6 Tips for a Happier Pregnancy (in 2022)

Hi, you guys. Welcome back to my channel. My name is Jessica. It's so good to be here with you. I'm a mom of three. I own a small business called Very Good Mothers Club. We also have an online community, which if you aren't a part of that, I would love to personally invite you to join. I'm there all the time. I leave the calls in it weekly. We do Zoom calls with moms from around the world, and we bring in different experts who speak on different topics related to parenthood. It's a way for you to get support in parenthood and find real friends. And you can even see who is local. So you could actually find friends on there and meet up with them in real life if you wanted, if that didn't sound creepy. There's also an opportunity, since you're pregnant, this might actually appeal to you. We do group coaching for moms-to-be. So we put you in a group with other moms due around the same time as you. And then every week for an hour, we do a call together and we talk about things like breastfeeding basics. And we have a real lactation consultant come in and teach on it. Labor and delivery prep, postpartum prep, baby sleep basics, kind of what do you need before having a baby. And we process the personal fears and anxieties and stressors that come up along the way. We even cover things like how to set boundaries with family, how to ask for help from people when all these people are offering and you don't know how to respond because it's overwhelming. So we've got all of that. And then once the eight weeks is complete and we don't do any more coaching calls, you still get access to the group that you are connected with. So you can be talking to them all throughout the postpartum experience and as your babies grow. And then you get access to the larger, very good Mother's Club community as well. And that is for $300. So we max that out at 10 moms a group. So if that's something you're interested in, please sign up soon. Thank you so much for trusting me enough to spend some time with me and let me speak into your pregnancy. I know that you guys are bombarded with information. The world knows that moms are desperate for things that will help them be good moms and raise their kids well and get their kids to sleep. So all these people are marketing stuff at you, convincing you that you need it. And I just think that it is an honor and a privilege that you would listen to me and let me talk to you. So I'm gonna tell you some things, apply whatever works for you. Remember that you're the best mom for your own kids. You're gonna have this thing inside of you called intuition and you can trust that and it's gonna be good. Pregnancy is such a strange thing. It reminds me a lot of being a teenager and really not knowing how your body's gonna shift and change and what you're gonna end up looking like at the end of this. There is a stage of pregnancy that I felt like I looked like the Grinch. I'll post a photo for reference. That's a real stage. It's kind of a stage where your belly's growing. People don't know that you're pregnant and then I don't know, it's just not the most flattering. And I felt like teenage years were like that too. You kind of wonder like, are you gonna get boobs? I never did. Pregnancy actually was the first time I did get boobs and I thought that it was so thrilling and satisfying and it was something that I look forward to with every baby. And now my babies are out and my boobs have left. Sometimes our expectations actually make the experience of pregnancy and motherhood in general just a lot harder. So you might go into pregnancy really hoping it looks a certain way and that's fair and it may not look the way that you want it to look and that is painful. And what I would say to you is give yourself space to grieve whatever feels like loss in this process. So if you thought it was gonna look a certain way or you thought people were gonna support you in a specific way or I don't know, just whatever it was that you thought this was gonna look like. If it doesn't look like that right now, I wanna invite you to a place of kind of surrendering that and then getting back into the present. Because when we're here and now and we're like, okay, this is what it is, it is what it is, then you can actually find a lot of goodness in it. If we're constantly looking at our life and trying to compare it to the stuff that we thought it was gonna be but it's not, then all we see is the loss. All we see is the kind of absence of the thing we thought it was gonna be and that makes it more painful. Pregnancy is allowed to be both amazing and horrible. It doesn't need to be one or the other. You don't have to pretend that it's better than it is and you also don't have to complain all the time about it. There's kind of a need for the tension of both right now and if you are gonna get the most joy out of this experience as you can possibly get, then it's going to require you to kind of sit into the humanity of this moment and realize that it's really awesome that your body is growing a baby. It is just the coolest thing ever. Maybe this is your first time being pregnant and you've never done it before. That means your organs are having to shift and move to create space for this little human that never existed before and it is absolutely amazing. It also can make you really nauseous. It can make you really tired. It can cause a lot of pain in different parts of your body that have never experienced pain before. It can make you really scared. It can make you really anxious. For some women, they experience prenatal depression and so when someone asks you how is pregnancy going, there can be this strange thing that happens in us where we're like, I don't know what I'm supposed to say. Do I say it's amazing? Because parts of it are amazing. But if I say that, then is that incomplete? Is that lying because it's also kind of hard? And I would just say it's allowed to be both and you just tell people whatever you want to tell them. If you trust the person enough to go to the hard places with them, then you tell them how hard it is. But if there's somebody who doesn't know that part of you and doesn't need to know it, then it's amazing and you just move right along. But for yourself, it's okay for it to feel really good and really bad and you're not crazy. I find that a lot of moms, if pregnancy or motherhood in general is hard, they internalize it to mean that they're doing it wrong. I guess I'm just bad at this. I guess I'm just doing it wrong and that's why this is so hard. And that's just not true. It's hard because it's actually hard. So if you're feeling like, wow, pregnancy is not easy, that's great, that means you're doing great. That is because your body's growing another person and that's not easy and everything's okay. If you don't already have friends, if you don't have people you can talk to and somebody to call and process life with, then be intentional about finding a community. There are lots of ways to do that, but I'm gonna tell you about the one that I'm involved in because I would love to meet you and have you join. So that is Very Good Mother's Club. That's what I told you about at the beginning of the video. And we have both the coaching opportunity and we also just have the membership group that you can join. Right now it's $9.00, but you can get a free membership for $9.00 a month and you get access to a bunch of friends and the weekly events. And I promise this isn't just me selling you something. The only reason I attach a price tag to it is because I need to be able to pay my bills and feed my kids and I wouldn't be able to do this stuff if I didn't also get paid for it. But I would love to have you join. And if you are somebody who's like, I really love this community, I'd really benefit from it, but I can't pull off $9.00 a month right now, reach out to us because some other moms have given money to cover people and we could just find a way to get you in there so that you can get the support you need right now. There's not a lot that you can control within pregnancy. There's really not. You could do everything right according to what a doctor would tell you to do and things could still go really south. You could also do everything wrong according to what a doctor would say and have a beautiful, healthy child. There's not a lot you can control, but there is some stuff you can control. Focus on health in kind of a holistic sense. I'm not trying to say join some sort of fad or do whatever will keep you skinny during pregnancy or something weird. What I mean is whatever you know to be true about eating well, exercising often, and getting a lot of joy, laughter, healthy sleep, all the balanced things of life, as much as you're able to do that and focus on just being a healthy person, your body will focus on growing the baby. You don't get to really tell it, like grow it bigger now. That doesn't work. But you can take really good care of yourself and as you take care of yourself, your baby will grow and be this precious, beautiful little guy or girl. My advice is just the basics of normal human stuff, right? So make sure you stay hydrated. Make sure you're moving your body. It's good. It creates endorphins. Endorphins keep you happy. That's really healthy. Make sure that you're laughing. Make sure you eat dessert sometimes because dessert gives you joy too and that's really important. If you at all are wondering how to eat a balanced diet or something, there are resources for you. Even within our own community, we have a nutritionist who speaks in there regularly on this stuff, so I'd be happy to point you in the direction of somebody who is a professional and can tell us exactly what to be doing. But I would just say kind of holistic health. Holistic sounds sort of like nuts and granola and that's not really what I mean. I mean like literally the whole of you, like all entirely you, what your mind, your body, your spirit, everything that keeps you well as a person, focus on that because then your body will do what it needs to do to take care of your baby. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. Wear sunscreen and a hat and drink water. If you don't wear sunscreen, you may end up with sun spots, the kind that's called melasma that happens specifically when you're pregnant and it can create like brown spots on your face. It's really cute, it's totally fine, but sometimes it doesn't feel that cute because it can land in really weird spots. But if you wear sunscreen and a hat, you're less likely to get it. So I recommend doing that. And then also just a lot of moisturizer on your body and hydrating fluids is a good idea. Stretch marks are pretty much just gonna happen to you or not. That's how I understand them to be. It's a lot more about DNA than how we take care of our skin. But I think if we try and take care of our skin, it's possible we'll minimize that. But at the same time, if you end up with stretch marks, really good job. I know that it can be hard to adjust to and we feel kind of insecure about all the ways that our body changes, but you're growing a human and if you have evidence of that later on, that's okay, you're doing such a good job. That part of you that feels like you know what's best, what you're learning to do now is trust that on behalf of your baby. And where you feel like you don't know what to do, ask questions. But maybe you could identify just a few places you take your questions to. So if you have a few trusted loved ones or some sort of resource online, wherever that place is, maybe stick to that. It can be kind of overwhelming to just ask Google your question because everything leads to cancer. So anytime you search anything on the internet, it's like, well, it could be nothing or it could be cancer and you're gonna die. That's terrifying. So I would just say maybe figure out exactly who you wanna be asking your stuff to and let those be your people. But you're trying to learn to trust that voice inside of you that's like, yes, this is the right thing for me. Yes, is the... I mean, coming down to like, where do you wanna have your baby? Do you wanna have your baby at your house in a bathtub? Do you wanna have your baby in a hospital with a doctor? What feels right for you? Because there are gonna be a lot of opinions. There are people who try and get you in a certain direction kind of with fear, like we'll do this or else. And you don't need that. Life is scary enough. So try and drown out all of the extra fear stuff and just be like, okay, what is right for me? What do I want to do? And you're allowed to trust that. Make sure you're healthy. Make sure your baby's healthy. Make sure you guys are safe as a family. Obviously, you guys made this baby together, you and your partner. So it's important that you guys are both on the same page. But really tap into what is that thing inside of you saying about your baby and do that. And you're gonna be so good at this. There's gonna be so many different styles of parents and that's fine. You do it the way that feels right for you and your family and it's okay if you get it wrong. It's okay if you start parenting one way and you follow all the rules. For example, maybe you do everything exactly right and you have your baby on a really specific sleep schedule in a really specific location and then you decide that you hate it and you wanna go a totally different route with no schedule and no locations. Fine, whatever. As long as you're safe and your baby's safe and you guys are taking care of each other, well, I mean, your baby's not really gonna take care of you. Maybe you and your partner are taking care of each other. Then you're gonna do so good and it's gonna be great. And if you don't have anybody to take care of you right now, join our community and let us help you. I would love to help you. I sound like I'm inviting you to join a cult. I'm not, I swear. I don't know if I'm allowed to say cult on the internet. Maybe it's gonna flag something and YouTube won't show my video to anyone. I don't know. Anyway, I think you're gonna do so good at this. I'm really excited for you. And if you have tips for other families expecting a new baby, please leave them in the comments because I would love to see what you have to say. And I hope you guys are doing well. We'll talk soon. Bye.