Spacefem's Weekly Wikipedia Pregnancy Blog: 4 weeks pregnant

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This week's articles

Month Week Day Article
0 4W,0D 28Yolk sac
0 4W,1D 29Estrogen
0 4W,2D 30Jane Denton
1 4W,3D 31Acupuncture
1 4W,4D 32Listeriosis
1 4W,5D 33Pregnancy (mammals)
1 4W,6D 34Rosalind Paget

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I'll be honest, I hated week 4. It's just bad memories. I was 31 days pregnant when I took that fateful pregnancy test and it was positive... and I FREAKED. Oh sure everything turned out super skippy (obviously, it's a blog now!) but at the time I wasn't so sure. First of all, we'd been trying long enough that I sort of had it in my head that we were just "trying", that was my mode, it sounds stupid but I didn't know I'd actually BE PREGNANT. "Trying" is just something you do on evenings and weekends. Pregnancy leads to a life-altering baby, you'll never be the same! Call me crazy but it's hard to cope with life changes when you like your life as it is.

Anyway what's in Wikipedia for us this week?

Listeriosis is the reason you are not supposed to eat deli meat while you're pregnant. It's rare, but when it comes up it tends to be in soft cheese, chilled or raw meats, and unpasteurized milk. I don't know about you but I love deli meats and this was a big deal for me to give up. YES you can cook them up and kill whatever badness might be there, but who has the time? I just wanted to go to Subway on my lunch break. I still went, but by the end of my pregnancy I was really sick of meatball subs.

I was eating lunch out with some ladies from work once, all moms, and they'd all ordered something involving cold cuts so I commented about how I couldn't wait to not be pregnant so I could have a club sandwich too. They all looked at me like I was nuts. Apparently they'd all cranked out tons of kids while eating all the deli meat they wanted, none of them had ever heard it was HORRIBLY DANGEROUS. Somehow all those babies turned out just fine. It was one of those "how did we all survive?" moments, sigh.

Which brings me to my first pregnancy commandment:

Relax


Really. There isn't much you can do to completely mess up your child right now... those opportunities won't really show up for years. Nature is truly meant to run its course right now. Even your doctor will tell you that... if your doctor tells you anything at all. My doctor told me she didn't need to see me until I hit the 8-week mark... and even then, it wasn't to do anything, it was just to draw some blood and test me for a laundry list of diseases that might affect things down the road.

The media will try to make you freak out about eating non-organic fruit or washing your face with the wrong soap or crossing the street to the south while the wind was west on a Tuesday, but after thousands of years of having babies, we know most of the things that mess them up, new research is not revolutionizing anything.

This brings me to my billboard theory. When I first got pregnant, I noticed like five billboards around town telling me not to smoke or drink while pregnant. Well, duh, everyone knows that. It's obvious, it's been proven... and look, there's a BILLBOARD reminding me. I can't miss it! Suddenly I wasn't worried about missing some tiny article about how western tree snapes harm pregnant women... if something is really truly important to me, I will not be able to miss it, because that stuff shows up on billboards for heaven's sake.

Just a little thought to help me rest easier at night... which I really needed.

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