Mommy IQ

August 20, 2012
Star of Bravo's Pregnant in Heels, maternity fashion designer, and founder of parenting-education center MomPrep, Pope offers moms-to-be a comprehensive guidebook to carry them through the nine months of pregnancy. In month-by-month chapters she covers eating well and staying fit (with input from fitness guru Andrea Orbeck), morning sickness (she calls it feeling " vomatacious" ), shopping lists and baby showers, birth strategies, and many other topics. A savvy, three-time mom herself, Pope uses " Paging Dr. Grunebaum" boxes to address such medical issues as hospital vs. home births and gestational diabetes (Amos Grunebaum, her personal obstetrician as well as the director of Obstetrics and Chief of Labor and Delivery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, wrote the book's foreword). Pope encourages moms to build a "tribe" consisting of a partner, doctor or midwife, parents and in-laws, a mommy workout buddy, an all-star event planner, birth and parenting teachers, and others. Quick end-of-chapter "Man Cave" questions allow men to weigh in on pregnancy issues. Pope fans will no doubt fully embrace her latest project, which is delivered with characteristic authenticity, humor, and warmth; others may be a bit put off by cute and quirky made up words like "jubblies" and "bay-bay"âas well as the author's squeamishness about sexual organs which she re-names "Queen Victoria" and "Prince Albert."