasting surprise I never heard back.)

Somewhat frustrated by the existing advice out there, I decided to compile my own list of nutritional tips for pregnant women. Here’s what I have so far:

• Activia prune yogurt. I’m not going to elaborate on that. If you’ve ever been pregnant you’ll understand.
  
  
  
• That dark brown liquid in my Starbucks cup? It’s decaf. I swear. Totally. I wouldn’t dream of potentially endangering the health of my baby just because I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in eight months, am carrying a 25-pound bowling ball with me everywhere I go, had over a hundred pages of Evidence reading and five student journal articles to edit last night, and got up this morning at 5:45 to clear three feet of snow off my car in negative 33 degree windchills. Uh, yeah, it’s definitely decaf.
  
  
  
• Dear Wiki Answers: I bought a container of toffee caramel “cafe scones” from Whole Foods. I don’t know what a cafe scone is, but I ate nineteen of them this morning. Do you think that’s a problem?
  
  
  
• If you’re craving booze I don’t have much advice for you. But one thing you shouldn’t do is make a big batch of chili and put an entire can of beer plus several shots of tequila in there with the hopes that the booze will boil off and you’ll be left with something that tastes deliciously alcoholic. Not only will your house smell like a brewery for a week, you’ll end up with a huge pot of chili that tastes like something you bought at a bowling alley.
  
  
  
• Who are you kidding? Throw those vegetables in your refrigerator away before the weird mold growing on them somehow infects the rest of the items in your fridge.
  
  
  
• Check this out: Bacon, cheese, butter, mayonnaise, mustard, black olives, sour cream, guacamole, ranch dressing and tomatoes, on a tortilla.
  
  
  
• Sure you could stop eating butter straight from the stick, but why would you?
  
  
  
• Beware of the Velveeta Shells and Cheese that purportedly contains 2% milk instead of regular milk. I’m not saying the regular Velveeta is actually good for you. In fact, I’m pretty sure someone could successfully sue Velveeta for false advertising and make them change their name to Velveeta Shells and Chiz. I was forced to buy the 2% version when my local grocery ran out of the full octane, and the “cheese” came out of the package in thin, oily clumps. The end product, although yellow, tasted like someone had poured a cup of skim milk over a bowl of pasta.
  
  
  
• If you weren’t supposed to eat six Snicker’s ice cream bars at once, they wouldn’t sell them six to a box.

That’s all I have for now folks. I’ve been bad about posting lately due to a combination of overwhelming fatigue, an out-of-control workload at school, and having to shovel my car out of the snow every single morning before 6 a.m. I keep telling myself I’m not the first 8-month pregnant woman to shovel snow, but I still pretty much feel like I’m going to pass out every day by noon. But I’m certain things will improve once the baby is born. BWAAAHAHAAAHAA. (Sorry, that’s just me laughing my ass off.)