I'm Pregnant! + First Trimester Recap

Well, it's true, and I'm so glad I finally get to share it loud and proud! Our family will be growing by another little one this coming July. We are so excited...and I'm so excited to be entering the second trimester already. Yay!

As I've mentioned on here countless times, we were quite open to more children and although we had learned a new NFP method after Zoe was born, it was kind of hard to put it into practice and we didn't really care so...we weren't really trying but we definitely weren't preventing anything, either. I was just coming off of breastfeeding and had really hoped that doing so would help me lose some stubborn weight I had been holding onto since my pregnancy with Zoe. Ideally, I would've gotten to a better place with my weight before we got pregnant but since we weren't trying too hard not to get pregnant, God had other plans ;)

I think I'll share some "secret posts" I had typed up soon after I found out just for fun that go into more detail of the early days of pregnancy. In short, I took THREE tests that came back negative on different days before I saw that little plus sign on the fourth, so I was really surprised to say the least. We told our families right before Zoe's birthday on November 7th because I really don't like keeping secrets and always feel like if something were to happen with the pregnancy, I'd be talking to our families about it anyways so what's the harm in sharing sooner rather than later.

{Kirleigh took notice early and was always there to cuddle}

The first few weeks were that pretty uneventful stage where I wasn't really feeling sick yet...so I kept questioning if there was in fact a baby in there at all. But soon enough, I started to feel the rush of fatigue, nausea, and food aversions just like with my first pregnancy. It was all so similar and I felt like such a pro knowing what to expect and what my body was doing.

Then, the Monday night before Thanksgiving, I noticed some bleeding. It wasn't anything super crazy but it was definitely enough to be shocking; I hadn't had ANY spotting or bleeding during my first pregnancy. Zoe was already in bed for the night, so we had to call Landon's parents over to watch her while we went to the ER because I thought for sure I had miscarried. Well...we went to an emergency care center. Not an actually hospital ER which was a dumb move on our part because the doctor, while very nice and clearly experienced in other areas, wasn't as helpful and reassuring as we had hoped. I thought for sure I'd get an ultrasound but instead they wanted to do a urine sample to 1. make sure I was really pregnant and 2. see if it had been caused by a UTI (um, nope!). When the test equivalent of the one I had taken a month early came back letting me know yup, I'm pregnant!, they STILL wouldn't do an ultrasound to check the baby. Instead it was time to check my hCG levels via blood which would have been fine I suppose...if they had a lab right there. But they didn't. So we had to wait hours for it to be transported back and forth to an actual hospital with an actual lab to get our results. By this point I still didn't know what to think and I was too tired to stay awake waiting. Sometime around 1 AM they came back with the results: surprisingly high hCG levels, which was a good sign. Luckily, I had a scheduled appointment with my OB the next day. She was shocked they didn't give me an ultrasound and that they made us do a urine test. We were also reprimanded for going to a fake ER instead of the one in our hospital where an actual on call OB would have been there to perform an ultrasound. We learned our lesson!--and the baby was there, heartbeat and all. That moment with Landon and our OB seeing our baby for the first time was about 1000% times better than the first time we saw Zoe via ultrasound when the technician had zero cares and we were over here, first time parents, as excited as could be.

From that point on, things remained uneventful for a good week or two. Then Zoe and I got hand, foot, and mouth disease which was super fun. We were betterish by Christmas and most of my nausea and food aversions were gone so I could eat normal fun Christmas things. Hashtag priorities.

{A HA-YUGE bump in comparison to week 14 round 1, dirty mirror and all. Keeping it real, folks.}

Since then, things have been on the upswing. It's way different this time around, chasing after a toddler all day instead of taking tons of naps and lying around. It felt like a miracle when I went real, full blown grocery shopping last week for the first time and was able to get vegetables and eggs without gagging. Before then, I had been walking into the store with Zoe and putting literally whatever I could stomach into the cart...which was a whole lot of random junk food.

I'm looking forward to the second trimester and all that it has to offer (energy maybe?) and of course for the gender ultrasound which we'll be having the day after Valentine's Day! We're already discussing names--listening to the Fountains of Carrots podcast episode with Kate from Sancta Nomina REALLY got my juices flowing (sidenote: I'm totally into grandma names/British grandma names but Landon's not soooo...) and we've even already agreed on a few we like. This time around we're planning on keeping the name a secret from everyone until he or she is born so we can have a little something for ourselves :)

One last note: I feel like the baby is already sitting super low on me. My bump is crazy noticeable already and it definitely is not defying gravity. And when I sit in a chair, I can already feel my stomach in the way like last time but it wasn't this early. Am I going crazy? I don't know but I'm a little nervous about it already being so low! Even when we got an ultrasound last week, the heartbeat was found super low on me. Goodness!

If you have any fun baby name suggestions, please let me know! I'm all about the unique and Catholic baby name ;)