Maternity Style Musts

Pregnancy lasts a mere forty weeks—but it’s enough time for your body to do a complete 180. It’s sometimes a challenge to see the rest of your body swell along with your tummy, and an even greater challenge to dress this ever-inflating shape (especially when your bum and boobs are competing with your belly for attention.) Add in the pressure to live up to the annoyingly super-cute—and super-styled—Hollywood moms, and I’m tempted to cry into my muumuu. To keep the muumuu at bay (at least when I’m in public!) I polled my most stylish and hip “mama friends” to see how they survived their nine-month style challenge. Here are a few of their style and beauty musts to make pregnancy as blissful (well, as blissful looking!) as all the books advertise.

A Good Belly Cream.
The books all say you can’t fight ’em—they’re a badge of motherhood. Doctors say they’re genetic, and we’re made to feel our minds should me on other “less shallow” things. I’ll concede to the other badges of motherhood (family-wagon, sleep deprivation, soccer-mom shoes), but stretch marks I’ll fight—or rather moisturize—to the death. I’m putting my faith in Mustela’s Stretch Marks Double Action cream. This cream smells nice, rubs right in—no oil residue on your shirt after application, and it’s hypoallergenic.

Cocoa butter is another favorite, and lotions containing the stuff are readily, and inexpensively, available at any pharmacy. Also, I have a friend who swears by plain old olive oil. The idea is to help keep your skin supple—help your skin out from the inside by drinking lots of water!

A Not-so-little Black Dress.
It’s going to happen to you at least once during your pregnancy—that invitation to a wedding or fabulous party will arrive in your mailbox and you will be forced to force your ever-increasing tummy into a party dress. Fortunately, designers are now more aware of the growing mama’s needs and have designed accordingly. I bought a black Liz Lange dress that I probably wore a hundred times the summer I was pregnant. I changed the accessories depending on the occasion to either dress it up or down: a funky necklace with a nice wrap for evening, and then a jacket or cardigan that allowed my tummy to peek out by day.