My pregnancy with Aria

This blog has turned into so much more than just a way to keep others updated, especially now that Aria has passed.  It's turned into her baby book, my journal and memories of her.  So that is why posts have become more personal.  I'm trying to write down everything I remember and feel before I lose track of it all.  

As I've said several times before, Aria was a surprise pregnancy.  Michael had been open to the idea of having another baby for ages, but as the mama who actually takes care of the baby I wasn't quite there yet.  We knew we'd have another eventually, I just didn't feel ready yet.  

The timing of things was interesting.  I'm not quite sure what my problem was, but last fall I was just having a hard time dealing with life in general.  I even wrote a blog post about it (don't go looking, you won't find it) where I talked about how I felt selfish because I really had a pretty good life but still wasn't really happy.  It got bad enough that at the end of November I started taking Zoloft, which is an antidepressant.  I was on that once before, several years ago, and the symptoms were starting to feel familiar.  On top of this, I was ready to tell my work that I needed to take a break for a couple months to see if that would help.  However, before I said anything they actually called me to ask if I'd be able to work MORE in order help with some decisions they had made for the company (I'm an office manager).  I actually really love my job and I loved the direction they were taking so I said yes but wondered how I'd be able to balance everything, knowing I was committing to a few extra hours a week for the next several months.

When I first started getting sick at the beginning of December I actually thought it was just a side effect of the medication (and no, Aria's problems don't have anything to do with that, the doctors are 100% sure. I also stopped taking the medication the second I found out I was pregnant).  I wasn't even on the normal dosage of the medication yet, I was still on the starter dosage that you take the first few weeks.  I remember being a little concerned that even that tiny amount of medicine was making me sick.  I didn't even consider it could be pregnancy until one day when I suddenly realized my period was several days late.  Even then, it took me a few more days before I went and bought a pregnancy test.  I was convinced there was no way I was pregnant, and taking the test was more just to put my mind at ease.  So when the test came up positive, I was shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you!  In fact, I'll do one better, I'll show you:

This selfie, taken minutes after seeing the test, has been my secret shame for the past 9 months.  But now I gift it to you.  See the utter terror?  Also, that might be a tear in my eye.  Ha, yeah.  Also as a sidenote, this selfie makes Michael burst into laughter every time he sees it.

I was terrified!!  And quite honestly, not immediately thrilled.  Don't get me wrong, I knew I would love the baby, it's just that for someone like me who is such a planner, this kind of surprise really shakes things up.  And I was already feeling so overwhelmed by life, I didn't know how I was going to be able to handle this too.  Also to be fair, there were a couple HUGE reasons why this caught me so off guard.  The first was that it took us a couple years of fertility treatments to get Bennett.  So to get pregnant without trying, while terribly cliche, was shocking.  The second reason was that I still, to this day, have NO IDEA how I got pregnant.  The dates just do not make any sense.  So with these 2 huge reasons for why I shouldn't have been pregnant - well now you can see a little better why we've believed so strongly right from the beginning that there was something special about this baby, a special plan that God had for us.  I'm so glad it happened this way actually - having that mindset right from the beginning, before we knew anything was wrong, is what has made everything a little easier to accept.  Although it's still devastating of course.

I took the pregnancy test while a huge snowstorm was raging outside, a little before Mike was due home from work.  I was so shocked at the result that I did the only thing that made any sense to me at the moment - I turned on a movie for Bennett, and went outside to shovel the driveway so Mike could pull in okay when he got home.  It took nearly an hour, and I spent the whole time in mental conversation with God, basically just bewildered by what was going on.  I remember telling Him that I knew that this baby was meant for us and that He must have a special plan for it.  Over and over, I prayed for God to help me handle everything "with grace."  I remember that specifically, and it's been interesting to see how often that word - grace - has come up since Aria's birth, by so many different people, and in reference to either me or her.  I definitely think that is one of the grand recurring themes of her life.  

As a sidenote, I also remember dimly wondering if I should be shoveling so much snow while pregnant :)

I didn't tell Michael I was pregnant when he got home.  Actually, I didn't tell him for a couple weeks.  I was just so surprised!  I needed time to absorb the news before I shared it.  Then, I thought it would be fun to wait and surprise him with that on Christmas.  We never made it that far though - I ended up having to spill the beans a few days before Christmas because I had been sooooo sick for so long and Michael was threatening to take me to Instacare.  I kept telling him the doctors couldn't help me and he didn't understand why and wouldn't drop it until I finally revealed what was going on.

My first pregnancy with Bennett was very tolerable - I was sick of course, but it was all pretty manageable and I actually felt super healthy the last half of the pregnancy.  I always looked back on that pregnancy fondly.  I was so much sicker with this pregnancy, more than I ever knew was possible, which led nearly every single person I knew to predict that it must be a girl (and of course, they were right).  I told Michael several times that this would be our last baby because there was no way I could ever be this sick again.  I never missed a day of work when I was pregnant with Bennett, but with Aria I ended up giving away all my regular work shifts and could barely drag myself to the trainings I had to be at.  I basically lived in the bathroom for the first 4 months because I could barely even open my mouth without throwing up.  Poor Bennett - I have no idea how he made it through that.  While I had never let him watch much tv before, now he basically watched movies all day while I laid on the couch next to him with a bucket.  I had Zofran prescribed to me but the side effects were almost worse than the vomiting so I didn't take it much.

In the middle of all this, we decided to move!  We had been toying around with the idea for about a year but finally made it official. We lived in a townhouse in Spanish Fork, but I knew that wasn't going to work anymore. We (I) needed a fenced-in yard where Bennett and the puppies could play without me having to be holding onto leashes or watching them every single second, and since our townhouse faced onto the main street in the community I knew I couldn't handle a newborn while still keeping the other littles adequately entertained, especially in the winter.  Plus Mike was currently spending about an hour driving EACH way to work and back and I knew that with a newborn in the house we needed to do better than that!

Life was crazy, and quite crappy, that winter.  Finally though, the beginning of March came and everything suddenly got a bit better.  We moved into our house.  Bennett and the pups LOVED the yard and seeing them so happy made it all worth it.  Mike's commute to Cottonwood Heights was cut in half.  I hit the halfway point of the pregnancy and FINALLY stopped throwing up every day.  Work was still crazy busy, but I was feeling well enough to take back my normal work shifts even.  We had our 20 week ultrasound and everything looked good with the baby.  We decided not to find out the gender this time around.  

The excessive sickness the first 19 weeks didn't exactly help endear me to this surprise pregnancy, but once I started feeling better that changed.  In fact, I remember exactly when it changed.  We were watching tv and there was one of those sappy commercial for Johnson & Johnson or something with a lot of tiny newborn babies.  I suddenly started thinking about how heavenly it was to snuggle Bennett when he was newborn, and how little and warm new babies are, and how they just fit so perfectly on your chest. . .and I thought maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have a little baby to snuggle again.  Plus I was starting to feel the baby move and that's one of my favorite parts of pregnancy.

From weeks 16-25, once I started feeling Aria move, I only felt her once a day, if that.  It was always around 10 or 11pm and literally only for a couple minutes.  It was so unusual because when I was pregnant with Bennett he was much more active and I'd feel him at regular intervals throughout the day.  I just figured every pregnancy was different and that as long as I was feeling movement at all things were okay. . .or maybe the baby was just in a position that didn't allow me to feel it moving as much or something.  As time went on though I started to get nervous.  Finally around 25 weeks she started moving more.  She only moved a little bit during the day, but as soon as I laid down to go to sleep she would be pretty active.  And strong!

Although the constant vomiting finally went away halfway through the pregnancy, I started having other problems.  I was so tired all the time.  I blamed that on the fact that I was HUGE - I already weighed as much as I did the day I delivered Bennett!  Since I hadn't been able to keep food down in 4 months which you would think it would tip the scale the other way.  My doctor thought I probably had gestational diabetes but when that testing came back negative we chalked it up to normal second pregnancy excessive weight gain.  Looking back now though I wonder if there wasn't more to it.  I also had horrible ligament pain that made it nearly impossible to sleep.  I was only comfortable sleeping on my back, which is a big no-no after the halfway point.  There were a few other things too but I'm going to stop with the details.  Let's just say I was crying daily not from hormones but because I felt so physically miserable all the time.  I was excited for the baby, but was counting down the days until I wasn't pregnant anymore.

Unfortunately, as you know, that came so much sooner than we expected.  Aria was delivered on a Monday.  The Thursday before that, things took a turn for the worse in my pregnancy.  I don't know how to describe it other than to say that my body just gave out.  Simple things like getting up and down from a chair were exhausting.  I worked on Thursday then came home and just crashed on the couch while Mike took care of Bennett.  Friday morning I only worked for a couple hours then came home - same thing.  Saturday and Sunday I literally was only awake for a few hours total each day, I mostly slept.  I literally couldn't keep my eyes open at times.  I was too tired to decide if I should be worried or not.  I had been busier than usual the last month so I thought maybe I was just overdoing it and my body was trying to catch up now.  I remember telling Michael that I really didn't think I could do this for another 6 weeks and him telling me that I didn't really have a choice.

Monday morning was my doctor's appointment, and you know the rest of the story from there.  (If you don't know, click here to read details about the day she was born and the events leading up to the decision to do an emergency csection)  The day after Aria was born, I felt so much healthier than I had at any point in the pregnancy, even though I was still bedridden and in pain from the csection.  That first week, the more we learned about all of her problems, the more things in my pregnancy made sense.  For example, because of her skeletal problems, she wasn't positioned properly in my belly which probably accounted for a lot of my ligament and hip problems.  Aria required life support right away, and even with that still struggled immensely.  I really believe that those last few days of being pregnant, my body shut down because it was working too hard to be her life support - it was doing 100% of the work for her of just being alive, where other babies by this late in the pregnancy had a pretty good grasp on that.  If my doctor hadn't gone with his instincts and did the csection, there's a good chance that Aria would have passed away in utero.  I hadn't been exaggerating how I was feeling when I had told Michael that I didn't think I could make it another six weeks.

Looking back, I can't deny that this pregnancy was legitimately a huge trial for me physically. What I do regret though is how much I complained along the way.  If I had known that the pregnancy would make up over half of my time with her on this earth, I would have accepted it much more readily and cherished the good parts so much more.