As a special gift, Your Baby Bible is available free of charge to all visitors to The Baby Show Olympia when they purchase an advance ticket. Simply look out for full details on your ticket confirmation email (RRP: £9).

With a Your Baby Club poll finding that 79% of mums weren’t prepared for everything they went through during pregnancy and 56% felt pressure to have a ‘perfect pregnancy’ and couldn’t speak about the negative aspects, the UK’s fastest-growing baby club has taken matters into its own hands.

The book, available as a free e-book to advance ticket holders to the Baby Show Olympia, has been created in conjunction with Louise Broadbridge, Your Baby Club’s official midwife, founder of Let’s Talk Birth and Baby, and the face behind Instagram’s @thehonestmidwife.

There are contributions from 10 other experts, specialists and medical practitioners, including paediatrician Dr Carly Fertleman, author of best-selling book 'Your Baby Week by Week', to ensure the guide contains the most up-to-date, reliable and factual information to help guide parents through each trimester.

Don’t expect sugar coating, though. The book intends to cut through rose-tinted views on pregnancy and parenthood to give readers an idea of what it’s really like at each step, as well as a better understanding of different eventualities or scenarios.

Louise, who has delivered antenatal courses to over 30,000 expectant parents, thinks that progress is being made on educating and speaking more openly about the realities of the pregnancy journey but there is still work to do:

“With social media, I think we have high-profile mums that are going through the experience and are getting much better at talking about it in a non-idealistic way. You have the likes of Stacey Solomon, Kate Lawler and Ali Bastian, these new mums are now saying on those communities: You know what? This is really tough.”

“Where we’re still lacking is education when it comes to more complex deliveries and on topics like breastfeeding – I think we could do far better in how we teach it. We need more depth and acknowledgement of the fact that not every single parent can have a ‘perfect’ birth, not everyone can deliver in the same way or have the same experience.”

With many parents having been cut off from accessing vital support during the pandemic, producing a resource-packed book with valuable insight from specialists to help them prepare has taken on even greater significance.

One key for parents, according to Louise, is keeping their minds open to all possibilities:

“It’s about saying, rather than just striving for a water birth, why don’t we just consider all the different routes? Rather than striving for one possibility, if women and their partners prepare for all different types of birth they would be far less likely to feel traumatised or disappointed if they end up taking a different route.”

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About Your Baby Club

With over 3 million members, making it the fastest growing network of mums, dads, carers, guardians and foster parents in the UK, Your Baby Club (yourbabyclub.co.uk) is the go-to place not only for the hottest offers and exclusive discounts, but for information from experts, as well as anecdotes, tips and stories - written for parents, by parents