10 Secrets About What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Brooklyn Decker, whose character Skyler is the second-time-around wife of race car driver Ramsey (Dennis Quaid), was fully aware that her onscreen pregnancy was generally not representative of the real thing.

“When I put on [the belly] they were like, ‘OK, we need it thinner, and we need it more bronze. Tan the belly. It has to look perfect,'” the model, then 25, told the Los Angeles Times at the film’s Hollywood premiere, detailing the approach to Skyler’s picture-perfect experience. “I was like, ‘This is not fair! This is not what pregnancy looks like.’ I’m setting a horrible standard for myself.”

But her prosthetic tummy was heavy like all the others, Decker added, because “they wanted the women to have a realistic waddle—truly, that’s what they said: ‘Realistic waddle.'” And that was enough to nip any baby fever in the bud, the star telling E! News at the movie’s New York premiere, “Honestly, it sort of cured any want for any sort of try. It was really fun to wear the belly and I had fun carrying around the babies, but it was really nice to take the belly off at the end of the day.”

Now mom to son Hank, 6, and daughter Stevie, 4, with husband Andy Roddick, Decker has made it clear there’s no airbrushed version of giving birth. She shared a postpartum photo on Instagram in October that she captioned, “This was me 6 years ago. 1 week after I gave birth to my son. So much blood. So much bruising. Pads and wipes and mesh underwear galore. I was a zombie. It was a shocking experience and not at all unusual.. the reason it was so shocking is simply because I wasn’t prepared. No one really talked in depth about the challenges of childbirth recovery. So I started making homemade kits for my girlfriends listing out all the gory details.”