Staying calm and happy during pregnancy is extremely important. This is why I’ve been avoiding pregnancy manuals and discussion websites like the plague. I don’t need endless lists of what I shouldn’t be doing, eating, watching, reading, or thinking. I believe that all this hype created around pregnancies is just a way for many women to feel important for the first time in their lives. Since I feel plenty important already, I don’t need the drama.
Unfortunately, my OB-GYN’s office believes it’s a good idea to give all pregnant clients the hugely popular What to Expect When You Are Expecting manual as a gift. I had nothing much to do while waiting for an appointment, so I opened this scary book. And what a mistake that was! Within seconds, I discovered that I had already failed to do a ton of crucially important things before conception even took place. It turns out, there is a to-do list from here to the moon that you need to complete before conceiving.
After perusing less than 2 pages of the manual, I already felt like a humongous failure and a horrible excuse for a woman.
As you can imagine, I never opened the manual since then. I eat, do, watch and read whatever I want. As a result, I feel extremely happy and stress-free. And that’s what really matters.
Clarissa's Blog 
There’s no end to the advice that you get while pregnant. I will bite my tongue and try to avoid giving you advice. 🙂
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People give the weirdest advice. My aunt, for instance, told me not to mix beer and cognac now that I’m pregnant. Given that I only had beer maybe 3 times in my entire life and cognac only once, I still have no idea what this piece of advice was supposed to achieve. 🙂
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It sounds like the typical womens magazine approach: treat the reader like a hopeless idiot and failure and then hold out the hope that by following all the advice given by the magazine people won’t notice.
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I’m looking forward to the Emily Oster book coming out in a few months. It’s supposed to show which pregnancy advise is based on evidence and which is myth.
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Yeah, but if I read it I will be exposed to all that advice anyways. And that’s what I’m trying to avoid altogether.
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Stay away.
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Manuals are useful for knowing what is going on – the facts, because weird things can happen to you during pregnancy, and if you can’t get to your doctor, it’s useful to have a reference book. I bought two standard manuals – one for pregnancy and one for after the birth to know about things like vaccines, fevers, crying, illnesses, when I should consult a doctor and so on.
After that, it’s a question of personal choice, but there are some pretty weird books out there. I found they just pissed me off and decided to do as I thought best.
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I would be very interested in getting some infant-maintenance manual with the most basic information of the kind you mention. But I don’t believe that a manual of this kind will not try to feed me its author’s weird ideology and try to guilt-trip me. I’ve seen too much to believe this is possible.
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