My Prenatal Smoothie for an Easier Delivery

It's been a month of NEW! We have a new site design - the blog is newly reborn and I had a new baby!

They say the second baby is easier but my first baby was 2 weeks late and I was in labor for about 37 hours - so this time around I wasn't too positive that it would that much easier - so in preparation I took a great refresher birth class from Kathy Killebrew at Imagine Your Birth.

In addition to giving me the tools I needed to make it though labor and delivery without interventions this time - she sent me this wonderful little study about dates. Not due dates, but dates you eat, and how in this tiny study 96% of the women who ate date fruit everyday starting 4 weeks before their due date went into labor on their own - AND had shorter labors with fewer interventions. Now I have no idea why this might be so - and the study basically just says that it warrants further study - but eating a bunch of dates never hurt anyone so I decided to try it.  The only problem was - i don't really like dates.

So instead of choking them down everyday i used them as sweetener in things I already like to eat - i added extra dates to my favorite chia pudding recipe - and i started to add them to my smoothies. This is the is basic recipe I used for my breakfast smoothie.

1 handful blueberries

1 bananna

1/2 cup greek yogurt

1 tblsp chia seeds

1 tblsp flax seeds

5 pitted medjool dates

1 cup Good Belly juice

Ice

add everything to the vita mix, blend, and drink up!

Did it help?

well, labor was about 12 hours, no pitocin, no epidural. Could be that the second baby is just easier - but I'm still giving some credit to my smoothies ;)

the result :