Category Archive

pregnancy

My four-year-old son and his eggplant sibling

So my pregnancy ticker tells me week by week how big my new baby is in relation to produce. My nearly four-year-old son loves it. He’s an on-hands learner (His grandmother the teacher says it’s a ‘kinesthetic learner’) and it gives him a tactile idea of how big our new wiggly addition to the family has grown. He asks me constantly how big the baby is now and really grasps the process of growing with the progression of fruits and veggies.

What can pregnant vegetarians eat to boost their iron levels?

I am about eighteen weeks pregnant, and I’ve had low iron since my iron was first checked at 12 weeks. The catch is, I really don’t like to eat meat, and it appears the very best sources — in terms of easy absorption — are meat, fish, and poultry. I just bought lentils, quinoa, kidney beans, and spinach, and I am going to dig up some recipes (and I know to combine them with vitamin C). I really wonder if this will suffice — or do I need meat?

I’m Human: a video from Alabama middle schoolers talking about what makes us different

The broadcasting team at Liberty Middle School in Madison, Alabama, is currently rocking my world. They put together this incredibly simple, yet incredibly powerful video called “I’m Human.” The video features students standing against a wall, each holding up a sign that tells you how they’re different. One is Christian, one is spoiled. Another is Mexican, and one girl has lost a friend — all of this in the first forty-eight seconds.

Being pregnant is changing my body and I LOVE IT

Before I got pregnant, I really didn’t like my body. I thought I was fat, thought I wasn’t good enough, you know… things a lot of young girls and women deal with. I gained weight and got stretch marks, and that sent me into a deep dark place of self loathing and despair that I wasn’t beautiful anymore.

How and why I voluntarily became a single mother at 22

When I was little, my rendition of “house” always included pretending I was a single mother struggling to make ends meet. I’m not sure if my eight-year-old self could foresee the future, or if I was just making do with the fact that I didn’t ever have a boy to play my “husband.” I dabbled in dating as a teenager. By “dabble” I mean my relationships never lasted more than three months and most were more like a few days. I just never had much interest in men (or women, for that matter), sexually speaking.

We’ve decided to have our baby and I’m going all in

When I found out I was pregnant, I had a serious choice to make. I have no moral, religious or political objection to abortion, and since news of my pregnancy was such a huge shock (at a time when my partner and I were unsure if we were able to handle the financial and emotional stress of raising a child), abortion was a very real possibility for us.

Our lesbian conception story – how a salsa jar helped us get pregnant!

We always knew we wanted to have a baby, but having two sets of ovaries doesn’t really help with that. Patty’s best friend has always talked about helping her conceive by donating sperm, but Patty didn’t want to carry the baby herself. I, on the other hand, was happy to get pregnant. We did consider adoption, and I in fact always thought that would be the way I’d have a child, but since we had a willing known donor… we figured we should at least give conceiving a biological child a shot!

A beachside maternity session featuring one happy mama and her kilt-clad baby daddy

So get this: I’ve just discovered that the only way to make a beach-side maternity session even better (because obviously the whole OCEAN thing already rocks) is to throw in an incredibly adorable family that includes a dad wearing a REAL LIFE KILT. I’m not sure why the juxtaposition of the kilt and the sea is so fantastic to me, but these maternity photos are some of my favorites that have landed in our Flickr pool to date.