A pregnancy journal is a place to collect your thoughts, feelings and experiences during pregnancy. It could be a home made scrapbook, a store-bought journal, or an online blog. It’s somewhere for you to capture your pregnancy journey, and a place to record your bump and scan photos. You may not be a Booker Prize winner just yet, but here’s a few reasons to consider keeping a pregnancy journal:
1. Time to think – setting aside 20 minutes each day to write about the pregnancy will help you relax and focus on your baby. It will give you chance to reflect on how you are feeling emotionally as well as physically, and give you chance to note down your hopes for the future.
2. Looking back – you may think you’ll never forget how awful it is to throw up mashed potato, or just how exhausting it can be to lug around a 40 week bump, but you will. As you are sucked into the consuming whirlwind that is motherhood, you will find the finer details of your pregnancy fade to the back of your mind. By writing it all down in a journal, you will be able to look back and read about exactly how you felt during pregnancy.
3. Questions to ask – writing notes about your pregnancy is likely to leave you with questions about the pregnancy and birth. As you write, you may stumble across worries and concerns you didn’t even know you had. With your pen and paper in your hands, you are in the ideal situation to jot down some questions to ask your midwife at your next appointment.
4. Stress relief – everyone knows that talking through your problems can leave you feeling like a weight has lifted, and writing can have the same effect. Writing down your worries and concerns will help you to better identify what is bothering you and why. Spending time each day writing down the exciting moments – the kicks, the scans, the daydreams – will allow you to focus more on these exciting aspects too.
5. The journey – it’s not all about the destination, the journey is worth celebrating too. Pregnancy is an amazing time – it can be overwhelming and terrifying one day, and magical the next. Some days you may lack the energy to get out of bed, and others you may be cleaning the house from top to bottom. Keeping a record of the pregnancy will help you to look back at this once in a lifetime experience.
6. Revision notes – if you have another pregnancy in the future, you’ll be able to go back and compare notes. It will give you a chance to see how your pregnancies differ.
7. Bump watch – including photographs in the journal will help you to see how much your body has changed. Taking a photograph of yourself each month, week or day, will allow you to marvel at the size of your bump by the end of those nine long months.
8. Pass it on – one of the most special things about a pregnancy journal is that you can pass it on to the next generation. If your children are expecting children, you can give them your pregnancy notes to read. If you have daughters, they may be particularly interested to see any similarities between your symptoms and emotions during pregnancy.
Are you keeping a pregnancy journal?
Written by Fiona, proud owner of a toddler, @fiona_peacock
This information is not intended to replace the advice of a trained medical doctor. Health & Parenting Ltd disclaims any liability for the decisions you make based on this information, which is provided to you on a general information basis only and not as a substitute for personalized medical advice. All contents copyright © Health & Parenting Ltd 2017. All rights reserved.
