Back in the day, when a "woman" was expecting a baby, things were a LOT different. I use the quotation marks because child-bearing age was 16, 17, 18 years old. Now I look at 16-year olds who are members of upstanding neighbourhood families and ask myself if they are capable of babysitting. It's nothing against the teens. Like every generation before me, I thought to myself, 'Times have changed', which proves that I have crossed the bridge to old.
Women are having babies once their careers are established, their houses purchased, their men earning, and their spines already compressing (I heard that after age 30 we start to get shorter). In exchange for the reservoir of youthful exuberance, we have been armed with information overload. We have access to so much information about pregnancy and childbirth that it is flat-out overwhelming to the first-time expectant mother. I made a conscious decision to limit the amount of reading and research that I conducted into this whole experience. Between the books about eating, feeding, exercising, labouring, weaning, teething,... ECH. I needed to save my sanity.
One fellow pregnant friend over-did it, by her own admission. Too much reading led to conflicting information which led to having to make her own decision in the end anyway. There is only one topic that I regret not resarching more extensively, which is nursing, but in the end it all worked out, which is what I figured would happen. I'm not knockin' the Baby Whisperer. I haven't read any of her books. But my friend did mention that the Baby Whisperer says to follow your own instincts. So I just didn't see the point in reading a book that told you to do what you think you should do. I mean, if this is indeed the moral of the story, I'm in the wrong business. I should be writing books.
And just in case you were wondering, the answer is yes. This IS bliss.
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