Van is crawling all over the house and pulling himself up on everything he can. He's so loving and sweet. Quick to laugh and he "talks" quite a bit. Nothing purposeful yet, but there are lots of mamama's and dadada's. I have never been so in love in my entire life. Here are a few more recent photos (recent being the past few months - clearly I need to download photos from my phone, but since it's almost 3 am, I'll do that another day):
Wow, I look really tired in the photo above. It is amazing how you learn to survive on little sleep. Although at this point, his bedtime is roughly from 7:30 - 7:00, so a big part of it is the insomnia that I've battled the past few years. I also have pregnancy insomnia again. Yep, I'm pregnant.
This is actually the second time I've been pregnant since Van was born. It took us 9 months to conceive him. Literally the 2nd time Steve and I had sex after he was born, I got pregnant (and yes I was breastfeeding, but my supply was never enough and I had to supplement). Van was only 3 months old and I was going to have 2 babies less than a year apart. In fact, both Van and the new baby would have had their first Easter at the same time. If you had told me last year, at 9 months pregnant, that at Easter the next year I would have 2 kids, I would have not believed you. But obviously, sadly, that didn't work out.
I sort of knew from the beginning...I never once felt pregnant. After how hard my first trimester was with Van, I had a hard time believing that my next pregnancy would be a complete 180. We went in for our first ultrasound and there just wasn't a baby - it never developed, but my body created the gestational sac and hormones like I was pregnant (just not enough to make me sick). I passed the tissue and sac a few weeks later and we were told to wait 3 cycles to try again.
Originally we wanted to start trying again in October so this set us back a few months, but we got pregnant again on our first try (after the 3 cycles). On a side note, I have to say, for me being 36 and Steve being 40, the fact that we have gotten pregnant 4 times in a little over a year in a half is nothing short of a miracle. My mom told me that the women in our family were fertile, but since it took me 9 months to get pregnant the first time (which ended in a miscarriage), I didn't believe her. Not sure what we were doing wrong then.
Anyway, this pregnancy feels more like how I did with Van. I have morning sickness and my HCG levels rose appropriately in my 5th week (and were higher than they were in week 7 of my last pregnancy). My morning sickness is different though - in general I feel the same - hungover and motion sick, but with Van it was only from 3:30 pm until I went to bed. And giong to bed cured me. This time, it's not as severe, but it lasts all day. And with Van I never wanted to eat. I hated food and was perfectly content to skip meals. This time however, food is my friend. Eating makes me feel better and if I go too long without eating, I feel so awful. And then it's hard to feel better after.
And now if Van wakes up in the middle of the night and I rock him to sleep, I have to go downstairs and eat something afterwards because I just get so hungry. I have never eaten in the middle of the night before. I tried to resist the first time, but my stomach was growling and I felt awful.
With Van, my overall weight gain was a few pounds (I lost 15 the first trimester, maintained the second trimester and gained 15-20 the third, but lost it all in the hospital before I even went home). This time, I don't think I'll be so lucky. I certainly haven't lost 15 pounds so far!
I'll be 8 weeks tomorrow and our first ultrasound is on Friday...I'll be 8w2d, which is exactly how far along I was when I had our first ultrasound with Van. With 2 miscarriages, I'm so nervous and terrified of having another one, but with being sick, I'm hopeful that's a good sign (usually when you're sick that means your pregnancy hormones are high and that's a good thing). If we go in and I find out something's wrong, I'll be so mad/sad for so many reasons, but the kick in the pants will be how sick I've been for no reason. It's been a few weeks now of just feeling like crap 90% of the time (and going to bed doesn't help this time around - hard to fall asleep when you feel like you might get sick).
So hopefully this is the start of our journey and I can blog about Van and my new pregnancy. I have to admit I didn't love being pregnant with Van - I was never comfortable. I had horrible morning sickness and food aversions (which it isn't fun to hate food for almost a year), debilitating heart burn (with an allergy to heartburn medicine so I suffered almost my entire pregnancy and only used Mylanta to help soothe), a sore back, insomnia and then incredible knee pain at the end.
I can't do anything about the morning sickness, but it ended at week 12-13 last time, so I keep thinking I only have about a month left. When I was 2 weeks away from my due date, I was so miserable with heartburn that I finally caved and tried another medicine and found one I'm not allergic to (Pepcid AC) and it works, so that problem will be solved. I have already been to the chiropractor once for my back this pregnancy and she was a miracle worker last time, so I feel like that problem will be under control. I just need to work on the insomnia (and I'm going to talk to the nurse at our appointment this week)...that was really hard last time. Working full time and not sleeping past 2 am was not easy. And now that I have Van, I just don't think it's safe. Hopefully there is a sleep aid I can take.
I'm worried about my knee pain - that was so incredibly painful the last 6 weeks of my pregnancy and it hurt worse after Van was born (for about a month). I could barely go up and down stairs and walking brought me to tears. I went to an orthopedic surgeon when Van was 2 weeks old and they did x-rays and couldn't find anything wrong. And then I woke up one day and the pain was gone and it hasn't been back since. The advice he gave me was to strengthen my knees before I got pregnant again. I didn't do that (at least not intentionally), so I'm going to be so careful to not injure myself this time.
Last time I hurt my knee at work and it never healed and just got worse. And then because I favored one leg, the other knee ended up being the bigger problem. And then when I had my epidural and couldn't feel my knees and had them bent in half, up by my head, it made them even worse. Everyone (well, the chiropractor and orthopedic surgeon being everyone) has recommended swimming to strengthen. I've known I was pregnant now for 4 weeks and I've swam laps once. I need to go the pool on my days off - that's 3 days a week. And then I can jog around the pool this summer with Van in my arms after work (I love having a pool down the street).
My due date is September 10 (unless they change it after the ultrasound, but I'm 100% sure that's my correct due date), so I'm hoping this summer isn't a crazy hot one. I'm a little nervous about that. With Van, I was easy to overheat and it made me very uncomfortable and for some reason led to tears. It was one of the only things I was irrationally emotional about. It's going to be a long summer if I cry everytime I'm warm.
Hopefully I can sleep now...decided to try to do something when I wake up in the middle of the night instead of just tossing and turning in bed. It's worked pretty well so far. Eating has helped the most. I'll have a bowl of cereal and come back up and fall asleep immediately. I'm going to get so much fatter though - I would rather just sleep through the night.
On that note, I'll update again after our ultrasound...I'm so nervous. Going through another miscarriage and then having to heal and wait will be...awful. Just so awful. I took Friday off of work. Our appointment is 3 hours to start with and then I'll either be joyously happy and will want to tell our close friends and immediate family (only my mom knows and she hasn't even told my dad) or I'll go home to be sad and snuggle with Van. Either way, after what we've been through, I can't imagine going to work after.
This just has to work out...
