Beautiful Maternity Clothes

Heidi Klum's "Lavish" maternity line of clothing is really lovely.  Check out this evening dress:

Her line also has some great leggings and maternity tops. I'm planning to pay a visit to Pea in a Pod during my holiday shopping to try on some of her offerings.  If her maternity pants actually stay up (unlike, say, all the maternity jeans I've tried), I'll be even more excited.  I'll let you know...

First Trimester vs. Second Trimester

A Dramatized Guide to Your Body,
First Trimester vs. Second Trimester
First Trimester
Stomach:  Feed me!  Feed me now!
Stomach: Aaagh, don't feed me that!  Or anything else you used to like to eat.  Even though you just ate the blandest food in the world, I'm going to go churn as sickeningly as if you'd just eaten a super-sized McDonald's Big Mac meal.
Whole body:  It's past 10 PM - I'm exhausted.  Let's go to sleep
Stomach: *gurgle gurgle gurgle*
Libido: I'm going to take a little vacation for a few weeks.  You know, Nausea and I have never gotten along, and I hear the Caribbean is quite nice this time of year.  See ya!
Stomach: Pickles, and cheese and crackers - that's all I need.
Whole body: Hey, I've got an idea!  Let's take a nap!


Second Trimester
Stomach:  I'm hungry!  Let's eat some real food for once!
Stomach:  That was delicious!  Let's eat some more!
Libido: Hey, honey, I'm back!  That husband of yours is looking fiiiine!
Stomach: Mmm, ice cream!
Whole body:  Let's go jogging.

Don't, Don't, Don't...

After I graduated from university, I spent a year living in Japan, teaching English.  Dan Strack, a fellow English teacher, hilariously captured in song what it's like to be a Westerner in Japan. Needless to say, any Westerner living in Japan who wants to try to avoid embarrassment has to learn some new rules.  His song "Don't" (from his album The Gaijin Years) offers a few tips on doing this.  Here are the opening lyrics:

Living in Japan is like crossing a minefield:
embarrassing explosions can happen every day.
Even if you understood everything going on around you,
chances are you still wouldn't understand what to do or say...
I hate to dwell on negatives or be too pessimistic, 
but here are a few rules that have been useful to me.

Don't, don't, don't...
Don't wear your shoes on tatatmi
Don't try to guess what's in that pastry...
Don't buy the salt-flavored toothpaste
Don't take part in a late-night downtown drag-race

The "don'ts" continue for several verses and several minutes, and then the song (almost) concludes:

Don't use umbrellas with typhoon winds blowing
Don't you wonder how long this song can keep going?
You may think I'm just exaggerating, so I'll sum it all up.
There's just one thing to keep in mind when push comes to shove
Remember...all...of the above

Being pregnant seems to come with a similarly endless list of don'ts.  No alcohol, caffeine, soft cheeses, over-the-counter meds, hot tub use, sushi, etc.  Since this is turning into a Japan-themed post, let's look at the evidence regarding eating sushi (and fish more generally) during pregnancy. I admit to immediately being skeptical of all the warnings against pregnant women eating sushi and cooked fish - the majority of Japanese women still list sushi as their favorite food (for Japanese men, it's steak), many eat it daily, and they don't seem to slack off on their sushi habit when pregnant.  And when they're not eating sushi, they're often eating grilled fish, or some kind of soup or sauce made from fish stock.  Yet neither they nor their babies have the sorts of health problems one would expect given the dire warnings we hear from US health agencies.  So what's going on?

Note: Before I get started, I should stress that I'm not a doctor and this is not medical advice.  

I'm just an educated, thinking person sorting through the publicly available evidence
and hysteria (ha!) regarding this issue. 

There are two main concerns with eating raw sushi during pregnancy: the risks of eating uncooked meat and the mercury content of fish. Let's look at each supposed risk in turn. Uncooked meat is more likely to harbor parasites, and eating uncooked meat is more likely to cause food-borne illnesses.  Some food-borne illnesses can be life-threatening to a fetus, even if they would just be a rather disgusting inconvenience to a healthy adult.  Raw sushi served in the States, though not cooked to kill parasites and other icky stuff, is flash frozen—this basically provides the same protection from parasites and microoganisms as cooking does.  A 1991 National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine study seems to confirm that food-borne illnesses from sushi are not a serious concern; most seafood-associated illnesses come from raw mollusks.  If you remove those from the statistical pool, your risk of falling ill from eating seafood is 1 in 2 million servings.  By comparison, the risk from eating cooked chicken is 1 in 25,000.  Given my own food poisoning experiences—all 3 caused by chicken and none caused by anything else, and this despite the fact that I regularly eat sushi, medium-rare steaks, and pork that isn't well-done—this seems about right.  If we consider only this risk, it seems you'd be wiser to swear off chicken and eat sushi your whole pregnancy. (This isn't completely fair to chicken, though, since salmonella is typically less dangerous to the fetus than some other common parasites and bacteria.)  Avoiding raw shellfish does seem like a good idea, though. 

What about the mercury risk?  Mercury poisoning can cause severe neurological damage, damage to peripheral vision, and worse, and the effects are typically more serious for the fetus than for the mom ingesting the mercury-laden food.  Who would want to risk this?  No one would, of course, but there is no reason to think that anyone is taking any risk from eating fish—even from eating fish on a regular basis.  Some of the scary literature out there is based on the fact that EPA's "reference dose" for ingestion of mercury is set many, many times below the level of mercury that has been shown to cause any harm.  Almost three-quarters of Japanese women of childbearing age have mercury levels above the EPA reference dose.  Similary, "over-achieving Chinese children in Hong Kong, whose blood-mercury levels are between 10 and 18 times as high as their counterparts in the United States" are clearly not suffering any ill-effects from their fish consumption.  The only clinical cases documenting mercury poisoning from fish involve people eating fish from waters that were the direct dumping grounds for industrial waste (the infamous Minamata Bay and Niigata mercury poisonings).

Based on the very low incidence of food-borne illnesses from eating fish and the fact that there is no reason to think that the trace amounts of mercury in fish will lead to any health effects—especially among Westerners who simply do not eat much fish, even if they have a serious sushi habit—I don't see any reason to avoid sushi when pregnant.  Given the nutritional value of fish, sushi  will probably only be beneficial to your health and that of your developing baby.

For my next post: the risks of ingesting alcohol when pregnant.

Sources
http://www.mercuryfacts.org/faqMercury.cfm

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/opinion/15shaw.html

Read more at http://www.babymed.com/food-and-nutrition/how-safe-it-eat-sushi-or-raw-fish-during-pregnancy?ktrack=kcplink

"I think I might be dying"

I was recently talking to the woman who cleans our apartment for us about her first pregnancy.  She was on birth control when she got pregnant (oops!) and had no inkling at all that she was expecting for the first month or so.  She finally went to the doctor when morning sickness kicked in, and she described her state to her doctor as, "I think I might be dying. I'm so sick every night."  She thought she must have cancer or some other sort of terrible malady to feel that nauseous all the time. That's how fun morning sickness can be!

The surprising thing for me about morning sickness was that it's not just in the morning!  In fact, I have hardly ever felt sick in the morning—the evening is usually the worst time.  As many pregnancy books point out, "morning sickness" is a misnomer for many women.  Fortunately, I'm feeling sick less and less often as the first trimester comes to an end. 

The good news is, you can do a few things to control and prevent first trimester nausea.  Everyone has different tips on how to do so, and I'm sure different things work for different women, but here are a few things I've found most helpful:

• Get enough sleep. Before I got pregnant, I'd very regularly get by on 5-6 hours of sleep.  But now anything less than 7-1/2 or 8 hours of sleep is a recipe for me feeling barfy and exhausted the whole next day.  As soon as I realized this and started sleeping enough, the intense bouts of nausea went away.
• Stay hydrated.  This will also help keep you from feeling warm or feverish. It's a good idea to always carry water with you.
• Never let your stomach be too full or empty.  I find I have to eat a little something every 2-3 hours.  For this reason, I also make sure to eat something shortly after I get up in the morning.
• Each snack should be a good mix of fat, protein and carbs - or at least these are the kinds of snacks I've found most effective at settling my stomach.  I pretty much lived on egg and cheese sandwiches, cheese and crackers, baked potatoes with sour cream, and apples during the worst week or two of nausea.  I also drank a lot of milk and water. 
• Don't eat anything sugary.  I am a huge chocolate fan, and usually have a little bit of chocolate every day.  I could only eat small amounts of very dark, slightly bitter chocolate for most of the first trimester.  Desserts were out of the question.  Strangely, honey did not have the same ill effects as sugar, so if you want to sweeten something, try a bit of honey.  (I believe you are supposed to stick to pasteurized honey while pregnant.)
• There is something to that pregnant women and pickles myth, but it's not just pickles—anything sour or bitter seems to go down well.  A tiny bit of straight lemon juice (I'd just suck on a lemon slice) was strangely effective at calming my stomach.  This worked much better than any over-the-counter remedy; the few I tried were completely useless—save your money for cute maternity clothes instead.
• Ginger candy was also excellent at settling my stomach.  I really liked The Ginger People's gin-gin candies.  Just don't get overly sweet ginger candy—the sugar cancels out the beneficial effects of the ginger.
• If your prenatal multivitamin makes you sick, talk to your doctor about switching to a folic-acid-only supplement.  My doctor suggested that as a possibility before I even mentioned feeling nauseous.
• Pay attention to your body.  Everyone has different smells and tastes that set them off.  For me, onions and Indian food did it, though I was a big fan of both before I got pregnant.  Processed meats, including bacon, also just seem gross to me right now.
• Once the worst week or two of morning sickness was over, I craved steaks regularly, and I always felt great after eating one.  (My husband has spent a lot of time grilling on the barbeque recently.) Your mileage may vary, but if that sounds at all appealing to you, give it a try.  Hamburgers—extra pickles, no onions—have a similar effect, though I often don't want the bun.

The good news is, for most women, "morning" sickness starts about a month after conception and ends after the first trimester.  (It often peaks in intensity in the middle of that period.)  So you probably won't have to worry about feeling sick for too long.  Better yet, maybe you'll be lucky and be one of the 20% of pregnant women who doesn't experience any first trimester nausea! 

Have any other tips for preventing first-trimester nausea?  Post them in the comments below!

Welcome!

I'm a first time mom-to-be, almost through my first trimester (and hopefully, almost done with morning sickness!).  I plan to use this space to share pregnancy tips, advice, and whatever wisdom I gain as I go through the process.  I already have posts planned on controlling morning sickness, maternity clothes, and myths and facts about what is and isn't safe during pregnancy.

You may be wondering, why is this blog named "Challah in the Oven"?  Well, every possible blog name variety on "Bun in the Oven" was taken when I was setting up this blog. My husband is Jewish and challah is a type of Jewish bread, and so voilà - "Challah in the Oven" was born!  Let us hope that the next birth goes as smoothly!