One thing I love about my job is that at the new MOMs groups I facilitate there is often crying and laughing all at once. Just recently, for example, during a discussion of post-birth bodies, sex and intimacy, one new mom described her scramble to unlock her apartment door one day when she had to pee. Moms’ lives can get busy: she’d been out with her baby doing a thousand errands and “holding it in,” till she reached emergency levels, and now that she’d made it home, her key was nowhere in sight.
I think the rest of the room knew the story would end “and then I sneezed/coughed/laughed… .”
Standing outside your apartment door with a crying baby on one hip and pee in your sandals, that mom pointed out, is not the sexiest thing.
I know you’re now madly doing a dozen kegels while you read, because you know they improve perineal tone and reduce the stress incontinence that is common during and after pregnancy. But perhaps you’re one of the many women who blow them off except at moments when the word “kegel” is uttered. Because — do you really need one more thing on your to-do list?
On the other hand, do you really need to pee into your sandals?
So but here’s an alternative: the Je Joue Ami, a PC muscle exercise toy. I learned about the other night at a workshop for childbirth professionals at Babeland.
Here’s how it works: you insert one of the Ami, (a small plastic and silicone ball with a plastic string for removal), vaginally, and … do nothing else! Apparently the weights inside the ball cause your perineal muscles to tighten – spontaneously – as effectively as kegels but without thinking about it. You can wear them for hours, I learned at Babeland, “while you go to the bank, do your errands or whatever you need to do all day.”
Perhaps the idea of walking around with plastic balls in your vag strikes you as a little funny, but I like that it’s both private and minimalist: you can wear it all day and no one knows. And as you get stronger, you can graduate up to Ami 2 and Ami 3, also included in the set. You might just end up with the Toned-est Perineum on the Block.
And there’s a bonus: the description promises that as you “exercise your way through the set of three” you will “build up kegel muscle strength, increase orgasmic sensation, decrease incontinence, and stimulate the G-spot.” Talk about multi-tasking! And of course you could also just use them like Ben-Wa Balls. They are, after all, called “Je Joue.”
By the way, Babeland is awesome, and the staff there really cares about your happiness and health. Their Brooklyn location has some pretty excellent programming for pregnant women and new mothers, check them out.