Pregnancy Diary: The Beginning

4 weeks

Well, there we have it…today we found out we are pregnant…utterly, totally bizarre! It feels like such a journey all in the space of one month which is no time at all but I promise you I’ve had all the emotions. Nick and I had always said we’d try again when Maggie reached a year old but I hadn’t really anticipated that would come around like the speed of light, not to mention only feeling like myself again when I hit 9 months postpartum. I was really enjoying feeling normal again! My cycle came back, my body didn’t feel exactly the same but much more like I remembered it and the baby brain seemed to lift and life was less foggy. Suddenly I remembered what normality was and I didn’t really want to say goodbye to it.

Just before her birthday we had our anniversary dinner and had a little chinwag about our plan of action. I was leaning towards giving it a little longer and Nick was ok with that. It’s such a weird decision to make because it could take months and months and yet you need to be prepared for it to happen straight away. Ironically, there isn’t really a lot you can plan when it comes to family planning. I also had a lot of worries about work, wondering how I would manage to keep on earning when the juggle feels oh so real even now and how could I forget how useless I’d been in my first trimester with Maggie, nausea to the max, so much so that sometimes I feared to open my mouth even to speak and tiredness to the point of 3 hour daily naps and 8.30am lie ins.

Fast forward a month and we chatted again and I came to realise that all the reasons I wanted to wait were essentially selfish. Getting some more work projects finished, enjoying my body feeling normal, not wanting to feel deathly sick again are fair enough but we knew we wanted more kids and I’d still have the same list of worries even in a years time so we resolved to stop using contraception whilst not launching ourselves into actively trying and tracking my cycle and all that stressful stuff. Basically ‘not, not trying’. I said that we could just leave it up to God and it was probably a good thing to start the process when my heart hadn’t yet caught up with my head as in my experience it always ends up following eventually and who knows how long the process could take to make a little person.The irony is that the first evening we decided to ‘not, not try’ was the evening we got pregnant!

I was tired that weekend from two late nights and a busy work week…oh and the joy of never having a lie in because toddlers don’t really do lie ins. When I get tired, it’s usually accompanied by a giant wave of overwhelm. I’d already been finding it hard to adapt my work to Maggie napping less during the day and always feeling like I’m treading water and then suddenly thinking about adding another baby into the mix sent me into a spin. I word vomited all of this onto Nick and my prayer gals and I could hear how totally negative I sounded. It didn’t sound like me at all. I asked them all to pray for a softer heart and a willingness to trust God. Nick said we could revisit the whole getting pregnant thing again in a while but I knew I just needed to step out in faith. God had sustained us and provided thus far so why was I doubting he would now. I was already preggers!

God sometimes keeps us hanging and sometimes he moves comically fast. A few days later I was working in a cafe and I saw a couple come in with their very new, squishy baby and I couldn’t stop staring and remembering our own special newborn bubble with Maggie. I laughed as I watched him feed her lunch as she tried to breast feed their little bubba. I think I forget all the little things. Suddenly I found myself walking back through the park looking longingly at all the prams with little bubbas nestled inside. What on earth was happening?? A few days ago I was freaking out and all of a sudden I was kind of broody! Well that was an answer to prayer.

I’m pretty in tune with my body in general so even though it was super early I had a lot of things that made me wonder if I might be. Firstly this sounds crazy but I’m one of those freaky people that can feel when they ovulate, I even know which side it’s coming from! The fateful night this new life began was different and it was kind of uncomfortable right through the night but I had a talking to myself because that would be ridiculous, right?! All the while I was feeling of our baby’s very first moments.

Other delights included a dodgy tummy that constantly felt a bit like I’d eaten something I shouldn’t. I was waking up gasping for water and spontaneously weeping a few tears out of nowhere. I was like a fiery furnace in bed at night which Nick commented on because he was gradually edging away from me and out of the duvet. I felt really bloated after eating (that rarely happens since changing my diet three years ago) and I was generally pretty run down with random asthma outbursts in the middle of the night. My skin and hair were instantly much greasier (aaahh pregnancy skin how I’ve missed you). I even started to feel the tiniest sciatica and SPD twinges which really made me suspicious. How totally crazy are hormones eh?! Most of these things only got my wondering because I’ve been pregnant twice before so you start to gage some of the less obvious signs, bearing in mind all of these were pre-4 weeks!

As soon as I wondered if I was, I realised I wanted to be pregnant. What a strange turn of events. It was fast approaching what should have been my period and I knew it would be easier to tell this time around as my cycles have been like clockwork. I am a robot, that is correct! I felt a little cramping one night and then the next morning I spied something which I won’t go into on here because TMI (something I have since checked out and realised is totally normal) but I just assumed that my period must be starting and that was that. My heart sank and I told Nick that it had made me realise how much I did want another baby. I watched other little people with siblings as I walked and felt a sense of longing. Nick said in that case we’d actually start trying.

Days passed and my period didn’t actually show up and I thought it was a legitimate time to take a test. I mentioned it to Nick and he couldn’t believe I hadn’t said anything because he’d also wondered if I was pregnant. I guess I’d been scared to admit it to myself, to admit that I wanted to be pregnant and then be faced with it not being the case. I was shot back to memories of trying for a baby post miscarriage and remembered with a yucky clarity just how gruelling it feels even when you’re not that far into the journey. Each negative pregnancy test is hard to take.

I bought those classy Tesco own pregnancy tests, and stared at them having put Maggie down for her nap. I’m not sure I wanted to know but Nick wasn’t going to let me get away with that. So I did one…and another…because I never trust just one and…we’re pregnant! What a surreal thing to be saying after no time at all. We’re both excited and scared all at the same time. Our third baby! Maggie is now an older sister! I’m not sure I can compute it all. Excitement is also tainted slightly by thoughts of another miscarriage. I don’t feel anywhere near as anxious as I did with Maggie but there’s still a little fear because the first trimester is just so fragile. I’m painfully aware of the statistics and so for everything to be fine seems like a miracle but hopefully I will be able to stay calm with lots of prayers. At the end of the day whether this baby lives has already been decided so worrying isn’t going to help or change that.

So here I am feeling like it’s been the strangest day and feeling like a ticking time bomb. When will I start feeling sick and tired? Last time it was around 6 weeks in which case I better make the most of feeling well for the next week and a half!