Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong - and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster

    Expecting Better was a great book highly recommended by multiple friends that I read to learn more about pregnancy (since my wife is pregnant). Most of the book is about researching the facts about pregnancy to find out how pregnant women can best assess risk without resorting to hard rules. Emily Oster is a really valuable writer because she is a trained economist who has applied her economics background to pregnancy and parenting. I previously read Cribsheet, but didn't do much of a reflection on it--it's crazy to think I read it seven years ago!

    Oster is very nonjudgmental, which is really good since pregnant women are faced with tons of judgments about their decisions to have a glass of wine, rest, exercise, you name it. So the book is filled with tons of things like her analysis of drinking coffee, which basically shows that there is really no clear evidence of any effect of caffeine intake on pregnancy health for mother or child. It is likely difficult to conduct studies because nausea during pregnancy is correlated with a low rate of miscarriage, and nauseous women usually don't crave coffee. But the hard rule of 200mg of coffee a day doesn't seem necessary. With alcohol, it appears that the real factor is speed of drinking that overwhelms the liver. Seven drinks a week may actually be safe as long as they're spread out--drinking a glass of wine slowly is unlikely to have any effects on the baby. Problems only arise when significant amounts of alcohol get into fetal tissues, but after mom's metabolization of the alcohol, that's usually not happening if it's just a little. She also does a really good analysis of raw fish: eating raw fish may make pregnant women sick, and it's worse to be sick when pregnant. But the real risk is mercury, which requires that women know the mercury levels of fish they are eating and reduce exposure by eating less fish with high mercury levels, but doesn't require full abstinence to stay safe. In fact, the mercury levels of many fish may reduce baby's IQ, but the omega-3s they have may increase IQ, so who knows?

Miscellaneous Facts:

• During the first half of a woman's cycle, her body temperature is below 98 degrees, then, the day after ovulation, it increases by about half a degree or more.
• Almost 90% of women have nausea during pregnancy, usually peaking between 8 or 9 weeks and falling off after. 50% of women report vomiting at some point in weeks 5 to 8 of pregnancy, but less than 15 to 20 percent by 17 weeks. At the worst point in pregnancy, 13% of women report throwing up 3 or more times a day.
• Airplane travel is unlikely to create enough radiation exposure to be a danger. It takes three round trip flights from New York to Tokyo to reach 1% of the level at which there is a demonstrated risk of birth defects or miscarriage. This can be relevant for women who work on airplanes, but not for the most frequent of frequent flyers.
• Kegels during pregnancy are highly effective at reducing urinary incontinence post-partum. Randomly assigned women who did 3 sets of 8 kegels twice a day for 6 seconds each had significantly lower urinary incontinence before and after delivery. Prenatal yoga also had beneficial effects, but not nearly as significant.
• Lying flat seems to have no effect on fetal health unless it makes the mother uncomfortable. Otherwise, there don't seem to be significant effects from sleeping position. The mother's discomfort may be a sign of blood flow constriction. A small minority of women feel faint from lying flat, but those who don't feel faint experience no negative effects that have been observed.
• Queen Victoria was one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth--inhaled chloroform for her seventh child. In the 20th century, women were sometimes given a combination of morphine and scopolamine that put them in "twilight sleep," where they experienced some pain, but forgot it. In the turn of the century, doctors administered cocaine to women in childbirth.
• Epidurals were used in two-thirds of births in the United States in 2008, although they often require use of more instruments due to the fact that epidurals make pushing harder. This can cause more tearing.
• Women who were randomly assigned a doula were half as likely to have a C-section and less likely to use an epidural.
• Eating and drinking during labor is usually prohibited, but probably doesn't need to be. The prohibition came from a time when women were put under full anesthesia, and the prohibition on eating was to avoid them throwing up during surgery and choking to death without anyone noticing. This was rare even in that situation, and today, thanks to epidurals, even less frequent. However, most women aren't hungry during the later stages of labor anyway, but if they are, they probably shouldn't be stopped from eating. Clear juices and Gatorade are a decent compromise.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff

    Hunt, Gather, Parent was a really cool parenting meets anthropology book. I would not call it a parenting guide by any means, although chapters end with bulleted lists of techniques. But it is an entertaining read of different parenting styles across the world in hunter-gatherer societies compared with our more Western ways of parenting. A good recommendation from my wife, who I already discussed this book with, so I don't have a lot of motivation to write it all down here.

    A lot of the advice in the book boils down to regulating parent and child emotions. She recommends that parents do things with their kids, but not for their kids--so no activities that are fun only for the kids. Instead, kids become part of the family by doing things with parents. This is especially useful when kids learn to do chores, or at least watch parents do chores. That way, they expect chores to be a part of their lives, and the parents and children are sort of on the same schedule having done the chores together and then being ready to rest together. Other themes of the book are about giving kids more autonomy, and really picking battles whenever possible. Parents shouldn't argue with children, and lessons are best learned after emotions are passed, and at a lower volume. All in all, a cool book, and I'm jealous of this mom and daughter who got to travel the world together to do the research for it.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

    What. A. Book! Lonesome Dove is an absolute epic, and reading it right after Moby Dick makes it feel like an amazing foil to Moby Dick. But on its own merits, Lonesome Dove is this incredible collection of events on a big cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and I definitely want to watch the miniseries, which is apparently amazing as well.

    I couldn't stop thinking about the Moby Dick comparison. The two books are both set around the same period, just a few decades apart in the mid-19th century. Both of them are stories of men going on a journey, but one is on land, and another is at sea. In Moby Dick, everything builds towards an absolutely massive climax, but in Lonesome Dove, the feeling you're left with over and over is anti-climax. Almost no one achieves their goals in Lonesome Dove. Almost everyone dies. The language is also very different in each book. Moby Dick is highly stylized and rich language, while Lonesome Dove is bare bones, especially in dialogue. McMurtry likes to go one for paragraphs or pages about a character's internal thoughts, but then make their dialogue almost nothing. Lonesome Dove is filled with characters not telling each other how they feel or what they think. But the characters are similar to Moby Dick in that they are all on the frontier, having few opportunities for good conversation.

    The best character in Lonesome Dove is The West. The West is like The Whale in Moby Dick, except no one can be mad at The West since none of the cowboys are as insane as Ahab. Except that in Lonesome Dove, by the end of the book, Call can't stop going north, getting a little hint of the madness that struck Ahab from the beginning. There are all these confrontations with nature itself in lightning storms, sand storms, flooding rivers, thirst, etc. Then you have all these intermittent confrontations with other men in the west, a lot like in Cormac McCarthy's books.

    In sum, this book was excellent, one of the best I've read in a very long time.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

 Little Women is a classic and I’m so glad I read it after being introduced by my wife to the newer movie by Greta Gerwig. I love that movie and I came away appreciating it way more after reading the book. The book is fantastic and I really appreciated how well the movie updated it and reinterpreted it for a modern audience. The original book is very old fashioned in a lot of ways, and it was interesting to think about how Gerwig changed the timeline and a little bit of the tone. I think she did especially well with Amy’s character. I was surprised that this monologue wasn’t in the book:

“Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.”

In the book, the conversation with Amy and Laurie in Nice plays out a little differently, and Gerwig is really inserting the opposite of what Marmee teaches in the book- life isn’t as simple as just being virtuous all the time. Marmee is always giving the best advice and teaching the girls, but in Gerwig’s movie, she’s a little deemphasized and the problems they face are a little more morally complicated.

Little Women is also very funny, and has a great narrator. I loved this line:

“There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

If anybody asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, ‘My nose.’”

I like that Jo isn’t so much the heroine and Amy not so villainized in the book as in the movie. In the movie Amy isn’t necessarily the “bad guy” but it has you rooting a lot more for Jo than for her in order to build up her redemption in the end. I didn’t feel that way in the book. For example, in the book, it was Jo’s fault she didn’t get invited to France, since she went on a diatribe in front of Aunt March about not needing anything from anyone. I don’t remember that in the movie.

There’s also an interesting Germanophile streak in the book. Louisa May Alcott makes all these references to Goethe and Germany and Germans, and that got left out of the movie. I’ll stop here, I don’t have the time to write this post anymore.