Katherine

All great suggestions. I agree with Mary's perspective on just being there and giving her lots of positive affirmation. She'll be getting unsolicited advice from everyone and their brother throughout her pregnancy, and probably will be "warned" many times about what to do and not to do, and about how hard different parts of parenting are. You can be a breath of fresh air in her life by talking about how joyous your mothering experience has been instead of how exhausting and inconvenient it is to be a parent. (or maybe by just talking about other normal things... I know toward the end of my 1st pg, I didn't want to hear what ANYbody had to say about ANYthing... I just wanted to get my mind off the stuff I was worried about, kwim?)

Also the suggestion about giving her one of Dr. Sears "other" books is GREAT! I absolutely LOVED The Baby Book and The Birth Book, and credit his info for a lot of the things that went "right" about my birth experience. His influence really set the stage for me to break away from a tremendously strong background and indoctrination into so-called Biblical spanking. Being attached to my first baby helped me to feel uncomfortable when we started "disciplining" him with punitive methods--the two philosophies just don't mesh well, and I was rooted enough in AP that I didn't easily depart from it. I read The Discipline Book and rolled my eye dismissively when I saw he didn't endorse spanking... but the ideas had already been planted in my mind. Later, when things got bad and spanking just wasn't the magic pill it was cracked up to be, those different ideas lurked in the back of my mind... I knew there were other opinions out there if I was just brave enough to consider them.