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Pregnancy & Labour

What we learned while navigating antenatal care, birth choices, and delivery in Singapore.
🤰 Antenatal care & check-ups
🏥 Birth choices & hospitals
💉 Pain relief options
📋 Birth plans & decisions
🍼 Preparing for postpartum
What Surprised Us About Pregnancy & Labour​​

Emotional well-being mattered more than doing everything “right”

Trying to optimise every detail created stress, while slowing down and taking care of our emotions made the journey more sustainable.

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Advice needs context — especially around food and lifestyle

Knowing what foods to avoid (like raw fish, certain herbs such as lemongrass, and undercooked items) mattered, but it didn’t mean living in fear of every meal.

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Enjoying pregnancy is a choice — and an important one

Travelling, celebrating small milestones, and allowing ourselves to enjoy the process made pregnancy more meaningful in hindsight.​

What we learned: try as much as possible to enjoy your pregnancy, it is truly a magical moment.

The Decisions That Mattered Most​​
Choice of Hospital

  • Public vs Private or something in the middle i.e. private patient in a public hospital

  • Choose something that works for your budget and comfort

There’s no “better” option just different trade-offs.
Birth Plans

  • Birth plans helped us think through scenarios

  • Flexibility mattered more than the choice itself​

Labour is unpredictable and that's perfectly okay
Pain Relief Options

  • Set realistic expectations

  • Reduce fear around labour

  • Stay flexible when plans changed

Know the options but you do not have to commit to one.
Tests & Screenings

  • Deciding which tests to do helped us balance being informed ​​

Learn about common pregnancy tests in Singapore
What We Over-Worried About (In Hindsight)​

  • Whether we were doing “enough”

  • Whether we started preparing too late

  • Whether our plans were detailed enough

In hindsight, most of these worries didn’t meaningfully change outcomes.

What We’d Do Differently If We Could Start Again

✅Stress less about optimisation

✅Prepare mentally for uncertainty, not just logistics

✅Focus earlier on how we wanted to feel during pregnancy and labour

Resources That We Found Helpful
Antenatal Class

  • We went for the NUH antenatal class

Useful Checklists

  • What to pack in the hospital bag

  • Foods to avoid during pregnancy

Exercises for Pregnancy

  • We followed some YouTube yoga classes at home

Pregnancy and labour are just the beginning. After delivery, most parents step into the intense — and transformative — First 30 Days with a newborn
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