We all know pregnancy is beautiful: new life, that pregnancy glow, all that other lovey dovey junk. But just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you have to do the crazy things all those other pregnant ladies are doing. Pregnancy is weird enough on its own (you’ve created a tiny person out of nothing!); you don’t have to add any of these weird trends to the mix. We don’t know if it’s the hormones or peer pressure that makes women give into strange fads, but we’re hoping these die off pretty soon.
If celebrities are any indication, there is a widespread epidemic of pregnant women posing nude. There’s no doubt that pregnant women are beautiful in a way that only happens when you’ve got those sweet pregnancy hormones flowing, but that doesn’t mean that anyone other than your husband should be seeing that much skin. In the celebrity world, we’ve seen too much of Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, and many many more, but there are non-celeb photographers who drum up a lot of business with this trendy and all-too-revealing idea. There are houses all over the country with framed photos of naked pregnant women. How scarred are their kids going to be when they grow up?
Forget the fact that you now have an adorable little baby, you get to celebrate Mother’s Day, and — the biggest gift of all — that alien life-form is finally out of you. Giving birth needs to be rewarded with a push present, a gift presented to the new mother by her husband after she’s done her duty of squeezing out a little human. Many husbands opt for jewelry, but a push present can be just about anything. According to a survey by BabyCenter.com, more than half of pregnant women wanted to get a push present. Maybe the men are just feeling guilty that they didn’t have to sacrifice their bodies to a baby for nine months or the women are feeling more empowered to ask for shiny things; whatever the reason, push presents get in the way of the joy just having a healthy baby can bring.
This one’s a little gross for those who aren’t into natural birth ideas. Instead of clamping and cutting the umbilical cord after a baby’s born, many parents are opting to leave the cord intact and let it fall off naturally, normally within a few days. It doesn’t sound so weird until you consider that the cord is still connected to the placenta, that ugly sac that’s been feeding your baby for the past nine months. Until the cord falls off, women who’ve opted for lotus births have to keep that placenta hanging around at all times. To hide the smell, many use herbs and sea salt. A better idea would probably be to just cut that sucker off.
Strange names may not be a totally new fad, but it seems that new parents these days want to name their kids something that no one else has ever thought of. Of course, there are the really crazy celebrity baby names, but plenty of regular parents are choosing to spell normal names in a weird way or just reverse the name completely (heard of the now-popular name Nevaeh? It’s heaven backwards). And it’s hard to tell the gender of babies lately by their names alone. Tyler? Kyle? Hayden? Girl names now. They’ll probably get a lot of phone calls and emails in the future addressing them as Mr.
Baby showers are commonplace and a great place to get some of the hundreds of supplies a new parent will need when the baby comes. A growing number of UK women with buns in the oven, however, are milking their pregnancy for every party they can get out of it. Fetus parties, where friends and family gather to look at 3D and 4D sonograms, are popping up all over the country. Many worry that taking ultrasounds that are used for diagnostic purposes and turning them into entertainment is commercializing pregnancy just a little bit too much. Maybe we should tell that to the people who are having Trying To Conceive parties as well!
Sure, we’re living in the Internet age where everyone who can pound on a keyboard has an email address and probably their own website, but that doesn’t mean your baby’s name is going to get snatched up before he or she turns 15 (or 5 or whenever kids of the future understand technology). Don’t deprive your child of choosing that cute email address that will embarrass her when she gets older. With technology moving so fast, there’s also a high chance that whatever service you reserve now will be totally obsolete by the time your kid grows up. Think about it: are there any 16-year-olds out there who would want that Geocities page their parents set up for them when they were in utero?
Whether you want to do it yourself or have a professional take on the job, having a masterpiece painted on your round baby belly has become strangely popular. You can buy a kit or pay out the nose to have a belly-painting artist do it for you. It seems pregnant women have a lot of free time on their hands and think they have the perfect, orbed canvas for some artwork. We can’t blame them for wanting to make creative use of their time. They can’t drink alcohol, sleep on their stomach, or even clean out the cat litter for heaven’s sake! And we’ll admit, some of the ideas are pretty creative and make for great Halloween costumes, but any other time of the year, it’s just a little strange.
This isn’t a trend for women who are pregnant but for those who wish they were. Apparently, because of the fashionable baby bellies being sported in Hollywood, women in China have begun to see the bump as a cute accessory. Fake baby bellies, made of silica gel, have popped up in the market for anywhere between $80 to $250. We wonder if these same people will start carrying around baby dolls when they see that all those pregnant Hollywood starlets are now toting babies on their hips.
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