first trimester recap

now, enough with all the seriousness already.

onto the fun stuff!

since i'm already in my second trimester, i decided to jot down a few things about my first trimester (and what feels like is still my first trimester, since not much has changed). and for those of you who like to guess the sex using old wives tales, some of these may help you formulate a guess :)

* i was sick, but not as sick as i was with june. it's been very hit or miss and gradually gotten better. i have fewer days where i feel bad, and it's usually when i overdo it on the amount or content of the food i eat.

* my face looks like a teenager's, i.e. serious acne. that is one thing that has gotten better since the second trimester's arrival. thank goodness!

* my energy is gone. it's never coming back. i'm convinced...ok i'm half kidding, but dang! i'm wiped out. around 15 weeks with june i felt like a new woman. i enjoyed almost everything about pregnancy except for the sciatic nerve pain (which i don't have this time). i'm still waiting on that energy burst. yesterday i laid down for a "cat nap" while my toddler was napping and woke up two hours later (thank goodness for long toddler naps). and i was still ready for bed at 9:00.

* half my life is lived in the following conundrum and internal dialogue:
"mannnn i've gotta pee so bad!"
"i really don't want to move."
"but i have to pee!"
"empty bladder? comfy couch? empty bladder? comfy couch?"...the scales are never balanced
(at night just exchange "couch" for "bed")

* and on that note, i'll add that having a newly potty trained toddler is incredibly easy when you're pregnant. because every time we leave the house, i have to pee as much (if not more) than she does. thus, no forgotten potty breaks.

* on a second semi-related note, i'll also add that the 3-day potty training bootcamp is THE BOMB. long story short, june had been half trained since around 19 months. we also cloth diaper. being half in cloth diapers is worse than being all the way in cloth diapers. and that's saying a lot. (can you tell i really love cloth diapering?) i couldn't bear the thought of dealing with another dirty diaper while i was on the verge of vomiting half the time, so i did some desperate online searching. 3 days later, no diapers. done. bam. it works, people.

* back up to the comfy couch note. how has dealing with a toddler been, you ask? and not just any toddler, but the very active toddler, who, when introduced to the new kids in her once-a-week gym class earned the title of "physical risk taker"...yeah, that one? well, other than the week where i caught a nasty cold that made me feel like death, it's been better than i thought. there are two three things i know. 1: my daughter will watch--from start to finish--any charlie brown movie, polar express, narnia, and countless episodes of curious george. 2: all standards i had on child-rearing before becoming pregnant have gone out the window. television has gotten me through most days. and that's all that matters. 3: polar express is actually a good movie, but if you're pregnant, be prepared to totally lose it during the part where santa flies away.

* i'm carrying an ice baby. that's what i call it. ice, ice baby. i'm kidding (kind of). with june i was a flaming torch. hot all the time. i radiated heat from my body. if i was in a predator movie, i would have been dead in no time. this time around, except for the occasional hot flash, i'm always cold. i've slept in a sweatshirt once or twice. in church we have to switch seats seven times before i find one that isn't directly under an air vent funneling the polar vortex to the seats below. it's winter! turn off the a/c!

* i discovered that coffee makes me feel much worse than without. but i remember last pregnancy going through caffeine withdrawals while pregnant and that was AWFUL. so i found a ginger tea (yay for ginger, the nausea fighter--and this one had real ginger, which is really freaking hard to find) that also happens to be pretty caffeinated. and that did the trick for a little while. BUT...it's still not coffee. i can pretend to be a tea drinker and fool no one. i love coffee. i've loved it since i had to stand on a stool to make it (which, at 5'2" probably wasn't all that long ago). so i've discovered that if i make a 1/3 heated milk and 2/3 weak, non-flavored, non-sweetened coffee concoction, that i can handle it. so that's what i do.

* i must be some kind of delusional fool because i signed up for a prenatal yoga class. i'm trying to focus on staying physically active during this pregnancy, for many reasons. first, it helps me feel better. secondly, my midwife swears by it for a quicker labor. and lastly, it's something i've put off for way too long as a general health practice. so, in addition to my walks and at-home exercise, i found a once a month or so class and i'm going to go. and look like a total idiot. fairhope moms walk around like they've all just been to a yoga class. and they probably have. there's 4 studios in a 1 mile radius. i wear yoga pants because that's all that fits me these days. so i've got one foot in the door. ha! not...

* chia seeds. my digestive best friend.

* not finding out the gender has been helpful for evading the "name game." you know the one. where you start favoring this darling little name, you tell it in confidence to someone you think you can trust, and then they drop a bomb like this: "ooooh, yeah. my great aunt was murdered by someone with that name. no. no you can NOT name your baby that." well, thanks. certainly don't want any murderer babies.

so listen up. we're not sharing any names with you. any of you. nothing personal. i just don't think your kindergarten teacher's name has anything to do with our baby. and really, with the way it went with june's naming, i don't trust myself to name a baby before he or she is born. just seeing june's little face, all bright and round and sticking out from her tight little bundle ruled out so many of the names we had considered. she is a "june." it was meant for her. and i couldn't have known that without meeting her first. or if i'm in a bind and feel like being mischievous, i'm going to start making them up:

"ooh what's your favorite girl name so far?"
"well, we haven't decided for sure, but right now 'halo' is in the lead."

* and lastly, i've found a heavenly midwife for my delivery. i had a midwife for my last delivery and...actually, no. no i didn't. because she wasn't there for my delivery. my 30 hour of grueling, strapped to a bed, labor and delivery. i delivered a healthy baby. bottom line. but i was not at all pleased with the staff or progression of events. i stayed sane only because of my support team in the room. this new lady. Y'ALL. she walked in and heavenly light shone down on her. she beams joy, and she told me verbatim "i'm so glad you're choosing the natural route. this is going to be wonderful. this--THIS is why i became a midwife." and i beamed. i confessed that i had such fear about this delivery until i met her. and now i have a total peace about it. and then she beamed.

i'm delivering in a hospital, just like last time. and if there's anything i've learned, it's that delivering naturally at a hospital is near impossible. it's just not something the staff is comfortable with or used to. i don't know what's going to happen this time. i really don't. it probably won't go as planned. but knowing that i have someone who will be there the minute i arrive (and who doesn't keep doctor's hours but is instead on-call 24/7, barring some unfortunate coincidence of sickness or major emergency) and who will fight for all the things i want as the same things she wants--that feels really good.

and this time, i'll know what they really mean until they say "stay home until you can't talk through a contraction." because they mean literally, it is impossible to utter anything except a low groan. ;)


whew. that was really long. and took days to put together. so naturally, expect the same long ramblings at the end of the second trimester :)

16 weeks, round 2

in case you missed it, i recently announced my pregnancy with our second child.

i'm about 16 weeks pregnant and a couple of nights ago i felt our baby move for the first time. i felt a little "bump, bump" which--like most things these days--i assumed was just gas. until i pressed on the spot where i felt said bump and it promptly bumped me back! gas doesn't bump back. that's a baby!

now it feels so much more real, and i realize how silly it was to have treated my pregnancy the way i have for the past several weeks.

so let me backtrack to the moment i knew i was pregnant:

we had been on a long vacation and i was "late." nothing unusual. i started to think maybe i was pregnant, but i told myself i'd continue enjoying our vacation until i really worried about it.

then we got home, and one of the first things i did was to go out to our backyard and check on our veggie garden. this poor garden...it got bit by a late cold snap, and then flooded (multiple times), and it had been in sad shape all summer. but still we tended to it, watered it, pulled weeds, plucked off caterpillars, pruned, and pampered. we got a few sad tomatoes, some tiny peppers, and a whole bunch of basil and rosemary, which is hard to kill.

i walked over to our garden and was sure someone had played a cruel joke on us. we had DOZENS of tomatoes. from 3 to over 3 DOZEN. in ten days with no watering, no tending to. weeks later we would count 72 tomatoes.

it was then i knew. God spoke to me in that moment and said "you are entering a season of fruitfulness." my heart raced. i called to my husband. we sat there, counting tomatoes in awe. not long after that i told him to go to walmart and get a pregnancy test, which sure enough confirmed our pregnancy.

my reaction (and continued reaction) was far short of elation. here's a few reasons why:

1. my daughter has proved to be a challenging toddler. not that she's bad or defiant or anything like that, but she's high energy. curious. independent. fearless. she keeps me on my feet. the one comment i get from people that far outweighs any other is how "active" she is. i wondered how i was going to make it through another first trimester like the one i had with her all while chasing her around. in fact, my husband and i had just, only days before, agreed that we would be totally fine not actually "trying" to get pregnant until she was around 4, that way she would be in school and out of the house most of the day while i raised a second baby. did we have a "plan"? not really. but we were comfortable with how things were before we knew i was pregnant.

2. i asked my husband a few days later: "what does this mean for me? am i entering a season of non-stop motherhood? because i don't know if i'm ok with that." what i mean by that is, i've still worked part-time from home while raising june. not a lot. some days i don't work at all, and some days i have to cram a lot into one day to finish up a project. it's certainly not easy, but it keeps me sane. it keeps me from feeling like i'm "just a mom." as much as i can justify that being a mom is the absolute hardest job, it still feels unimportant to me personally, in my position. i know that's not true--not in the slightest, but i have a hard time convincing myself of that. i've struggled with that a LOT.

3. --and here's the big one-- i worried way too much about what announcing this pregnancy would mean to others. there are more women than i can count, many i know personally, who have experienced trouble and heartache with pregnancy and fertility. it's a borrowed hurt and fear i've held onto with no justification whatsoever. here are these hurting, struggling women who want nothing more than a healthy pregnancy, and apparently my husband can look at me the right way and i get pregnant. with two "happy accident" pregnancies, it's obviously not an area we struggle with. there's no way that i could tell these people that i was pregnant and hide the anxiety i was facing. that would be totally unfair to them. and i had a lot of guilt about that.

then my husband reminded me of where i sat 4 years ago and the uncertainty i faced with my own fertility. i had forgotten. i once sat and listened to a doctor tell me "i want you to come in next time and be pregnant" because it was fairly possible that i had a condition that could jeopardize my ability to bear children in the future.

now, while i don't (and didn't) take to heart the presumptuous diagnosis of one man (even though it cost me my insurance coverage for a while--now that i'm still peeved about), my husband reminded me that i had every right to be thankful for this pregnancy. the same right as anyone else. not only due to personal circumstance, but because the bible clearly states that children are a gift. any gift from God should be held in high regard and put us in a state of gratitude.

not only did this ring true, but it made me realize that i had been unrightfully anxious over this pregnancy. i don't know if i had even once until that point (several weeks in) stopped and thanked God for this gift. and for this season.

one of my strongest christian mentors once explained to me the meaning and importance of accepting seasons, and it has stuck with me so strongly since then. but sometimes i forget. i forget to realize the season i am, accept it, and be grateful for it--no matter the high or low. i've had incredibly low seasons that brought me the closest in my relationship with God.

we face struggles that others don't. we are strangers to the seasons others are in. some seasons of others we can't even begin to understand. and some of ours may be totally foreign to others. it's not our job to compare seasons. it's our job to recognize them and remember what it was like to be in the lows, and what we might have overlooked in the highs.

we are allowed to rejoice in fruitful, good seasons. we don't have to be hush-hush just because someone else can't find it in their season to share in our rejoicing. that's fine. but we can be sensitive to them, and we can remember what it was like in low seasons. we can be a system of support and prayer.

so whatever this new child brings into our lives, i am excited about it. i can say that with truth at this point. i am glad i was able to see past the silly fears i had that were totally unwarranted. i can only imagine God's frustration with me! to give such a gift and then for me to act like i did.

it is a gift. it is wonderful. and i accept it gladly and with gratitude.

over christmas, my sister invited me to a musical performance some friends of hers put on at their home and invite their friends and church members to be a part of. this family--y'all. there are eight kids. EIGHT. and each one of them brings an integral part into the family. they are close. they are loved. when i met the parents of these children and saw how friendly and joyful they were, i knew it could all be ok. i knew that mom probably had days where she locked herself in the bathroom just so she could cry alone. i knew she probably had nights when as soon as her husband was home she got in the car without any explanation and drove off just to sit in silence somewhere. i knew she had days where she probably thought she couldn't do it anymore. i knew she probably lost her cool and regretted it. and yet, there she sat, long past the toddler days, watching her children come together and put together a performance to bless their friends and family. the pride she must have felt. the overwhelming gratitude.

i can be a mom like that. i can. i don't have to have it all together. i don't have to act sane on days when i'm not. i know, that just as he has with only one kid, God will give me just what i need to get me through, even if that's the wisdom to call someone and tell them i need help (which i've done...although probably not enough!)...no matter how many happy accidents we have :)

on my birthday, my husband and i even had a conversation about having "more kids than the average family." what?! crazy people! someone out there has to take it upon themselves to remind me that i said this when i'm pregnant with my fourth child and crying in a corner.

(i'd like to stop here a minute and say that there's this publix commercial that airs around thanksgiving, and it highlights all of the things that can go wrong at a family holiday gathering. but at the root of it all are very full and very happy homes. full and happy homes--that must be the envy of every mother...or maybe just pregnant mothers. i don't know. all i know is i saw that commercial, internally wept like a child, and told my husband "we're going to publix--right now-- to buy all the things! right now!" do not bring up this commercial around me. i will cry. i'm pregnant! it's the hormones! it's natural!)

we are thankful for all your congratulations and well wishes and prayers. and know that if it's just not your season to be joyful with us, then i understand. i've been there, too.

i'll be documenting this pregnancy on my blog, just as i did with the last. because all my children deserved to be celebrated. (i just hope i make it around to blogging as much as i did last time!)

until, next time friends. i'm sure you can't wait to read all about my pregnancy acne ;)