Pregnancy Posts, Weeks 4-7 v. 1

Let the pregnancy journal begin!

As you may remember from when I was pregnant with Vander, I did a weekly blog post about my pregnancy. In a very conscious effort to make things as even as possible between my kids I will be doing weekly posts again this time. Also, I feel it is really helpful for me to take some time to sit down and really think about my pregnancy and bond with little baby #2!

I ended up turning my posts from my pregnancy with Vander into a photobook, which I have definitely pulled out this pregnancy to refer back to my thoughts and symptoms and belly size.

As a note, the timing for my posts describe how many weeks pregnant I was during that week, for example, my week 13 post describes days 13 weeks 0 days through 13 weeks 6 days. 

Weeks 4-5

As I mentioned a little in our announcement post, we weren’t really trying to have a baby quite yet, just apparently NOT trying hard enough. The most ironic part when we first thought we were pregnant was that it all happened the day before my boss was saying/joking that abstinence is the best policy… so that memo came a little too late! For my job we have a very distinct busy season and ever since I started we have all joked that the one rule is to not have a baby during busy season. We were planning to start trying in August, which would be a May baby, as in after the Winter tax season and Q1 busy season. Apparently there were other plans. I realized about a week after it happened that maybe that accidental timing wasn’t going to work out so well for not getting pregnant… darn hormones!

Our initial due date was March 12, which is Dylan’s birthday (among other people who I know well…), but I definitely took that as a sign that this pregnancy was meant to be. While I am an advocate of not sharing a birthday, I thought it was very exciting for the due date to be Dylan’s birthday. So for these first couple weeks we went with that as our due date.

My first signs were the same weird cramps I had with Vander at about three weeks (one week after conception), becoming overly nauseous at gross things, having really vivid and weird dreams, getting very fatigued already and peeing more.

I took my first test the day I expected Aunt Flow to show up, and didn’t get anything. So we waited a couple more days, July 5^th, and got our positive test! Vander was napping and Dylan knew I was testing, so I ran out and told him. We went out to breakfast the next week just the two of us, after we dropped off Vander at daycare, since we went out to breakfast when we first found out about being pregnant the first time. It was really fun and cute to continue the tradition J

We told our immediate families, and everyone was obviously very excited!

Week 6

Not too much going on at the beginning. I felt like I was starting to get fat already. The long lived stage of being hungry, but not wanting to eat anything already started. I did have my first waffles of the pregnancy this week. (I lived off of waffles with Vander). I also had a lot of headaches the first couple weeks, which was really annoying!

Week 7 (v1)

Due to my fatigue, which you really don’t get to have when you already have a toddler, I figured out that I would get up with Vander at like 6am, then get Dylan up at 7am, when I would normally get him up, but instead of staying up I would just go back to sleep for another hour. Genius! I am generally a morning person, so this isn’t usually an issue for me, but goodness it was SO NICE to get back to bed.

We had our first ultrasound this week! It was such a relief to get to see the baby and see the baby existing! My mom had a miscarriage and the cells had just never really come together to form a baby, so seeing the baby made me feel so much better! I had definitely been walking on eggshells about the whole pregnancy. Our due date did change from 3/12, which was based on my last period, to 3/20, based on the baby measuring about 8 days behind the 3/12 date. The doctor wasn’t concerned at all and said it was likely due to a combination of late ovulation and late implanation. Which definitely makes sense since I was having inconsistent cycles and considering it took a couple more days to get our positive pregnancy test in the first place. Given that Vander was very ready a week early, I still expect her to make her arrival around Dylan’s birthday. The heartbeat was good at 123. She was smaller than Vander was when we first saw him, but he was almost 9 weeks and she was only 6 weeks and 3 days, and 3 weeks makes a big difference! We could see Vander’s limbs at this point and they weren't really developed yet for this ultrasound. 

In case you hadn't noticed, we are referring to the baby as a girl. I think it is a combination of wishful thinking an hopefully some intuition, but either way it is a lot easier having a gender to refer to than just "it" or "the baby". 

It was great to see my doctor again! She is just so nice. I am just annoyed at having to redo a week! I am sure I will get over it soon enough and adjust to the new timing just fine. 

All of my tests came back good, so that is one less thing to worry about. It may be less obvious via blog, but in reality I was really stressed about everything going well. I have had too many recent stories of people I know having miscarriages and it just makes me nervous! Everything went so smoothly with Vander last time that I fully expect this pregnancy to have something more complicated come up. 

On an unrelated note, it is really difficult to meal plan for a crazy pregnant lady! I never know what I want and it changes all the time. 

I will post the next couple weeks shortly! Hopefully my fatigue is going to abate eventually and I will have energy to blog again!