Since I decided to have a baby I've developed a love/hate relationship with the Internet.

It was my ally before conception, a foe during pregnancy and an indifferent lover now that I have a child. I can't seem to find a happy medium between me and the World Wide Web.

Our relationship started out with a bang, when I had a hunch that I was pregnant. It was too early to take a pregnancy test, so I searched site after site for what would be the telltale symptoms that my efforts to conceive had worked.

If you Google "signs you're pregnant" you get more than 1 million results. Unable to click on every site available, I checked a chosen few that looked somewhat legitimate. Bullet points screamed at me across the screens: Cramping! Excessive salivation! Acne!

If there was a symptom, I was sure to make it fit my not-yet-changed body. Even if it meant pretending to go to the bathroom all the time. If the Internet said it, it must be real, right?

As it happened, I was pregnant, and that only complicated the relationship further. If I was obsessive about solving the question of whether or not I was pregnant, what would become of me now that I was actually carrying a child? Put it this way -- I'm sure if my unborn son had a choice, he would have used his umbilical cord to tie my hands behind my back to stop me from using the computer keyboard again.

The Internet confirmed for me my worst fears about the first trimester of pregnancy. I'd be nauseous for at least three months, I'd have bad skin, and the clincher -- I couldn't eat what I wanted to. I tried and tried to find a Web site to support my consumption of deli meat laced with raw fish and artificial seasoning, but I couldn't seem to pin it down.

I was starting to hate the Internet.

Sick of soul-searching on the many 1.3 million Web sites telling me what I could and could not eat, I decided it would be better if I limited my options. I'd rather have a few close friends than many superficial ones, and that translated well to the Web. I was better off getting my information from just one Web site instead of the multitudes.

So I signed up for alerts from a very popular site.

It was like having an annoying acquaintance who seems to know everything, but is only right about 60 percent of the time. But you keep her around because she can answer simple questions such as, "When will I feel the baby kick?"

I remember vividly scouring the site around week 20 of my pregnancy, hoping to feel a little something. If it said so, I believed it. I'm sure my doctor did not appreciate this. And at around week 21, when I still didn't feel anything, I was convinced something was wrong.

I remember the call to my husband:

"But the site said I should feel something by now!" I said. He said, "You've lost it."

And then I felt a punch.

The umbilical cord was getting tighter around my wrists.

And so I started hating the Internet even more. Every time I'd get an update -- "Your fetus is the size of an avocado" -- I'd delete it with one fell swoop. A forwarded link from a friend? Gone in a flash. Now that I had felt the precious kick, I didn't really care about Braxton Hicks or false labor. My baby was fine, and so was I. Birth happened -- no, I didn't read other people's delivery stories -- and I moved onto a new phase in our relationship: indifference.

After my son was born, I became numb to the information. There was too much of it out there and, well, I had the baby now. What else did I need to learn? So I shut down my computer to opt-in advice.

How has it served me? My son seems healthy and happy, I'm a little more relaxed, and my wrists are free to show my son how to swing a bat, rather than support my hands in typing and clicking.