- If you can't stomach prenatal vitamins, try children's chewables. One of our mommy M.D. guides recommends taking the over-the-counter kind, and you can take small pills and take three or four so you don't have to choke down the one. Sometimes you can take them with food, take them before you go to bed, take them with a drink that disguises the taste.
- To increase calcium, take a couple of tablespoons a day of liquid calcium. Calcium is a big mineral not included in vitamins, so sometimes you have to take that separately. You can eat yogurt and other dairy foods, but you can find a brand of liquid calcium. That's what McAllister did. Take a teaspoon and get your calcium that way.
- You can drink one or two cups of coffee daily, try making it with half decaf. You need to drink as little as possible. We don't know fully the effects of caffeine on our unborn babies. One of our guides recommended making a pot of half caffeinated and half decaf but you should limit it to a cup or two a day and no soft drinks.
- For morning sickness, try chopped, fresh ginger in tea. One of our guides recommended taking ginger, and what she did was take a teenie piece of gingerroot and grind it up and put it in a cup of tea. Ginger has been proven to quell nausea.
- Consider cord blood banking. Moms only have one chance to collect and store their baby's cord blood, and that's in the moments after delivery of the baby. That cord blood from the baby's umbilical cord is a rich source of stem cells that can be used to treat and sometimes even cure more than 80 different diseases. Moms can find out more about that at cordblood.com.
"The Mommy MD Guide to Pregnancy and Birth" is available now and features more than 900 tips that 60 doctors who are also mothers use during their own pregnancy and birth.
For more information on McAllister's books, visit http://www.rallieonhealth.com/rallies_books.php
