Hayfever, allergies and pregnancy II.

The post on "Hayfever and pregnancy" had quite a good response. Hayfever seems to be a big complication to pregnancy for many women. I have decided to post en entry summarizing the comments I received on how people copes with hay fever and allergies, specially when they are pregnant and they cannot take tablets. Thank you everyone (Laura, parentclass admin, anonymous, A.K.&A.) for sharing your ways of coping with allergy:

Outdoors:

• Use sunglasses and put Vaseline in your nostrils. Pollen will get stuck to the Vaseline outside your airways rather than getting inside.
  
• Use a cap with a peak. It will some of the pollen get to your face and nose.
  
• Cover your hair. Your hair collects a lot of pollen that you take back to home.
  
• When you get home change your clothes and wash them. Have a shower if you can.

Indoors:

• Clean the place quite often. When you come from outside you bring pollen with you. If you sit still for about half an our the pollen will drop from the air. If you can vacuum clean then you will remove a lot of it.
• Keep the clothes you ware outdoors somewhere "sealed" from you (do not have them in the bedroom if you can) and wash them quite often (ideally one should wash them every time they have been worn).
  
• Keep doors and windows shut.
  
• You can use HEPA filters to remove pollen and dust from the air.
  
• People have also reported that homemade soaps help reducing the skin itching.

Whatever precautions you take you still get allergy and your airways get congested. Here are some tips people have suggested to open them:

• Use heat pads on your chest and back.
• Use Vicks Vaporub on your chest at night. I searched a bit on the Internet to see if this product is recommended for pregnant women. They say that "There is no safety information available on the use of this medicine in human pregnancy and breastfeeding. However, it has been widely used for many years without ill consequence. Seek medical advice from your doctor". Read it yourself here.
  

Disclaimer: This site is place to share parenting experience and to provide general information only. The information contained on this site should not be treated as a substitute for medical, legal or other professional advice. The authors of this site are not responsible or liable for the contents of any websites of third parties which are listed on this site.

Back to waiting.

We have to wait a bit more...

Eight days overdue now.

We are eight days overdue now and we have got a hospital appointment today. So... stay tuned.

To dummy or not to dummy

Until very recently I thought that babies were born already with a dummy in their mouths. It´s been with the babies of a few couples close to us that I have seen that they do not always use or like dummies. What I gather is that dummies are useful to pacify the baby, but other than that they do not have any other particular feature. With almost all babies it works but with some it does not. If the baby likes sucking he/she should have a dummy otherwise he/she will get use to sucking his thumb and when the baby grows up you can always put the dummy away but not his thumb. I have also read around that when the baby starts eating should not use a dummy anymore.

Group B Streptococcus (GBS) infection and screening

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. What follows is information that I have gathered from talking to doctors and reading related topics. In no case should be used as a reference or guide. Consult your doctor for more information on the topic. I am just a parent-to-be sharing experience.

Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is a bacteria that lives in the vagina or the rectum of 10-30% of pregnant women. Carriers of this bacteria do not feel any symptoms. This bacteria can be passed to the baby during labour if the mother is a carrier. The risk of infection on the newborn is very low. However, if the baby gets the infection the effects can be devastating. A simple test can be carried to the mother-to-be in the late stage of pregnancy (around the 35th week) in order to know whether she is a carrier of the bacteria. In case of a positive result of this test the mother is given a shot of antibiotics in vein during labour and then the baby is safe.
I want to stress here that, in case the waters break before entering into labour the shot of antibiotics should be given ASAP. I think that this last bit of information is not always stated clearly to the parents-to-be, so keep it in mind if you are a carrier.

In the UK, NHS does not perform the GBS screening systematically on pregnant women. I have heard mainly two arguments:

1) that this bacteria comes and goes so that a negative result on the week 36 does not mean that the mother is not a carrier on the day of labour (around the 40th week). I do not buy that argument because the result of the test can be known very quickly (I think) so they could perform it when you check in at the Labour Ward.

2) the risk of infection to the baby is so small that can be considered negligible. According to GBS Support, a charity that deals with all GBS related issues, 700 babies per year get this infection in the UK.

However, you can have this test done privately at a cost of around £30. We did it through the charity mentioned above, GBS Support, and are happy about it.

Related links: GBS entry at the Wikipedia, GBS Support charity.

Hayfever and pregnancy.

The most difficult thing my wife has had to cope with during pregnancy has been hayfever. She suffers a lot from hayfever and this last year has been particularly bad. Due to the pregnancy she could not take the tablets and she suffered a lot even indoors and taking the usual precautions (clean environment, remove the cloths that one has worn outside, wash hair ecc...). I have just learned that there are air purifiers on the market and from what I have read about they work very well with allergies and odours. They use filters that filter out the pollen from the air, there are several reviews in some allergy related sites and they all say very good things. It seems that the best filters are called High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters (entry for HEPA filters at the Wikipedia here). They are supposed to filter out 99.97% of pollen, dust, mould and bacteria and airborn particles down to less than one micrometer diameter. A few examples of these appliances are here, their prices range from £20 to a few hundred pounds. I intend to get one for next spring when the baby will be breast feeding and my wife will not be able to take the tablets. I'll put a post here again when I have seen it working.

Baby's sight. B&W patterns.

I have recently learnt that babies continue to develop their sight gradually from the day they are born until they are about 8 months old. Although they can see colors from the very first day they cannot distinguish similar tones until they are 2-4 months old. Until this age they are more interested and thus stimulated by high contrasted black and white patterns as the one on the picture to the left or a chess board.

I have some B&W patterns in a pdf file that a friend passed me (thanks Gidon) that apparently babies love watching at. In principle it should be possible to download some dingbat font onto your computer and create your own black and white patterns (with animals, shapes or whatever you want/find). I have not yet figured out how to do this but as soon as I know how I'll put a post.

Some useful info

Here is an interesting site a friend has passed me (thanks Ulrik):

http://www.nct.org.uk/

NCT is a charity dealing with pregnancy, birth and parenting in the UK. There is a lot of information on their website about everything related to pregnancy and parenting, from early birth to breastfeeding. They also organise lots of events like baby stuff sales or meetings with other early parents. On their web site there is a "events search engine" where you can search events close to you by entering your postcode.

Still waiting

Still waiting for the baby to come. The question now is, how different are the "real" contractions to the "fake" ones?. I guess that if we have any doubts they are not the "real" ones. By "fake" I mean the ones that do not lead to the delivery, those the doctors call "Braxton-Hicks contractions" and that many women experience. But, from what I see in my wife, they are very real and somewhat painful.

I realize that a substantial amount of the posts that will appear on this blog will be about practical things like what nappies are best or what toys seem to have less toxic materials and where to buy them. If you already have gone through this you may want to leave here your advise or comment about anything you found useful.

The beginning

After some thinking I have decided starting this blog. The idea is to post in it information about the adventure we are start to begin: having a child. I will try to post here "a posteriori" any information about anything that I would have appreciated having beforehand, just in case it can help somebody. It would also be great if readers left their comments about their own experiences, how they solved particular problems ecc...

I have had a look around Internet searching for similar blogs and it has a been a bit disappointing to find out that most of them were abandoned after a few posts. I guess that when the baby comes people get too busy or simply things change so much that they simply forget the blog.

Having said this, let me put my first post: a picture of ourselves waiting for the baby, only a few days to go...

Primera prueba con el blog

One, two, three, trying