During my second pregnancy, I found some books that provided some great info. One of these was by Mama Natural, along with her very informative website. Mama Natural has a handy due date calculator, posts to cover what’s happening for you and your baby during pregnancy from week to week, and baby development up to one year from week to week, among many other things. This resource still plays it pretty “safe” regarding the various aspects of this subject, just more on the natural side. She also has some great nutritious recipes to try and sells a whole food pregnancy multivitamin. Other multivitamins I would try include those from North American Herb and Spice or Healthmasters.
Heather Baker’s book is an overall great resource that spells out a lot of things that you might ordinarily just have handled by your medical practitioner of choice (obstetrician, nurse, midwife, doula, etc.) but it is great to learn about in case they aren’t around for whatever reason. It’s very thorough and covers all relevant topics.
The book by Gail Sforza Brewer may be dated but it is a great book you can borrow to review the excellent Brewer Diet and how to practice the Bradley Method of pain management during labor (which worked great for me). You can print out the diet sheets to check off what you ate and what you still need for the day. This kind of diet largely prevents issues that might make hospital births necessary, such as pre-eclampsia. The Brewer Diet website also has some additional resources above, although some of the links are now broken.
Although this last book, by Barbara Luke and her colleagues, may be for multiple births, it is a great resource to understand diet and nutrition in pregnancy and how much and when you need to gain weight to support your pregnancy. You can naturally carry full term twins and even triplets with this guidance (unless you have other issues going on).
I have read many other childbirth books but the previous are the best I have read so far.
Another resource for you and your baby staying in a good alignment for childbirth is the following website:
And another topic that substantially helped me this time around was understanding the role of hormones in conception, labor, and childbirth. See the resource collection here and the infographic and pdf download following for more info.
