Baby J, the third edition

written January 30th

We had finally gotten in to a real groove with two kids.  The girls have both become relatively easy to care for, are a lot of fun, and for the most part we can get out of the house pretty easily.  So what is any normal sane person supposed to do?  Decide to have another baby of course.  :o)

Now to fully understand the beginning of this pregnancy, a little background information is necessary.  Back in October, a few days before Halloween, I found out I was pregnant.  The whole situation was a little weird with some questionable cheap test sticks and dates that didn't match up.  But a First Response Early Reader test came up positive without any question so we started celebrating.  One week later when I got out of bed, there was bright red blood.

It ended up being a chemical pregnancy.  A chemical pregnancy is a miscarriage before anything can be seen in the uterus.  Essentially, a fertilized egg implants into the uterus, but for whatever reason does not continue to grow, therefore the only evidence that the woman was ever pregnant was the chemical reaction that caused the pregnancy test to turn positive.  I was confused and devastated.  I wasn't sure how to feel.  I kept trying to reason with myself that I had only been 'pregnant' a week.  How could I have been so attached?  But my friend said it best, you fall in love the minute that second line appears.  I was surprised by how much it hurt, and I definitely spent a few days in tears.

We debated waiting a bit to try again, but ultimately I decided that would make it even harder on me.  I didn't feel like I had lost a baby.  I hadn't really begun to picture what our third baby would be like.  What life would be like.  But I absolutely mourned the loss of the pregnancy.  And I felt like being pregnant again would help ease the pain.  Because I generally have irregular cycles, I was using ovulation strips, and was surprised when they came up positive just two weeks after my loss.  It was going to be my shortest cycle to date.

Fast forward eleven days later.  I had been emotional and irrational and just not feeling great.  But I attributed most of that to eating crap food for a bit because of Thanksgiving.  I've learned how much food can affect my body and how I feel thanks to the Whole30.  I swore that was the cause.  But the morning of December 1st I got antsy and took a pregnancy test.  It was SO faint.  I thought maybe it was an evaporation line, or that I was going to go through another chemical pregnancy.  I said nothing to Christopher, and waited until the next morning to take another test.  This one was again faint, but definitely darker than the day before.  I dipped a more expensive test, and a digital test, and they both came up positive.  I thought I would be elated, but truthfully I was just numb.  I couldn't find an ounce of excitement because I was instantly terrified.

After letting it sink in a bit, I woke Christopher up.  Mostly because I wanted his butt out of bed to help me make the girls breakfast, but just before I went back to tend to the littles, I dropped a 'by the way, I'm pregnant.'  He was happy.  And said that he thought I was based on the way I had been acting, but hey.

In all honesty it took a couple of weeks before I started to feel excited.  Once I passed my loss date, and especially after the first ultrasound, I began to relax a bit.  I also kept taking pregnancy tests like a crazy person.  Watching the line get darker and darker was just so comforting.  With the chemical, granted I didn't take near as many tests, but the line just never got darker.  With this pregnancy when the test line was finally darker than the control line, I stopped being such a freak with the tests.  :o)

I'm pretty sure that is crazy all wrapped up in a jpeg there.  Yes I even used ovulation tests as pregnancy tests because I ran out of cheapies and I only had so many of the 'nice' tests and you can turn an ovulation predictor test positive when you're pregnant.  Completely unnecessary to take all those tests, but they helped calm my nerves so whatever.

We wanted to hold off telling people, partly because of the previous loss, and mostly because we wanted to protect the girls (and keep the girls from telling EVERYONE).  But that plan was quickly ruined the morning after I told Christopher.  I received the following text from my sister:

I sent a screen shot to Chris with a 'what the hell am I supposed to do with this?!?!?'  I ended up telling her.  Then two weeks later I was with my mom when my doctor's office had to call me to reschedule my first appointment.  The entire scenario is detailed in one of my weekly posts (which I will get to posting in a bit) but she figured me out too.

And I know several other people have.  They haven't directly asked me, but I hear several people have asked girls that do know!  One guess was because I haven't been blogging.  Yes, I do kind of crash in the evenings, but honestly for a while I didn't know what to blog about or was too lazy to edit pictures.  So really the pregnancy wasn't the only thing killing my blog.  Nah, instagram did that too.  :o)

edited to add: I think it's funny that so many people were tipped off because of the portable ultrasound comment!  Yes, we totally used it to peek at the baby, but the truth is Chris often brings it home to practice on my joints, and that particular weekend he had it to look at a friend's wrist.  Too funny.

So to bring this long winded up and down post to a close, baby (GIRL!!!) number three is on the way and we are THRILLED.  2015 is seriously going to be quite the year.  If we make it to 2016 alive I'll count it a success.  But I'm certainly excited for the crazy ride!