Surviving Pregnancy

1. Invest in the Prenatal Cradle. (It’s a harness that supports the weight of your belly) It’s worth every dollar of the 50 bucks I had to spend to buy it. It saved my back and I think it kept my huge uterus from getting too strained because it offered so much support. Wear it every day as soon as you have a belly!

2. At 28 weeks you need to start slowing down the pace of your life! At 32 weeks, put yourself on bedrest if you haven’t already been ordered there by your doctor. I’ve talked to lots of moms of twins and we all agreed that at 32 weeks we all of a sudden felt so much more tired and it was really easy to start going into preterm labor. You do NOT want to have your babies early… even if you feel miserable (I felt like a beached whale every morning and an old lady by the end of the day) having your babies in the NICU is stressful and not fun at all. I cried every time I went and visited my boys because I hated seeing them suffer. So stay pregnant and have healthy babies! (Plus, the longer you stay pregnant, hopefully the bigger the babies will be which will mean you are that much closer to have them be able to sleep through the night!).

3. Sit as much as you can. Even in the weeks that you feel great. If I was doing something that I would normally just stand to do (like doing dishes, or reading to my class, I would sit on my stool instead).

4. Peanut butter saved my life. I was sick A LOT and the only way I survived teaching school was to keep a jar of peanut butter on my desk. When I would get overcome with nausea, I would take a spoon and grab a spoonful and just suck on it. Kind of gross, but the protein helped me feel better.

5. Read When You’re expecting Twins, Triplets, or Quads by Barbara Luke and Tamara Eberlein. I read and re-read this book several times during my pregnancy.  One of my doctors treated my pregnancy pretty casually so I had to rely a lot on this book to teach me what to do and what things I should ask for in my prenatal care. I really would have been clueless without it.

6. Buy an exercise ball. By the end of the pregnancy, my hips hurt sooooo bad. They hurt the worst at night when I had to sleep on my side and I often couldn’t sleep. When this would happen, I would get out of bed and stretch out my hips a little by bouncing on my exercise ball. It felt so nice. Plus, then we already had the bouncy ball ready for when we brought our babies home and it worked great because we would sit on it while holding the babies and bounce the babies to sleep.

7. Body pillows help after you’re 16 weeks along and have to sleep on your side.

8. Carnation Breakfast Drinks helped my nausea. My morning sickness lasted the whole pregnancy. But with the help of prescription Zofran, and drinking a Carnation Breakfast Drink every morning before I got out of bed and every night before I went to bed, I felt a lot better and was able to function and teach third grade until my 32^nd week. The cheapest place to buy these drink mixes is at Costco. There, you can get 30 packets for almost $10 as opposed to what it costs to get 10 packets for almost $5 at Walmart.