Surprise!! #2 is on the way!

We're Expecting A Baby Boy

yes, that's correct, I am pregnant again and we are due with a bouncing baby boy on April 26th. I haven't written here in a long while and there is a good reason why. My first trimester with this pregnancy has been HELL. I got nauseous about five seconds after I found out I was pregnant and have felt terrible ever since. In between being nauseous, exhausted and emotional I also managed to get two colds and a viral stomach bug. I've lost 7 pounds and am pretty rough around the edges these days. For all those people who say being pregnant with a boy make you look and feel better are LIARS.

Over the past 10 weeks I have had more help with Lyla than ever with my husband, mom and mother-in-law picking up my slack. Que the mom guilt. I am not 14 weeks pregnant and am finally getting out of it. I took care of my daughter today by myself for the first time in two months...not something I am proud of but at least it seems like its over. I am ready to resume my life.

My real thoughts on this pregnancy is that it seems too soon...I feel like I just went through all this, and I did. Lyla will be 17 months old when this baby comes and although she will be well into toddlerhood she is still a baby. I am excited and terrified to have two kids under two. Everything I keep reading and hearing from moms who have walked in my shoes does nothing to quell my fears and only furthers my panic. I barely feel like I've got a handle on this whole mom thing and now I am being thrown a newborn on top of it all.

The first question people apprehensively ask is if Matt and I were "trying". The answer is yes, but we both did not expect it to happen on the first try. It took us 6 months to get pregnant with Lyla and I was still breastfeeding so we figured it would take a few months. Nope.

Matt and I are both over the moon that we are having a boy, although I truly didn't care one way or another this time around. I am so in love with our little girl that I would have been delighted to have another. But we've got our perfect little package of one boy and one girl and I am pretty certain we are done having kids after this.

I haven't taken any bump photos yet but will start to post those soon. I will also hopefully document this pregnancy well and keep this little journal going.

XOXO

Lisa

Patience and Privacy

I decided to write a post on these two important words after a nice chat with my best friend Jennifer. They are two attributes that I admittedly do not possess. I am the least patient person I know, besides my husband, and I am an open book on the verge of suffering from constant word vomit.This blog has given me the opportunity to be frank and open about my feelings as my husband and I begin the journey into parenthood. However, it has also posed the question:

How much information is too much information?

I began this blog not long ago hoping to chronicle the ending of my birth control and the beginning of a new chapter. So far I have enjoyed sharing my thoughts here and think I will find it therapeutic going foreward. Pregnancy and the time surrounding it is so special, however, that most people do not believe it is something to be shared or talked about. There is that very common rule of thumb to not tell people you are trying, as well as to not reveal that you are pregnant until the end of your first trimester. People do this out of fear.

The fear comes from not knowing if you will be able to conceive, not knowing if you will be able to carry a pregnancy, and not knowing if you will lose the baby or terminate due to an unforeseen condition. These are all valid fears. I fear all of these things myself. They are the unspoken "what-ifs" that every woman deals with and I am no exception. So the question is posed: do I write about it all, regardless of the outcome? Do I reveal my insecurities and my fears in the hopes that someone somewhere will read this and feel like they aren't the only ones?

I can't do this blog justice if I do it half-assed. If I blog about nonsense until 20 weeks when  I can properly reveal to the world that I am pregnant then it defeats the purpose of writing about any of it. It may sound bizaar, but I feel like this silly little blog can be my truth, the truth of how I feel and what I go through, physically and emotionally while trying to get pregnant and God willing, while I carry my first child.

The feeling that has become overwhelmingly apparent to me from writing this blog has been impatience. That is what I recognize in my own writing. It is not a quality I am proud of, but it is one that I have to deal with. I am reading this book, The Lady of The Rivers by Phillipa Gregory right now and last night I read the most profound quote about patience, women and the desire for children:

"First you have to know the emptiness of your womb, of your arms, of your heart. That can hurt. You have to have the courage to look at yourself and know the loss that you feel. Then you have to change your life to make a space for the child who will not come. You have to open your heart; you have to make a safe place for the baby. And then you have to sit with your longing and your desire, and that can be the most painful. You have to sit with your longing and know that you may not get what you want; you have to encounter the danger of longing for something without the expectation of getting your desire." - Jacquetta to her daughter Elizabeth

I took that to heart and it was a piece of writing that resonated with me because the scariest thing about "trying" to get pregnant is the fear and the possibility that it may not happen, or that it may take quite a while and effort. This whole experience might be a good learning opportunity for me, to learn to know what I want, to know what I desire, and sit and wait with patience and calmness for the cards to fall into place. That was the advise that Jennifer gave to me, to "not stress about it". It was hard for me to explain that I'm not stressed about getting pregnant, I am impatient only because I know how much both Matt and I want this in our lives. But I will try to sit with patience and just enjoy the process, as people say. In all honesty, this has been the best part of our relationship so far with so much happiness and time together just being married that I am glad we waited until now to start trying as opposed to starting right away when we got married. The future holds a lot of promise with or without a pregnancy that I should start to learn some patience, although the privacy part may not follow.

XOXO

Lisa

  

Shoot and a Miss

I'm not pregnant yet.

At least, I don't think I am. I jumped the gun out of excitement and took one of those early response tests that let you tell before you miss your period and it came back negative. I thought it could be possible since we had been aware of my ovulation and I have been feeling off lately, but alas...I think it is only regular PMS which is a bummer on a lot of levels. My period last month after getting off birth control was the worst one I've had since I can remember so I'm sure being on BC was softening the blow of cramps etc. I know a lot of girls get onto BC to make their periods more bearable but I never realized that it made that much of a difference for me.

Matt knows I was really hoping to be a one and done kind of conceiver. One try. One cycle. One baby. But perhaps it will take a bit more effort than I originally thought. It's funny because I spent most of my life thinking that if a guy comes inside me and I had forgotten my pill that day that BAM! I was going to end up knocked up. Only when you get to an age that you want to get pregnant do you actually find out how difficult it is. I read an article today that said that it takes a while for your ovulation to come back after stopping birth control and that even when it does at come back that you have a 20% chance of conceiving each month (I'm sure someone did that math so I wont argue against it but it seems kind of absurdly low).

Matt has assured me that we are still in the grey area, that I jumped the gun on taking a pregnancy test and even though it is highly possible that I am not pregnant there is still a chance that I am. To me, I just feel achy and crampy and bitchy pretty much how I usually feel before my period so my guess is that it didn't happen this month.

It feels like people all around me are getting pregnant and having babies. This is also thanks in large part to Facebook which projects everyone's happy and quickly growing families onto my computer screen every day. The crazy thing is that you never hear about the sort of stuff I'm writing about...the process, the tries, the weird process of stopping birth control and hoping to defy odds and hit the bullseye each month. Online all you see are growing bellies and new babies and happy carefree new moms who just had to have sex once unprotected and they're pregnant.

I know I am being a little dramatic about the whole thing here...I have after all admitted that I am feeling extremely hormonal so my apologies. I know that I will get pregnant and that this was only our first time trying and that we weren't even expecting to get pregnant this month

I just didn't know I would care this much...

XOXO

Lisa

...Shooting with No Safety

This was the first month that we have entered the "trying" stage of getting pregnant. I am off my birth control and have been for a month and we had our first attempt.



So we've been having sex every other day and using my phone app to track my ovulation (which I'm sure is 100% accurate lol). Anyway, I don't expect anything to happen in the first month, after all sometimes it takes several months to even be able to get pregnant after stopping BC. I don't feel pregnant...although my body has always been kinda a mystery ever since my first period came so I am not exactly an expert on my own reproductive system.

Matt is just about as anxious as I am to get knocked up. He is a very impatient guy and he keeps talking about "when we have kids..". I am pretty impatient too so if we get pregnant this month I will feel so happy to be getting into the nitty gritty of it. In the meantime Matt is really enjoying my enthusiasm to bone, not like I'm not always enthusiastic but the other day we were in a little fight and even mad at him I insisted we do it. It was kinda hot. There might be something to the whole Russian roulette method of having sex...I almost can't believe this is what sex was like for women for thousands and millions of years before birth control...maybe we just messed things up with the invention of birth control.

just a thought...

XOXO

Lisa