Pregnancy is Bliss

3.26.17

“For a year where I’d hoped to slow down a bit, I didn’t anticipate having to almost get through March before that could happen.”

I was either out of town or in town, but at conferences for work for eight weekends of the first twelve weeks of 2017. Like I do every new year, I’d picked a goal to achieve in 2017 – to slow down. When I picked the goal, I knew we may or may not enter into a pregnancy in 2017, and assumed it would probably be a good thing for my whirlwind of a self to learn how to slow down.

Things I don’t like:

1 – slowing down.

True confession – I was not 100% on board with starting a family yet, because I didn’t want to slow down. I didn’t want to give up my weekends away, my lighthouse-seeking adventures, my vacations, my hiking/biking/cross country skiing outings, my ability to work out or read whenever I wanted, my grocery shopping on the fly… I wanted to still be able to jam pack each week with the perfect concoction of fun, productivity and necessity. I knew having a baby would put a wrench in the cog that was my perfectly planned out whirlwind of a life.

So I needed to learn how to slow down. I needed to learn how to stay home, how to scale back, how to be content… As an achievement-focused individual, what I needed most was to put in writing a goal that would help me learn these things. There in my journal, on January 4, 2017 sits the goal that would become the excruciating theme that would encapsulate so much of 2017. Slow down. The foreshadowing I projected on that day would become downright eerie.

But the foreshadowing I projected on March 26 would become the hug I would wear through much of my pregnancy and beyond:

“Baby-wise, in general, I finally feel like I’m in a good place with it. I’m actually looking forward to being a mommy. I think the mind-shift took place as people began to step up… I’m so, so comforted by the support system that has formed around us. I don’t know that I necessarily thought we would have to face all of these changes alone, but I’m more so just realizing that we can do this. And in the times when we think we can’t, our support system will be there for us. Praise God for the people He’s put in our lives…”

On March 26, we were just days away from an abrupt ending to the honeymoon phase of our pregnancy, yet I already knew the major blessing God had bestowed upon us in our support system – our people, our village. I wore that blessing when I needed the reassurance that slowing down and starting a family was going to be ok, but I would wear it again like it was the old, worn out, comfortable sweater I’d never be able to part with for much of our pregnancy and Oaklee’s first months.

In the stats: 
Gestational Age: 14 weeks, 1 day
Days of blood: 4
Doctor’s Appointments: 1

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