Mothership Confessional

We have finished eating our freezer meal stash, I'm working dinners around what's left in the pantry, and I've halted trips to SAMs Club. It's moving time! Time to start packing up our lives once again to move on to the next adventure! Fort Campbell was the first duty station Chris and I were at together, and it was a good 3 years. A  great  3 years, actually... Fort Campbell is where I learned how to live this Army life as a supportive wife, and how to not complain about things that cannot be controlled. I learn more about this duty every day. This is where I learned more about myself as an individual and had a tremendous amount of personal growth. This is where I went out on a limb and chose a different career path . As it turned out, I loved it! This is where I learned that your morning coffee makes you poop. (true story, people!) This is where I learned how to fold jeans in a nice, neat stack and how to fold shirts faster than I ever t...

Its funny how differently I feel with this second pregnancy. Not necessarily physically, but emotionally. With Ava, I truly felt happy and thrilled  and  ecstatic pretty much every single day of pregnancy, even despite the first trimester sickness and third trimester hugeness. It was my first time experiencing pregnancy after trying for 4 long years. I was enjoying every moment of it. I wasn't taking any day for granted and I honestly felt like I was glowing every day. I also had nothing better to do than to sit and daydream, plan and organize for little girl's arrival. This time around, the pregnancy itself was a complete surprise. I mean, we weren't preventing pregnancy so obviously we knew it could happen, but seeing how we didn't get Ava without medical intervention made us have our guards down a little. I still feel the timing for a second pregnancy couldn't have been better. I have absolutely zero regrets or hesitations about being pregnant again. ...

12 weeks... DONE!! We are 1/3 of the way to meeting our baby!! And we finally got to see little baby and we got an official due date! The ultrasound image was of a 9 1/2 weeker, so there wasn't much to see! Still a "little gummy bear" as the doctor called it! And I am due February 27th!  I was able to ask some questions about my delivery options. I will only have one more appointment with this doctor (if we are even here that long) so she gave me her opinion, but said my next doctor might have something different to say. She recommended letting myself go into labor, and have a c-section scheduled for a week or two past my due date in case labor did not happen. She said it is rare that they advise anyone against laboring, so it would be okay for me to do as well. Of course, this all depends on how baby is presenting; Ava was transverse or breech the whole time until the doctor did an external version to move her. I still feel a little reluctant to labor bec...

I can't believe it. I just can't!! Ava is 10 months old! And she's acting like such  a big girl! We thought it would take forever of her to crawl and pull up and sidestep. And then one week, it was like an explosion of milestones! She can do it all now, and she's so fast! She doesn't like her jumper as much, mainly because she can't get around! I have to stick her in there for dinner prep some nights before Chris gets home.  She's not happy in there for very long anymore! Her favorite thing is to walk around the house with help. She seeks out our hands and grabs them and starts smiling and squealing, pulls to standing, demanding for us to help her walk! She can now pull to stand, and then stand for a bit without holding onto anything. She's getting so brave! Last week she surprised me and crawled up a few steps! It gave me a heart attack because I didn't think she could do it! She has really become an adventurous little girl...

Is it really?! 38 weeks?! I know we are being incredibly inpatient, but Ava, darling...we are wanting you to join us so badly!! I have been feeling a lot of different emotions this week, and they usually come in this order: Excitement. I can't wait for Ava to be here, to see her eyes, to hold her, to admire her hair, to watch her while she sleeps, to watch her daddy with her . This wait has to be one of the most unbearable waits ever! The house is full of baby things, just sitting...waiting. I find myself spending a lot of time just staring at them, imagining what Ava will be doing in each of these baby things, what she will look like in the car seat carrier, which motion on the swing she will prefer, and I can even visualize her flailing arms and legs when she will get her diaper changed on the changer (for some reason I am imagining her hating  getting her diaper changed!). So much eager anticipation! I think about how exciting these changes will be. And the...

I have debated for a long time about whether I wanted to include a post on my blog about the journey my husband and I have been on to achieve a pregnancy. It's quite personal. And some people may think that it's too much information. But without the other blogs I came across during my research, I would have felt MUCH more helpless and alone. And my hope is, is that another woman will stumble across this post and find comfort and hope in hearing someone else's story. Now, I will go ahead and include a disclaimer: men may find this post frightening as you will probably read way more than you ever wanted to know about the female body. It's nothing embarrassing, its just biology. I will warn you again when things get personal. For now, let's rewind the clock back to June 6, 2009: the day Chris and I got married! We both had talked during our dating years of if we wanted kids, how many, and when we wanted to start trying. We both agreed not to start trying righ...