Things I did while pregnant: grow a baby

I think by now we all now that Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo is pregnant. On twitter, this started the #ThingsIdidWhilePg hashtag, in which women were telling all the awesome things they were doing while pregnant. I for example wrote 2 grants (one of which I didn't get, the other one I still haven't heard from), submitted 3 papers from my PhD and did a lot of experiments. The reason that I did so many experiments was not just because I wanted to get them done before I had the baby, but also because especially in the first trimester I felt so tired and nauseous that I had to keep doing something in order not to throw up/ feel incredibly sorry for myself/ cry or all of the above.

However, I think that all this bragging about the things that we can do during our pregnancy doesn't really send the right message. Because when you're pregnant there's a tiny little person growing inside you, and I think it's your responsibility to treat that little person the best you can. And we all know that you shouldn't smoke and drink while you're pregnant, but it's also bad to be stressed the entire time. So to me, that was the priority; I made sure I exercised, did prenatal yoga, was eating well, went to bed early, and I took a nap during the day on most of the weekend-days. So I don't think it's necessarily good to work like a crazy person because we think that that's what society demands from women: that we can only have babies when we prove that we can still work hard enough. When you decide to have a baby, realize that you're going to have to take care of that baby, and that starts when the baby is still in you.

(okay one confession to end with: I did go to this awesome conference in the mountains in Colorado when I was 17 weeks pregnant and I snowboarded all the days I was there, but I was obviously very careful and had read that by 17 weeks your uterus is still below your pubic bone, so it's not that risky)