MacGuyver Maternity: Five Steps to Extending Your Non-Maternity Wardrobe Throughout Your Pregnancy
Wait, what’s that peestick say? You’re pregnant? Well, congratulations! And welcome to first trimester hell. Dun dun dun.
You don’t need maternity clothing yet. You don’t want to tell everybody — or maybe even anybody — yet.
And yet…
Your waistband is cinching and your belly is bulging and your boobs are threatening to annex into Canada. So now what? Maternity clothes? Already? It’s tempting, in a rush of Shiny New Pregnancy Excitement, to switch to maternity wear as soon as possible — especially once you get a load of those PRICES, dear heavens. Buy it early and get your money’s full nine months’ worth, right? Well. No. Stuff you buy in the first trimester most likely will stop fitting sometime before the third trimester. And…it really won’t fit you in the first trimester either. You’ll look big and baggy and sloppy. Some people will be able to guess your first-trimester secret, while other people will just wonder if you’ve taken to drinking during the day, especially if they overhear you puking in the office bathroom.
Instead, save your money AND your professional reputation with these five simple steps to extending your non-maternity wardrobe — even all the way to the third trimester:
Step One: Make a searching and fearless inventory. Of your closet.
Trust me, you’ve got stuff in there that will work. Some pants in a slightly bigger size, perhaps. A flowy tunic. An empire-waist (or drop-waist) dress. Those super-stretchy low-rise jeans that always showed your butt crack but sit directly below your newly-acquired pooch and when paired with that long flowy tunic…huh! Look at that.
Try everything that has a little stretch or is a little big. Look for loooong, waistband-covering shirts. Yank fabric belts off dresses. Leave fitted shirts unbuttoned and cover them with a more generously cut jacket or sweater. If something doesn’t have a very defined waist, it’s MONEY, baby. Wear it.
Step Two: Get extra inches from your pants anyway you can.
Shirts and dresses tend to pose less of a problem for first-trimester bodies than pants. Oh, pants. How you taunt us by SO VERY NEARLY BUTTONING BUT NOT QUITE ALMOST GOT IT GAH MUFFIN TOP AHOY. Screw that. Wear long shirts — wear a minidress if you have to — and leave that top button undone or several inches unzippered.
Of course, you don’t want your pants to fall down, and you don’t want weird pointy corners of your fly sticking through your shirts. So…slip an elastic hair band (or a rubber band, for a longer extension) through any buttonhole you want to leave undone, looping the ends back over and around the button. I’m STILL using this trick with TWO WHOLE PAIRS of non-maternity jeans — both of which are low-rise with stretch, purchased a little before I lost that last bit of baby weight last time. AWESOME.
For dress pants that use a hook-and-eye closure, stick a safety pin on each side, and then close them around a small hair band. Sometimes all you really need is an extra inch or two, particularly for low- or high-rise pants that miss the bulk of your belly.
To smooth out any — ahem — bulging, you can shell out some money on a Bella Band. It’s an ultra-stretchy tube top that you wear over your unbuttoned waistband to help (sort-of) hold up your pants and hide the fact that yes, your waistband IS unbuttoned. It basically looks like a neutral tank top underneath your shirt, and while it does require a bit of adjusting now and again, it is extremely useful. (I wear mine postpartum as well, when I basically revert to all my first-trimester dressing tips all over again).
Or you could just wear an ultra-stretchy tube top. Yes.
Step Three: Extend your bras before you replace them.
I’ve written about this before, but your boobs won’t just have one big growth spurt early on. You’ll notice a LOT of changes in size throughout your pregnancy and then AGAIN after you give birth. And unless you really ENJOY spending a ton of money on bras you’ll wear for a month and then never again, you must be very selective about timing the inevitable new-bra purchases during pregnancy.
As a general rule: upgrade your bras when you’re spilling out of the cup, but EXTEND them when it’s the band size that seems too small. You can buy bra extenders at maternity stores extremely cheaply ($2.99 at Mimi Maternity, for example). Or if you’re the crafty sort, or simply have other plans for that $2.99, you can make them yourself. Find an old bra that you no longer want and cut off the hook and eye sections from the band. Tightly and securely sew the hook part to the back of the row of eyes. Use the hooks on the eyes of a bra you want to extend, then fasten it comfortably. Voila!
Step Four: Don’t be afraid to snip, hack & roll.
Control-top pantyhose cinching you a bit too much? Make a small cut in the waistband. Make a couple cuts. Roll non-maternity leggings down below your belly. Yank underwires out of your bras. Got some too-small maternity hand-me-downs? Cut belly panels. Snip around the armpits and bust region and use as a layering shirt. When your body shape changes drastically overnight, you can’t be afraid to just grab the scissors and force a little breathing room out of your cheaper, more replaceable clothes.
Step Five: There’s no law that says you MUST. WEAR. MATERNITY.
The very word “maternity” garners a HUGE price premium (perhaps I shall charge double my going rate for simply mentioning it in this column!), so if you must make purchases during your first trimester, you will save more money in the long run by finding workable options in non-maternity stores. With my first pregnancy, I refused to listen to this advice, reasoning that it made so much more sense to buy maternity stuff right off the bat since I would need it anyway. Why not get the most wear out of it? Well….I didn’t, really. What fit (sort of) in the first trimester was ALL WRONG for me by the end of the second. I waited longer this time, for the most part, but STILL have a handful of expensive maternity tops that just aren’t long enough to cover my third-trimester, fully-popped-and-high-high-up belly.
It’s also tempting to assume that true maternity styles will be more flattering than regular clothes in the next size up, but honestly this isn’t always true either. There’s still an awful lot of pink, crazy-patterned tent-like outfits in the maternity section, and with the current trends and styles being long and generous and non-waisted, you’ll be able to find regular clothing that works without the maternity mark-up.
My essentials have generally NOT been from the maternity section — packs of men’s undershirts, for example, have extended my wardrobe more than any other purchase. They’re stretchy and long — waaay longer than any tank from the women’s section and waaay cheaper than any tank from the maternity section. They’ve saved me from wasting money on maternity pajamas and allowed me to keep slightly-too-short shirts in my regular rotation for months.
When I realized that you could, in fact, pay OVER ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for a single pair of maternity leggings, I hit the pajama department at Old Navy and found stretchy leggings that covered my belly AND were cheap enough to cut (a la Step Four) and extend (a la Step Two, using a bit of elastic from a worn-out pair of lounge pants and some safety pins) without a second thought. I’m still wearing a sack-like minidress from H&M — I used to wear it with leggings, now it’s more of a shirt to wear with actual pants — that cost a FRACTION of what an identical “maternity” version would have cost.
Sure, I’ve treated myself to some beautiful maternity clothing. There are even a few things I’ll be terribly sad to pack up at the end of this pregnancy. But I’m also keenly aware of the fact that SOMEHOW the human race survived and procreated for years and years before the recent boom in maternity fashion.
You can’t always predict how your pregnancy will progress and show, so it’s best to just take a deep breath and admit that you may end up buying clothes just for the final two months, and that’s *breathes* OKAY. Avoiding public nudity is not a luxury, you know? And if you need to work up until your due date, you deserve to have clothing that fully covers those last couple inches of your belly. So do your coworkers, come to think of it.
Don’t forget to visit Amalah’s Weekly Pregnancy Calendar.
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