Greater Expectation

"Nothing is off limits," says Ellie Miller, co-founder of the Baby Planners, an L.A.-based service that does everything from helping clients find the perfect stroller (using a lifestyle survey with questions like, What kind of sidewalks are in your neighborhood?) to hooking them up with in-home spa services. "One of our clients just spent $10,000 on pregnancy facials" and the like. "Her skin was very important to her during her pregnancy."

"These are highly educated successful women," adds Melissa Gould, Miller's business partner. Gould and Miller estimate that 75 to 85 percent of their clients are first-time working mothers. "They're strong and amazing in the workplace, but they find themselves pregnant and it gets a little tricky," Gould says. "One of our women kept calling us obsessed with the diaper pail."

It's all part of achieving a "perfect" pregnancy, says Clare Hanson, author of "A Cultural History of Pregnancy" -- a concept that did not exist 20 years ago. Pregnant women are expected to have the right kind of body, eat the right kind of food and do the right kind of exercise. "It's very fashionable to be pregnant. It's aspirational." Every other day, some movie star poses with her baby bump looking like it had its own stylist.

Gould and Miller do not judge. Before going into the baby planning business, Miller was a pregnant producer for CNN and Channel One. "I was a woman working in a newsroom, and I was freaking out because I could not find apple green bedding" for the crib. "Who needs apple green bedding?"

It wasn't about the bedding, of course. It was about a woman used to commandeering every aspect of her life suddenly watch her belly swell into an alien bulge.

A woman like this might pay for peace of mind.

"Every free moment I have, I want to spend with my family," says Susan Levison, a Fox executive who purchased a concierge package from the Baby Planners when she became pregnant with her second child. Her first was carried by her partner, also an exec at Fox. Gould and Miller helped Levison find a good prenatal yoga class, a crib and a baby memory book.

It's the sort of thing you would have once asked your sister, back when everyone stayed put in the same town, or asked your neighbor while returning a casserole dish, back when everyone made casseroles.

"My family lives in San Francisco and I'm down in L.A.," says Levison. "All of my friends are busy working parents. I didn't want to ask them every time" she needed something. "It's nice to have someone at your beck and call."

Taylor, the New Yorker, says that her mom lives just 20 minutes away, and was annoyed that the couple was getting a baby nurse rather than inviting her to move in for a few weeks. But Taylor thought she'd feel more comfortable taking advice from a nurse than from mom.

"We live quite isolated lives, very far from our mothers," says Hanson. In that sense, these services are "fulfilling a real need. Pregnant women do need to be nurtured, and [they're] going to have to pay for that."

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