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I was right on track with the textbooks until I started swelling...some checkups I had gained 9 lbs in 2 weeks even though I wasn't eating more than normal.

Did you have preeclampsia? I had that with my first, and I think that was the only reason I gained any weight that pregnancy. I say this because I was 242 the day I delivered (started out at 252, then went down to 219 because of the HE), and a week later I was way down to 219 again! It had to have been just about totally water weight, or there's no way on Earth it would have just disappeared like that. Pre-E can make things really freaking weird at the end of pregnancy.

That sucks. You can have pre-E without having sky-high blood pressure. I remember one monitoring session in labor & delivery where the only time I had a really high reading was for the one they took when the corpsman was coming at me with a needle to draw blood. :lol: I was told with my second pregnancy that they no longer look at swelling as a sign of pre-E (it's one of the things I was told to monitor the first time, & my rings didn't get tight til I started developing it), but rapid weight gain is a hard sign of it, and really it's not too hard to check for protein in urine. I was right on the border of full-blown eclampsia too, because I was getting these headaches so bad they were throwing my vision off, not to mention the dizziness & all...

But yeah, I understand bitterness. It's why I made plans this last time around for midwife care/home birth (even though I wound up going to the hospital, it was my choice in the end, which meant a lot). I just wasn't brave enough to schedule another hospital birth after the first two!

Hopefully it will work well for you! If you've not checked it out yet, I really recommend Birthing from Within, for the information on pushing positions that maximize the pelvic opening. (No big surprise the typical lithomy position isn't ideal, huh?) If I'd been coherent enough when it came time to push I'd have insisted on pushing in a squat; it probably would have made things easier on me.

In the latest pregnancy books and issue of Fit Pregnancy that I have read, they say that in your first trimester that you don't need the additional calories yet. What I have read points to eating about 2000-2200 calories a day, which is the standard for most women to maintain an average weight normally. They recommend adding the 300 extra calories a day in the second and third trimesters.

I truly do believe that they are correct in stating that you need more calories a day (around 500) when you are nursing, more than the 300 when you are pregnant. In pregnancy your body is housing another being, but in nursing you are "creating food" yourself-which is a whole different ballgame.