There is a deep-rooted superstition among some Italian doctors and teachers that raising a child bilingual causes the child problems, such as slower overall language development, and academic problems later in school. Fortunately, I never fell for that line, as I had done my homework about bilingualism while still pregnant. And it doesn't stand up to common sense and experience - in many parts of the world, including many parts of Italy, it is very common for children to grow up speaking a local dialect or language in addition to their country's official tongue(s).

Not as Hard as You Might Thing - Our daughter is bilingual in English and Italian, and some people have asked "how we did it." There really wasn't much to it. While I was pregnant, I read the only book  I could find on the subject (The Sun is Feminine Amazon UK | US), which happened to be written (in English) by a German linguist married to an Italian. She suggested following the "one parent, one language" rule: each parent should speak only one language (preferably his or her native one) with the child, right from birth, so that the child is able to identify each language with a specific person, and thereby learns to keep the languages separate.

One of our Mums in Spain members shares her experience following her recent miscarriage. Although a sensitive subject to approach it is an unfortunate reality for some, and we hope that this thoughtful contribution from Sam will help anyone else who might be going through a similar situation.

The best piece of advice I had from someone when I was pregnant was not to skip the "caesarian" chapter of my birth book just because I didn't think it applied to me. She had done the same thing and gone on to have an unplanned caesarian and had wished she had been more informed.

I speak Swedish and my husband's native language is English. When we had our two children, we had no doubt that we wanted to raise them with equal access to both languages. Now, years later, when I've made promoting multilingual child-raising not just my avocation, but my vocation as well, people ask me for the straight story, warts and all.

If you are travelling to certain countries, you may need to have vaccinations to safeguard against diseases found in those areas. However, if you are pregnant, the general advice from the NHS is that not all vaccines are safe for your baby, especially live ones, which include vaccination against: yellow fever, typhoid, rubella, BCG and MMR.

In Spain nearly two children out of every ten are obese which is nearly double the number  compared to 20 years ago. This places Spain in third place after the US and the United  Kingdom in terms of child obesity according to the International Association for Obesity.