HOW FAR ALONG: 20 weeks 6 days! Can't believe I am over halfway through my pregnancy!
SIZE OF BABY: A banana WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO: Took one last final vacation with just me and my hubby. We had our anatomy scan where we saw baby boy move around like crazy. He is measuring big, weighing more than normal and longer than normal. Everything looked good according to the doc and hes progressing as he should! EXERCISE: None, zip, zero, nada. BODY CHANGES: The bump is starting to really sprout and rise higher than it has been. SLEEP: Sleeping is still difficult and from where I try to only lay on my left and right sides my hips ache so bad throughout the night. BEST MOMENT OF THE WEEK: Well the best moment was seeing him on the ultrasound but that was over a week ago now. Now that I can feel him kick that's my favorite. Any time I'm worried I'll go fill my sweet tooth craving and shortly after he will go crazy with his kicks. WORST MOMENT: I think just the general anxiety that never seems to go away. UGH! FOOD CRAVINGS: Pancakes! SYMPTOMS: Round ligament pain is real this past week. WHAT'S GOING ON WITH BABY: A white, creamy substance called vernix caseosa that protects the skin from its aqueous environment has covered the baby. Sweat glands form. Starting now, immunities are being transferred from momma to Sawyer. NEXT APPOINTMENT: 23 weeks. TOTAL WEIGHT GAIN: The boost shakes have worked and I'm gaining weight like crazy now. In between appointments I had gained 5 pounds in 3 weeks. MATERNITY CLOTHES? Not officially needed just yet, although I still wear them because they are so comfortable! DIET: Ever since the doctor told me to gain weight I have been eating so bad and eat way too many sweets. Now that I know Sawyer is a big baby and doing just fine I told Bryan only one desert a week from here on out (we will see how long that lasts). MISS ANYTHING? Nope! ANYTHING MAKE YOU QUEASY OR SICK? Nope! GENDER: Boy! We are starting to work on his nursery this weekend!! HAPPY OR MOODY? Happy! This experience has been such a breeze as far as pregnancy symptoms go. I feel great!
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Bryan and I just got back from the most relaxing vacation we've probably ever been on. We went to one of our favorite cities, Charleston, South Carolina. We love everything about Charleston, from the city to the beaches, the food (and pralines), to the old southern history/architecture. I didn't even know "babymoon" was a thing until everyone started asking me where were going on this babymoon trip. Anyways, it's the same thing as a vacation and we wanted to take one last trip with just us two before the baby came. Luckily I am in my second trimester (which they say is the best time to go) and it's summer, so it was perfect timing. We stayed at the neatest little hotel right on the marsh, Shem Creek Inn. We watching the dolphins chase after the boats and could walk to multiple restaurants from our hotel. We were in love with this place and already talk about the next time we can go back. We were just a five minute drive to our favorite beach, Sullivans Island. Sullivans is nothing but locals and their many dogs running around on the beach, we love this! We always had the beach pretty much to ourselves which made it nice. We traveled to Folly and Isle of Palms a couple days but it was much more public and way too crowded for us this trip. We stuffed our faces with the best food. Charleston is known for their amazing southern dishes, seafood, and old fashioned candy. I hate wayyy to much but it was worth it! Baby Sawyer really enjoyed the virgin pina coladas and pralines- he would kick like crazy after each one. There was one point I was out in the ocean and a wave wiped me out unexpectedly. I stormed out of the ocean like a two year old thinking something might have happened. One virgin pina colada later he was kicking up a storm. We traveled downtown a few nights and wondered around the streets of Charleston. We checked out the famous Angel Oak Tree and visited some old historic sites. Out of the many trips I've made to Charleston this one was by far my favorite. I saw more of Charleston this trip than I've seen out of all the others. We sat on the beach and just talked about life this time next year. It's going to be crazy having a little boy running around but we can't wait. We are so thankful for these sweet and many blessings from God. We are excited to see what the future holds for us!
I wanted to share a little bit about my story without going into too much personal detail. I wrote about all of my experience from the beginning and didn’t leave anything out. I realized after reading it, it was way too long and way too personal for me to just share with anyone. However, I made a promise to God in the midst of my struggle if he would provide for me I would share how I grew in faith for him. So I rewrote this post and this time prayed for Gods assistance while writing. I have found that until you share your struggles, you don’t often hear the struggles of others. When I shared the news about our pregnancy on the blog I was a little hesitant but I received so many people reaching out thanking me and telling me about their own battles with pregnancy/infertility. Some people I knew and others I didn't. Regardless, I had no clue these people were going through a similar struggle until sharing my own story. It always helped me to be able to talk with people who knew what it was like and went through the something similar. To know you aren't alone and your feelings aren't just craziness never hurts too. About the time I realized something might be wrong I wasn't convinced it actually would be. I went to my doctor after several months of no period for a checkup to look into what might be going on with my body. I was told there was a possibility I could have poly cystic ovarian syndrome (along with a hundred other things) but that chances were low since I didn't fit the "normal" criteria. After multiple blood tests and an internal ultrasound where they found cysts all over my ovaries, it was confirmed, PCOS. For months (prior to being diagnosed with this) I assumed nothing was wrong and it was just my body trying to regulate, so when I actually found out there was indeed a problem I freaked out. I remember the doctor telling me "you caught this early so with the help of fertility meds you should hopefully be able to have a successful pregnancy; it might just take longer than we anticipated to get you pregnant." I remember being so mad, angry, and confused at first- although I thought once going on the fertility meds it would happen right away with their help (still not fully convinced I couldn't outdo this road block on my own). I prayed here and there about it but was honestly pretty upset; I didn't know why God was putting me through this. The first couple months I didn’t even ovulate with the help of the meds. I was taking seven medications a day; I was using ovulation strips, and getting blood drawn every 21 days to check for ovulation and hormone levels. When I realized it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought with the help of fertility meds I really panicked and wasn’t my normal self. I had a few things go on that didn’t help too. The fertility doctor I was referred to (which was the only one in our area) was a jerk. He had no sympathy and charged $200 for a ten minute session to tell me I had PCOS. I was beginning to get very stressed and overwhelmed. No joke when you feel like you are ready for a baby, want a baby, and then told by your doctor that you'll likely struggle getting pregnant... every month that you get a negative pregnancy test feels like 6 months (or it did for me anyway). I can't imagine the difficulty of those who went through several months/years trying to get pregnant. It tests your faith, your marriage, your sanity, your everything. By January I knew I wasn’t going to get through this by simply relying on myself and doctors. I started to change everything about what I had done/thought/relied on previously. Although I had always prayed about my situation I began to fully rely on God for support. Bryan and I refused to miss a single church service. We prayed every single day together. We asked the church to pray for us. Things that happened in my life started making so much more sense. I was meeting people randomly who would bring up a conversation about trusting God or a story similar to what I was going through. I realized these weren’t just out of a coincidence, this was 100% God talking to me through his people. I would pass a sign or read a daily devotion that was directly on point to what I was currently going through. Everything started to make sense and I realized in February after 6 months of being on fertility and a couple procedures to check on cysts and flush out my fallopian tubes, that after all this and still nothing.. God was putting us through this for a reason. The reason hit me; it was to get closer to him and closer to one another in our marriage. We needed that. I was closer to God more than I had ever been in my entire life. Bryan and I were closer in our marriage than we had ever been. Although we struggled through the process we were getting along better than ever. These are the two biggest things in my life and yet I wasn’t near where I needed to be with either of them. I told Bryan in February that we can’t force this any longer. I told him as much as I would have wished pregnancy would have just happened for us, I understood why it didn’t. God put us through this struggle to get to where we should have been all this time. I knew if it weren’t for our struggle, we would have never drawn closer to him and closer to one another in marriage. Although you never, ever, understand why you are going through a struggle during that moment of time, it is true what they say, once you reach the top of your mountain it will all make so much sense, and it did just that for us. The next month on March 30th I found out I was pregnant before starting my last and final rounds of fertility meds before being referred to Asheville for IUI treatments. I was in shock and overwhelmed with happiness. After months of negative pregnancy tests, I always wondered what it would be like to actually get a positive one and how I would react. I definitely did not expect it and collapsed to the floor when I happened to look down and see the “Pregnant” read on the digital test. It was a feeling I will never forget. I was laying there on the bathroom floor just praising God for his goodness and thanking all those who had been placed in my life and prayed for us. God doesn’t give you what you want, he gives you what you need and when you need it.
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