Ahhh….I'm pregnant, and my pregnancy is flying by! In the same breath, I feel like I found out I was pregnant many moons ago. It is a weird feeling.
Before getting pregnant, Jared and I had been trying for a while. During this time, I felt very discouraged. I know that many, many people have experienced more and longer struggles than we went through, but that does not discount the emotional toll I felt. Eventually, we stopped focusing all of our energy on getting pregnant and went back to being us. Thankfully, that worked for us. I personally believe that I was unable to get pregnant because of the stress that my body was under. We got pregnant right as the summer was coming up and I was ending the most insane year of teaching in-person and virtually in 2020-2021. Coincidence? I think not.
Finding out!
I felt a little off the morning I found out I was pregnant, but nothing too out of the ordinary.. Knowing I had gotten my hopes up many times before, I honestly was not expecting a positive result. Plus, I told myself that I was feeling normal and only a handful of days past my expected period day therefore I was likely not pregnant. I only had one test left and thought..what they heck I’ll try it. I was getting ready to leave for my brother’s soccer game when I glanced down at the test and saw ‘pregnant’. I was honestly so surprised and shocked. I hid the test because I did not want Jared to find it. With the poor track record of ‘not pregnant’ results, I wanted to make sure that this was not accidentally a false positive result before getting hopeful.
I had to keep this secret from Jared and my family for what felt like an eternity, but in actuality was just a few hours. As I was headed to watch my brother's soccer game, I was a ball of nervous energy. I needed to pick up a second pregnancy test to confirm that I was actually pregnant, so I just was in this limbo period. Once I finally grabbed a pregnancy test, I rushed home to take it. Jared was waiting for me to go out to dinner. I had this plan on how I was going to tell Jared I was pregnant. I, of course, left all of the items I was going to use to surprise Jared with in my classroom over the summer. To make matters worse, I was unable to get into the building and get them since the floors were being waxed - I tried! I was taking so long before heading to dinner that Jared ended up coming back inside from waiting in the car. I ended up just blurting it out that I was pregnant and pushing the pregnancy test in his face. It did not go according to plan, but it ended up still working out! We went out to eat at East Coast Pizza and bought our first baby items from Target.
After finding out we were pregnant, I still had to wait to see the doctor for a few weeks. Jared and I held on to this information of knowing we were pregnant, but not knowing much more. Up until this point, I felt very much like my “pre-pregnancy self”. I was eating normally, working out, and enjoying my summer! We were just so thrilled to be starting this new chapter in our life. However, it was hard to sit back and relax without confirmation from my doctor that all was well.
Telling the Fam
It was also extremely challenging not to tell my mom immediately that I was pregnant. I wanted to tell my parents and siblings in a memorable way, and we decided to tell them a couple weeks later on our family vacation. I ended up making little baby t-shirts that I put into the clean laundry my mom was folding one morning while on vacation. One t-shirt said “I love my grandma!” and the other said “Michel - Sporting - 12”. The idea was to have one shirt that was for my mom and one for my dad. In the middle of our vacation week, my mom was upstairs folding laundry and the rest of the crew was down stairs doing what we do best on vacation…nothing. :) I will never forget hearing my mom shout down asking if I had something to tell her. I looked over at Jared with wide eyes and waited for her to come down stairs. It was very comical seeing her throw the t-shirt that was meant for my dad at him. Once she was downstairs and both baby t-shirts were out, we just said that we were pregnant. It was such a fun moment for Jared and I to tell my family and see their surprise and excitement.
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First Trimester “Symptoms”
After the vacation, I started feeling nauseous and extremely tired. I had about 3 weeks where I felt completely useless. Jared was a saint, and he was at Walmart every other day getting the random things that sounded semi-appetizing for the day. I ranged from wanting to drink only chocolate milk to hating the idea of chocolate milk and only wanting to consume Ritz crackers and so on. I really got lucky with both a wonderful husband and mild first trimester morning sickness. I did not ever get sick; I just felt horrible. My “morning sickness” also started around 2pm, so if I wanted to accomplish anything, I had to do it in the morning. Luckily, this section of my pregnancy was only a few weeks and ended before the school year started.
Right around the time that I was starting to feel better, it was time for our first doctor's appointment. We were so excited and unsure of what to expect. Based on my last missed period, Jared and I were thinking I was 7 or 8 weeks along in the pregnancy, but we found out that we were 10 and a half weeks along. I was shocked. It doesn’t seem like that big of a difference, but I was almost already out of the first trimester. That was so wild for me to wrap my head around. We got to see our little babe for the first time. It was truly an experience like never before. Our excitement about being parents has continued to grow, and we couldn’t be happier or more nervous!
