Tag Archives: pregnancy

How I found out I was pregnant

18 Sep

 

{not my test – pics are at home – but it looked exactly like that}

I am currently 11 weeks 2 days. If you count back from today, that means I technically got pregnant just a few weeks after we got back from Alaska. As in a few weeks after we started trying to get pregnant.

You may remember this post from soon after our Alaska trip, where I said that getting pregnant could happen anytime, or it could take a while.

I was prepared for it to take a while. 3 months, 6 months, 1 year — I was ready to wait on God in faith. Besides, I didn’t think the odds were in my favor. I had been on birth control for over five years. My cycles were “irregular” (45 days long instead of 28) so I had only had 2 full cycles since going off birth control. And I had just trained for and run a full marathon – who knew if that would affect things?

During the ‘two week window’ of waiting to take a home pregnancy test, I started to feel cramping in my lower abdomen, different than any period cramping I’d had before.

‘Maybe?’ I thought but didn’t want to get my hopes up. I mean, who gets pregnant on the first try? I started researching pregnancy symptoms at work but God convicted me during a morning quiet time that I wasn’t trusting Him but trying to figure things out on my own. So I stopped researching and told the Lord that I would be content in not knowing.

Those two weeks ticked off day by (slowly moving) day and finally it was the day I was supposed to get my period. By the time I got home from work, it still hadn’t appeared and I had the thought that I could take a pregnancy test and just find out right then. But my plan had been to take it the next morning so I told God that I was trusting Him and would wait.

I slept horribly that night, not just because I was excited and nervous but also because I felt awful. I let the dogs out in the middle of the night because Charlie was whining and felt like I was going to puke. I was leaning more and more toward the idea of me being pregnant.

Morning dawned and I immediately got up and went into the bathroom, where I had set out everything the night before: the pregnancy test, a plastic cup (I was nervous that I wouldn’t pee on the stick right so I opted to do the dip method, which the test instructions said was fine), my phone (for the timer), and the camera. I did my thing, dipped the test, laid it flat, turned on the timer, and walked out of the bathroom. I didn’t want to sit there agonizing over the test.

When the 3 minutes were up, I announced to the dogs, “Moment of truth,” and walked back into the bathroom. The lines could not have been more clear.

I was pregnant.

Having dreamt of that moment for so many months (since I’ve had baby fever for a while), I have to say that it was rather anticlimactic compared to what I expected*. I had expected to scream and jump up and down in delight but my reaction was more of a subdued joy. I realized that I had been more certain of being pregnant than I had wanted to admit to myself before that moment. Seeing that result on the test was more of a validation of what I already knew, rather than a surprise – more like, “I knew it!” than “OMG! I can’t believe I’m pregnant!!!!!”

And Travis was out of town on a work trip. Since I wanted to tell him in person, I was the only one who knew for over a day. Those 24 hours felt very surreal.

Travis had known that I was going to take a pregnancy test while he was gone and when he got home, I gave him a little pair of hockey skate baby booties (the ones in our announcement picture). He didn’t realize what they were at first but when I pulled out the positive pregnancy test and showed him that, he deciphered the code (they print it right on the stick), then realized what the booties were and got really excited. We’re having a baby!

More to come…

*I don’t mean to minimize the specialness of the moment, and of course I was very excited and happy. This was just my personal reaction to the situation.

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Waiting with My Heart Exposed

19 Jul

One more post before resuming the posts about our trip to Alaska…

So I’ve mentioned before that I went off birth control and we are trying to get pregnant this year…

Now that the marathon is over, it could happen anytime.

OR it could take a while.

It’s that limbo, that waiting and not knowing, that excitement and anticipation and longing and hoping and wanting it to happen right now so I can start decorating the nursery already…

That’s hard.

I already see that whether the road to pregnancy is long or short, it will be difficult. I can be a tad impatient about big things like this. Which is why looking for houses in Minnesota “just cuz” is dangerous for me. I am constantly tempted to see something I love and panic because we need to get our house on the market and sell it NOW so we can buy that house before someone else buys it first! 

God’s faithfulness reminds me to take a step back and breathe. Remember Truth.

“This God, his way is perfect – the word of the LORD proves true.”

When I was involved in Campus Outreach in college, a common phrase we girls used when talking about boys and dating/marriage was “Guard your heart.” And I got to thinking this morning what that actually means, and how it applies to this situation too. Here are my thoughts:

“Guard your heart” is a call to live in the moment. Instead of waiting for That Day When, you embrace the reality of This Day Now. You offer God the sacrifice of thanksgiving for this day being what it is, right now, and deem it Enough.

In Psalm 118, the psalmist writes, “This is the LORD’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” I don’t think that those two verses occurring together is a coincidence. You could rephrase it: “This day is the LORD’s doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. Let us rejoice and be glad in his creation of this moment.”

Yes, sometimes it feels like you have to search high and low for the things to be thankful for. But they’re there. And the more we train ourselves to look for them, the more we see.

Faith is not easily won. It is fought for. But we can count it all joy, for the glory to be revealed far surpasses the fight.

So I will not dampen my excitement, or pour myself into something else to be distracted from my heart’s desires. I will sit at the foot of the throne, heart exposed, waiting for God’s faithfulness to prove true, however and whenever.

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And we’re off!

29 Mar

Travis and I are heading out this morning to go visit my oldest brother Jeremy and sister-in-law Jen, and their little baby J.

Who is adorable, might I add:

My parents are coming down too and they’re going to pick us up from the St. Louis airport (which was considerably cheaper than flying directly into Evansville, where J&J&J live).

I’m blessed to have an awesome family – Jen is the one in the pink sitting next to me and Jeremy is behind her in green.

Since Travis and I have been married almost 5 years and I’m one of the few of my friends left without kids, whenever I mention babies or am around newborns, people tell me “You’re going to catch the fever!” I usually just smile and nod. But what I really want to say is that I have already caught the fever and as of last Sunday, am officially done with birth control. My doctor said I should give myself 3 months without BC before we start trying to get pregnant, and since we want to start trying pretty much right after we get back from our Alaska trip on July 6ish, 3 months ended up being now. So there’s that! I am very excited about the next stage of life…

But I have 26.2 miles to run first!

Have a great weekend friends!

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Teen Pregnancy vs. Sperm Donation

24 Jun

With all the brouhaha going around lately about teen pregnancy because of the supposed pact in Gloucester, MA between 15- and 16-year-old girls to all get pregnant and raise their kids together, I felt like I needed to comment.

The Los Angeles Times has an article on this on their website by Kay Hymowitz (find it here). She “says the Gloucester teen pregnancy story reveals a change in attitudes toward the family. Kerry Howley counters that we need to stop thinking a baby is the cure to an empty life” (taken from the subheader). While I think both women make interesting points, I will make my own in this blog (inspired by their points and other media I’ve read about this).

The media is saying that the reason these teen girls created this pregnancy pact was because they wanted to forge an identity for themselves. They wanted to bond through motherhood. Jamie Lynn Spears made teen motherhood not only acceptable but appealing.

That may be true–Jamie Lynn isn’t a great role model. What ever happened to the Scarlet Letter? But there are plenty of other women out there–in their 30s and 40s no less!–who aren’t good role models either.

They publicly, purposefully, and expensively forego marriage and commitment (or just don’t have the patience to wait for it) to get artificially inseminated by some guy they never met–and will probably never meet–just to have a child who will be raised by a single parent. Imagine if you grew up knowing you were just a result of a random sperm from a petri dish inserted into a your mom’s uterus.

Some women want to be a mother so badly (and so selfishly) that they are willing to pay tons of money and to cheat their child out of a father just so they can assuage their desire. In my opinion, these women should not be mothers. To be a good parent, you have to be selfless. You have to be willing to give up your career, your expensive purses and shoes, your free time, if the need be. So many parents today want kids but also want to live their lives like nothing had changed–they just added a kid, no big deal. (Hence all the rich families who have full-time nannies while the mom is out shopping and getting pedicures all day–they do exist. I have friends who work for them!) Um, life CHANGES when you have kids. If you don’t want your life to change, then don’t have any!!

My whole point is, if these teen girls did indeed create a pregnancy pact, it is quite possible that they did so so because they thought motherhood looked glamorous and trendy. Or maybe they thought their life would be better if they were mothers. But as evidenced by sperm banks and artifical insemination (and SATC), many other older women think the same and you don’t see them getting scraped all over the media. If the issue is about financial stability, then I concede–older women are in a financially better position to be single mothers than teen girls. But if the issue is kids being raised without fathers or women seeking fulfillment through motherhood, no matter what the means, then those teens girls are no worse than a 30-year-old woman, unmarried, who wants to be a mother so badly that she pays for some sperm.

Motherhood is a precious gift from God, just like virginity is. We should respect it and use it correctly, in the way that God intended. That way is a man and a woman who are married, monogamous, and living together, who raise their children up in the ways of the Lord. These teen girls don’t need more sex education. They don’t even need more information about abstinence and the consequences–emotionally, physically, economically–of getting pregnant. They need Jesus. They need the One who really will satisfy their desires and fulfill their empty life. A baby is not the answer and never will be.

Disclaimer: This is in no way intended to be hurtful or derogatory to those mothers (and their children) who are widows. If that is you, I bet you wish your child could grow up with a father. They are a crucial element in a family but sometimes God chooses a different path. My condolences.

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