Amrita’s Chronicles: My Little Poppy Seed-Part 1

Earlier this year, my husband, Bala, and I found out that we were pregnant! This is our first child, and we were ecstatic when we found out! We have taken our time to start a family, preferring to wait until we had both finished with graduate school and at least one of us had settled into a career path.

We live in Chicago, and our families live in India, so the morning that we took the home pregnancy test, we called them to share our big news! Being from India, we knew that such early news of pregnancy is generally shared cautiously, and only amongst close family. So although I wanted to share the happy news with all my friends right away, I decided to respect the tradition.

I was really fortunate to be able to travel to India at the ten week stage, and spend over a month with family! We had planned our trip before….I’d got pregnant – a happy coincidence – and I was truly very fortunate to be able to spend a part of my pregnancy amongst my loved ones.

While at home, I couldn’t help but notice that the everyday advice that I received differed quite a bit from the rather limited restrictions from my OB in the US (and what I’d seen and heard from my friends here as they went through their own pregnancies) – at least with regard to daily routines, diet and lifestyle during pregnancy.

This got me quite curious about the overall prenatal experience in India, and I wondered whether my experience in the US would be significantly different. From foods to embrace and foods to avoid to whether or not I really needed to worry about every slight bit of lifting that I might do while pregnant…were all the dos and donts scientifically sound?

I’ll be posting about my general experience as my baby grows from a poppy seed to a pumpkin! And while I do that, I’ll be weaving in my approach to everything that I’ve been told to do/not do by my family in India and my OB and friends in the US. This process has been a great learning experience for me, and again, I cannot help but wonder if my experience would have been different if I’d chosen to go through my pregnancy at home.