Popping in with a quick post all about the books and podcasts I read during this crazy period of transition into motherhood.
Reading and listening to podcasts has been such a saviour during this time of change, and it’s been an essential way to put my very disordered mind at ease. Another reason I’ve loved books? Whilst I have a terrible tendency to reach for google whenever a question arises, I’ve found that this often leads to getting stuck down a forum vortex where 101 worst case scenarios are played out and too many perspectives make you more stressed rather than less. Not what you need!
Nurture I adore this book, and WISH I lived in LA so I could visit the amazing birthing/women’s health studio set up by the author. It’s split up by month and has other detailed sections about birthing and what to expect, all done in a relaxed and informal style which is my ultimate pregnancy self (when I wasn’t googling WHY ARE MY FEET BALLOONS?!). When I compared it to a quick flick through What To Expect and other books like that I found them completely dry and lacking. Ps. This is a great book to give as a gift to a newly pregnant woman.
Ina May’s Childbirth In case you are worried that your body won’t be able to cope, the stories in this book are moving and enlightening. My mum gave me her copy (I have a feeling she was holding onto it for this very purpose).
Hello, Bump I really liked this podcast which features real mums, a mid wife and doctors talking about pregnancy month by month in, again, a relaxed style.
The First Forty Days I was really into the concept of staying in for a given amount of time when I first had Frankie, it’s something my local friends in Hong Kong swear by and is the premise for this book. Whilst I didn’t follow this book down to a tee, I think the relaxed recovery I had made a big difference (I think) for me. *People also recommended The Fourth Trimester to me, but I was didn’t love it.
Bringing Up Bebe You’ll either love this one or hate it, but for the most part I liked many of the ideas in the book.
The New Basics This book is polarising (mainly due to the author’s sleep advice) buttttt we really like it and it worked for us (Frankie slept through from about 8 weeks). Dr Michel is featured in Bringing up Bebe and he goes for low intervention, try-not-to-freak-out, you-got-this style of parenting which I am 100% into (even though I am not totally on board with everything he says). The cover is TERRIBLE though so if you’re an aesthetic obsessed person like me it will be hard to get past, but you know what they say about judging a book by its cover. Update: I wanted to say that with Frankie now at 11 months, pretty much everything that this author says in his book has turned out to be spot on. If you buy one book about parenting make this it.
Save Our Sleep You’re probably going to end up with a thousand sleep books, and this one has pretty terrifying sleep routines in it that hurt my brain to read. I mean, how does one have a LIFE?! So whilst I don’t follow Tizzie’s routines exactly, I did take the idea of a dream feed and a few other concepts and found them really successful.
I Don’t Know How She Does It I was terrified when I got pregnant about how I would juggle baby and career. So I love this podcast that talks to lots of women about the juggle and how they make it work. I found it really uplifting during those first few months when I was wondering how it would all come together. Spoiler alert: Women get help, they blur the lines between personal and work time and they try to carve out time for themselves once in a while(!). I think the new series is about girls but the earlier ones talk mainly about mothers.
Love to hear if you have some others!
