Oct 10
Like their unborn babies, pregnant women should listen to lullabies. Sweet melodies and nature sounds before bed can reduce stress, depression and anxiety related to pregnancy. This has been shown by the study of Taiwanese scientists. They studied two groups of women aged 30, who were between 18 and 34 weeks pregnant. One group was asked to listen to CDs featuring lullabies, classical music, nature sounds, and Chinese nursery rhymes and songs for 30 minutes every day. Continue reading »
It has become really easy to find out, if you are pregnant or not – and you don’t even need to visit a doctor. Regular pregnancy tests you could earlier find in drugstores are no more actual, as there’s something much more interesting, something hi-tech – USB pregnancy test kit. Just do the same procedures as you do with the regular pregnancy test, but with an exception: the stick goes into a USB port. Sounds like somebody’s fantasy? No, it’s reality! 
It’s the third postpartum trimester. Your toddler has already achieved a feeling of independence in moving. Now it is impossible to leave the baby alone for even a moment. It would seem easy to place the child for a long term with relatives and start taking care of yourself at least occasionally. But something still prevents you from shedding post-pregnancy weight. 
Your baby grew noticeably bigger, weighing twice as much as at the childbirth. Now that the digestion is working well, your baby is a calm sleeper and the most drastic change – the baby becomes inquisitive about the world. As for moms, they their psyche becomes increasingly vulnerable during the second postpartum trimester. Statistics shows, the second trimester is linked to an increased risk of postpartum depression. Half a year after the childbirth, many women start pondering on their looks and slimming diet opportunities. 
You already know that women may gain up to 30 lb or even more during the nine months of 
“Well, it’s time to change your wardrobe! You can’t fit into your old clothes after having a baby”, - your friends are giving you a teasing advice. Here is how you can make fun of them after just half a year. Now that you checked out of maternity hospital and made your baby comfortable at home, you could finally take a breath. You looked at yourself in a mirror closely and winced! “My body will never be the same!” - a common fear among young mothers. So let’s get this straight. Yes, you will never be the same. But you can get your slim body back! 
Parents’ diet may play a role in whether they will have a boy or a girl. Studies show that the parents of boys had a lot of natrium and potassium in their diet while the parents of girls preferred foods rich in calcium and magnesium. Scientists have come up with two different diets including specific foods for those who want to plan their baby’s sex. 
The cosmetics a pregnant woman is using may cause sterility in her future baby, scientists at the University of Edinburgh say. They tried some chemical components used in cosmetics industry on pregnant rats. The experiment showed that many components disrupt female hormone profile, which inhibits the male reproductive function that develops at 8-12 weeks of pregnancy. It may contribute to the risk of male sterility in humans. Therefore, scientists advise women avoid cosmetics at early stages of pregnancy.
It is the fact that the sex of your unborn baby is determined at the moment of conception and depends on the type of a sperm cell that would fertilize an egg cell. If the X-chromosome sperm reaches the egg, then the baby is a girl. If the Y-chromosome joins the egg, then the baby is a boy. 
British doctors successfully performed the surgery to save the baby who was growing not in the womb, but in the abdomen. Jayne Jones, 38, had repeating abdominal pains during her pregnancy. At a routine ultra-sound scan, doctors surprisingly saw a well growing baby outside the womb. 
A baby’s first words are often “mama” and “papa”, and it seems so natural for us that we hardly think why babies actually utter these words first. But the experts at the University of British Columbia have made brain scans of babies to successfully crack that mystery. The secret lies in repeating the same syllables. 
Swelling occurs quite often during pregnancy. And the gravity force is what makes swelling in legs especially noticeable. Usually, swelling becomes worse towards the evening and in hot weather. Pregnant woman has more water in her body, and that leads to swelling. Tissues store and retain water, causing a woman to swell. 
After having a baby, a woman should focus on her exercises. It all depends, however, on the woman’s desire to look real good because no matter how difficult it is to allow just a little time for your own needs, it is still possible. There are lots of programs to strengthen your muscles and regain your body tone weakened after pregnancy and childbirth. To do that, you don’t have to leave your baby for a few hours and go to a fitness center. 
Pregnancy is a happy time for every woman since once this period in her life is over she bears a child. On the other hand, pregnancy is connected with other problems as well, one of them is heartburn. Often enough heartburn becomes pregnancy’s constant companion. What are the reasons behind this? How can we rid ourselves of this unpleasant feeling? 
You don’t have to develop healthy eating habits in your baby, according to new research. These habits develop naturally if a breastfeeding mother sticks to a healthy diet herself. The fact has been discovered by Danish pediatricians from the University of Copenhagen. Their findings show that breastfeeding helps develop a taste for healthy food (like fruit and vegetables) in babies. The researches say that the link is even stronger if a woman eats more fruit and vegetables herself. 
In about 30 years sterility problem will be completely solved. But that’s not the half of it. Any person, regardless of age, will be able to have babies. The enquiry is that in the near future we will not need even human sex cells to create a human embryo. Skin cells will be good enough for the job. This opinion belongs to a biologist from the University of Medical Biology in Singapore – Davor Solter. 
They say not for nothing that a pregnant woman should be taken well care of and her caprices must be indulged. British scientists believe that depression during pregnancy slows down the child’s intellectual growth and development. Probability of such defects grows by extra 34% comparing to the moms with normal psychological well-being. During pregnancy try not to take to heart small issues and avoid any situations which can make you feel nervous. 
Yesterday you probably read the article about the myth and truth about 
Pregnancy is not an easy period in a woman’s life. This time is associated with many changes: nutrition, physical activity, dress size, interests, health and so on. There are enough and to spare myths about pregnancy, such an important moment for any woman, which we unfortunately believe. This time we will debunk some of the myths concerning nutrition during pregnancy. 
The baby’s intellect depends by around 20% on the mother’s environment during the carriage and on the child’s surroundings during the first couple of months after birth. Scientists have recently carried out a number of experiments on the development of intellect during infancy. One particular well-spread belief, that infants get smarter when they listen to classical music, was not confirmed. The scientists did, however, establish that a child’s IQ is affected by the following factors. 
Many pregnant women wonder, whether they can take strong drinks during the pregnancy. If so, how much of alcohol is allowed for them. As it turns out, a woman bearing a child under her heart has to trust her own intuition regarding the alcohol consumption during the expectancy period. Researchers still vary in their views on the topic. 
Many U.S. women, as well as women in many other countries, delay the birth of the first child to the age of 30 due to some reason. But is it healthy for women to delay parenthood till this age? And what makes women behave so? Most women want to have children, but when – this is the most wide spread question and problem. Well, it was a problem. Since now the scientists have found the best age for motherhood. 
A new device silicone womb is being currently tested in Great Britain. It’s going to make in-vitro fertilization much more effective, than it has been before. The goal of the silicone womb is to develop stronger, more resilient embryos for eventual pregnancy. The silicone womb holds test-tube embryos, which are currently developed in an incubator, inside the womb to expose them to more natural conditions. It allows them to be implanted inside the mother for up to four days. During this time they are exposed to the uterus through 360 holes each around 40-micron across. 
A two-stage study has shown, that women, who follow Mediterranean diet in pregnancy, also protect their babies from childhood asthma and allergy. During the first stage of the study, 1997, doctors recruited 507 women who attended an antenatal clinic on Menorca, Spain. These women were quizzed about their dietary habits. Six years later the children of these women were examined for asthma and were tested to see if their organisms responded to six common allergens. The researchers found, that the diet of children did not influence the fact whether they had these problems. The main reason was the dietary intake of the mothers while pregnant. 
Backache can catch everyone off guard, in this situation something should be done quickly. This article tells about home remedies, that help to get rid of acute backache and also dietaries for backache. These tips are useful for those, who experience back pain, but may not or do not want to take pain relievers, like allergic people or pregnant women. Pregnancy is often associated with backache, as the body of a pregnant woman changes a lot because of the growing baby, the increase in weight and the change in the center of gravity. As pregnant women are not allowed to take particular medicines, there exist home remedies for back pain, which are safer. 
Normally our skin is elastic, but if you grow really fast, there appear lines on the body which are called stretch marks. It can happen during puberty, pregnancy or postpartum, when the body changes a lot and quickly. The usual places for them are abdomen, breasts, arms and thighs – that are all body parts with larger amounts of fat. Postpartum depressions is also not a rare case. When here appear stretch marks too, postpartum period is becoming nearly beyond endurance. Sometimes stretch marks become almost imperceptible after some postpartum time passes. But sometimes they are so deep that they could even be felt by their haver. 
