The Top 5 Things I Wore While Pregnant
For a lot of my pregnancy, I wore my regular clothes – or some of my regular clothes. My regular leggings took me a long way, and so did some of my shirts. (I don’t wear a lot of tight fitting clothing). I have a couple of sweater-type tunics that made it with me until the spring, and would have made it farther if I’d had a winter baby. That said, my jeans didn’t make it very far. Basically, anything with a waistband started to get tight a little after my first trimester, and I started officially buying maternity clothes ~ week 17.
Because my baby was born in the summer, I needed maternity clothes that would take me from cooler spring weather to my due date. I didn’t want to buy maternity clothes that I could only wear for a couple of weeks, given the season. Here’s what I ended up wearing almost non-stop:
I wore this shirt an unbelievable amount. Almost every day. Bonus: because it’s a button front, it’s great for breastfeeding after.
I bought a couple of pairs of maternity pants, including one fancier pair for work. But I didn’t really end up wearing the fancy pair. I much preferred the type of maternity pants where the elastic comes up over the belly. I found they were much more comfortable, and I didn’t worry as much about being exposed.
Someone actually gave me a pair of hand-me-down high-waisted H&M maternity slacks, and I wore them more than anything I bought myself!
I found that a lot of the maternity dresses were the same: a jersey fabric, tight-fitting, modified t-shirt style dress. I didn’t want something tight-fitting. I wanted something a little looser, but still stylish. I found a New Look Maternity dress on ASOS that I wore a lot.
Here’s a similar one. Or this one, with short sleeves.
One great tip I got? To buy at least a couple of pairs of high waisted maternity underwear. Not because you’ll necessarily need them during the pregnancy, but for after. If, for some reason, you end up having a c-section, all the other underwear’s waistbands will be right at the bikini incision. So I bought a couple of pairs, and I found, at the very end, I much preferred them to my other underwear, which was just my regular underwear worn all the way through.
The first ten pounds of weight I gained with my pregnancy was all in my torso. Online, I saw all these bra recommendations, so I asked a friend what she’d done. “Ignore all those.” she said. “Go to the bra store with the woman’s name. The old lady bra store where they specialize in bras for all sizes. They will hook you up in there.” So I walked in, talked to them, and they sold me two bras, including one soft-cupped Wacoal number that ended up being stretchy and comfortable enough to take me all the way to the end of my pregnancy.
Things I didn’t wear:
Apart from too-tight t-shirt dresses and pants without high elastic waists, I also found maternity swimsuits pretty, err, depressing. I love swimming laps, and I wanted to keep doing it while pregnant, but it was almost impossible to find a maternity suit that was good for lap swimming. A lot of the maternity swimsuits are more in the “stylish sunbather” camp. I even bought a Speedo-brand maternity suit, but in it, I just felt like a cow, not a swimmer.
A lot of my shoes I didn’t wear, too. At the very end, I was in an old pair of flip-flops. For work, a soft pair of loafers brought me through to week 38.
