Baby belly

I haven't posted in so long and it's because so many things have changed and happened!

We found out in December that we were expecting our second baby and we have been over the moon ever since! But there is a whole lot of information to tell about that so here we go:

 When Emilia was very nearly one, we knew that that year we wanted to start trying again for our second baby. We knew in order to do that the being closer to family would end up being very important. So over the course of a few weeks we decided to move our entire lives back to my hometown. That was a huge step in preparing ourselves mentally for a second baby.

Once we got settled back into our small hometown, we started in on the pre-trying to conceive testing and blood work to make sure that we were in the best physical place we could be before embarking on another journey of having a baby. If you followed our story you know that us getting pregnant the first time was not an easy journey or experience. So the first step was me getting into the best physical health that I possibly could and it took a long time! I started making my health a priority six weeks after the birth of our first child and worked on it religiously. Once I was really into my goal weight range and physical well-being, we met with my doctor for routine testing and not so routine testing.

Something that we haven't really mentioned to anyone outside of our immediate family, is that in the past few years I've had lots of cervical cancer tests because it runs in my family and I have questionable cells. So we knew we needed to get that checked on before we could proceed. Well the tests that came back were not only abnormal but had progressed. Which led us into a very scary time thinking that I may be continuing in the footsteps of the women in my family and had started to develop cervical cancer.  This led to our trying to conceive plan being put off and instead meant that cervical and uterine biopsies had to be performed. If you've ever had those kind of biopsies you know that they are very uncomfortable and have lots of cramping!

Anyway long story short, the results came back non-cancerous and instead I have chronic cellular inflammation. Which makes my cells look cancerous but they are not! Yay me!

So our journey to trying to conceive was back on! December 15th at about noon, I took a pregnancy test and honestly, I completely forgot about it while Em and I ate lunch. About 45 minutes later I remembered and went to go check. Immediately I saw a faint line. My initial reaction was that it was probably an evap line due to the test being way over it's time limit. So I took another cheap test. And then a first response plus or minus. And then a digital. All of them were positive!! I was in complete shock that we had gotten pregnant on our own and In a pretty short time period.

That night I told my sweetheart. When we first started trying to get pregnant, hy's beard was getting completely out of control. And if you know us, we like to make fun bets between us. So we made a bet that when I got pregnant he would finally shave off that crazy beard. Luckily (magically, heavenly sent intuition?) I decided to buy Hy a new beard trimmer and leather bag for Christmas. It had come a few days before from Amazon and was all wrapped. So that night we sat down and I told him that he got to open one Christmas present early. And I had him open the beard trimmer. At first he was a little hesitant because it wasn't Christmas yet! I basically told him that he had to be quiet and open it anyway. He opened it and loved it immediately and then I told him "you know what this means right?  He was so surprised and asked "Did you take a test today?!!"  We laughed and hugged and cried. It was completely wonderful.

Our excitement was a little short-lived because four days later I started to have severe cramps and some bleeding. We immediately made an emergency doctors appointment and got in with the doctor that I love who did all of my biopsies and is now my OB. We did a beta and an internal ultrasound. I was only four weeks and one day so there was nothing to be seen except for lots of fluid behind my ovaries. Our doctor warned us that that amount of fluid behind my ovaries was a really large indicator of an ectopic pregnancy and that we needed to prepare ourselves. We left that appointment feeling completely deflated and scared. My beta that Friday was 233 and I was scheduled for a repeat that Sunday with another internal ultrasound scheduled for that Monday. We really needed my beta numbers to double to have any hope of it being a viable pregnancy because in an ectopic pregnancy the numbers grow but not in the way that they should. The results came back on Sunday late afternoon and were 503!! We finally felt like we had a little hope again! We went to the appointment on Monday morning not really knowing what to expect. Our dr came in and wasnt really sure what we were going to see or if we were going to need the methotrexate shot (it's a low dose of chemo meant to disintegrate ectopic pregnancies). He really liked my beta numbers and agreed to do another ultrasound. And there in the perfect spot was a gestational sac. Nothing else but it was in the perfect spot. We were completely overjoyed and act topic was completely ruled out! All of the fluid behind my ovaries was agreed to be caused by my chronic cellular inflammation!

We had a few little more scares with bleeding around seven weeks, but with a few days of bedrest that all went away. At eight weeks we went in for a heartbeat confirming ultrasound and we saw a beautiful and healthy little baby!!

I did deal with some morning sickness and hormone headaches but nothing in comparison to Em's pregnancy!!

We decided really early on that we were not going to find out the gender and people think we are kind of crazy! When you're in infertility treatment there are so little surprises because everything about this pregnancy was completely different we decided to just go with it! so here I am 31 weeks and four days along and less than two months until we meet our little one!

We have so much going on right now and so many things that are coming up, but we are taking it all in stride and I will do another update (hopefully soon) with lots of pictures. But for now, we are so thrilled and Em HAS to talk to "her baby" several times a day. We are so in love with our little family.