Over to the lovely Emily Vest from Pants With Names
Zoe Williams: Bring It On, Baby.
I’m pregnant at the moment. I have to keep reminding myself because I spend so much time and energy running after my 2 small boys that I quite often forget. If it carries on in this vein we are going to get to October and a baby will appear and I will be thinking ‘goodness me, a baby! Where on earth did that come from?’
In an attempt to keep the 3rd small boy in my mind, I’ve taken to reading pregnancy and baby books again, but it hasn’t been successful. I’m finding the traditional week by week pregnancy guides irritating as I can’t remember how pregnant I am (more than 20 weeks because I’ve had that scan, but the midwife doesn’t want to see me until September so it must be less than 30). As for the baby books, experience has taught me that they are mainly wishful thinking. We followed the books and had a text book baby that slept through the night at 12 weeks and congratulated ourselves on how good we were at this parenting lark. Then we had a baby that didn’t sleep through until he was 3 years despite exactly the same parenting and techniques. Turns out that really it depends on the baby, whatever the books say.
So it was such a joy to read Zoe Williams book ‘Bring it on Baby!’. She doesn’t try to tell you what to do or how to do it, recognising that everyone does it differently and there isn’t a right or wrong way. As she says when talking about the old hugging vs scheduling chestnut (aka the child led vs routine dilemma): “My point is, it doesn’t matter what you do: this could be the most contested area in all mothering, to hug or to schedule, and I’m afraid the true answer is that it doesn’t make any sodding difference. There are easy babies and difficult babies, and different ones respond to different things and then, before you know it, they are no longer babies. If only there were some way to get all the time that all the people who’ve ever had this argument had spent on it; recover it, like with a hard drive; use it for something else, like world peace…”
She asks some questions, which 3 pregnancies in, I still don’t know the answer to, like how much alcohol is safe to drink whilst pregnant. This has become increasingly important to me because as the balmy summer has kicked in, so has my desire to delicately sip a chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc, but the Government advice, which used to be 1 or 2 units once or twice a week when I was in my first pregnancy seems to be don’t think about touching the stuff now. Zoe moves in, asking not just how much can you drink, but why has the government advice changed and is that advice actually based upon proper scientific research? Suffice to say I’ve sampled my glass of wine since reading that chapter.
With a large dollop of common sense she also covers labour and birth, a mother’s weight gain/loss, feeding the baby and motherhood itself. It’s not the book for a first time mother hoping for a week by week how to guide, it’s the book for the mother that hasn’t got time but wants someone to talk to her like she still has a brain. The book is also funny, very readable and I finished it over a weekend which hasn’t happened in years. I’d recommend it.
(big thank you to Laura both for sending me the book to read and letting me use her blog to sing its praises.)
Review by Emily Vest who writes the Pants With Names blog, www.pantswithnames.com.
3 Comments on "Guest Book Review – Bring It On, Baby by Zoe Williams"
I was really looking forward to finally reading an intelligent, non-biased and inspiring story of pregnanyc and eaarly motherhood when I saw ‘Bring It On Baby’ advertised in the Guardian Magazine two weeks ago. I have just finished reading it (only took me an unsatisfactory two nights – note the size of the letters and the huge space between sentences) and although it is hilarious indeed, I think it is incredibly vacant, one-sided and crass, and to my mind not more than another attempt (though at times reasonably well-researched) to justify a woman’s (Zoe Williams’s) own choices during pregnany and early motherhood. It feels quite dated too, as many of the topics she discusses seem to have been highlighted in the media and by the NHS from more varying angles anywaysince she had her first child four years ago…
fantastic review emily!
i’m hoping to join the baby club for the first time next year and this sounds much more like the kind of book i would read than one of the ‘hand-holding’ guides you reference.
it never ceases to amaze me how some first time mums act as tho they are the first person in the world to have a baby!
EVERY conversation, tweet, facebook update, happening in their lives is somehow directed back towards ‘oh by the way did i mention i was pregant’
i hope to god i’m not one of ‘those’ mums…
i know a few people who are first-time pregant at the moment and the one making the least fuss about it is the one who has every right to – she’s expecting twins!
Sounds just like the book I need just now…