I love my ante natal Pilates classes. We often digress onto the weird and wonderful side of pregnancy. And women often say to me that it’s this, ‘beyond Pilates’ education that they find so relevant and useful about my ante natal Pilates classes.
So rather than keep them to myself, as a avid follower and information hamster of all things pregnancy, here are a few of my favourite facts about the wonderful ride that is becoming mum to start us off.
- Your placenta is amazing! It exists only to perform the function of raising your unborn baby and then immediately dies. It is responsible not only for nutrient transfer and waste disposal but also for ensuring your body does not reject your baby as a ‘foreign body’.
- The wound your placenta leaves when you give birth to it, is the largest wound the human body ever recovers from, usually without medical intervention.
- Carrying out front or wide has nothing to do with the sex of your baby and everything to do with where your digestive system gets squidged to during pregnancy. This also usually means that an out front, torpedo baby’s mummy gets dreadful wind and indigestion!
- Eating yams will increase your chance of having twins, so says a 1996 study from Yale University student Obinwanne Ugwonali, M.D. The student was so fascinated by the high rate of fraternal twin births amongst the Yaruba people of Nigeria that he investigated diet and cited yams as the answer!
- The most common day to give birth on is a Tuesday. The last recorded data was in 2004 from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention which cited Tuesday as the most popular day with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday not far behind.
That’s all for now folks.