On being pregnant again

I wouldn't have thought I would be so HAPPY to be pregnant. You see, I haven't exactly had GOOD pregnancies to date. I'm not one of those chipper little cutesy preggo's everyone loves. I'm the one with my head in the toilet for 9 months or calling my poor midwife's office every day because I'm bleeding or contracting.
With Chicklet, my first pregnancy, I was irregular so I didn't really think anything of it when I had a 3 month long lapse between cycles. It had happened before and we weren't exactly planning on having kids. We wanted kids! We just saw the state of the world and didn't think we had the heart to bring kids into this mess. So we were using non-hormonal preventative measures. Well I felt just awful queasy for the longest time and my sister told me on the phone one day that I was pregnant. I laughed at her. Took a test to prove her wrong. Wasn't I surprised when there were TWO pink lines on the test instead of one! Well the queasy turned into heaving and then one night I started heaving during supper and could not stop. Sometime in the middle of the night it was so bad I couldn't take a sip of water without it coming back up with blood. Even when I didn't drink anything, the blood and bile was coming up. By morning I was so weak I couldn't lift my head off the toilet seat for more than a second. My husband called off work and carried me to the car to take me in. They tried to get an IV in but I was too dehydrated. They kept stabbing me but no vein could be found. Finally in desperation they gave me a shot of anti-nausea meds in my hip, hoping that I had enough circulation for it to work enough for me to keep some fluids down the natural way. Thankfully it did work and within minutes I was gulping water down my raw throat like I'd come from a week in the desert. I was prescribed the same drug, in pill form, to take for the rest of my pregnancy. I would periodically have bouts of uncontrolable puking, and would take one of the meds, and puke it back up, then take another, maybe puke it back up too, and take another, which I might finally keep down long enough to give me a few hours peace. Towards the end of my pregnancy I was able to wean myself down on the pills by drinking lots of Morning Wellness Tea from EarthMamaAngelBaby.com and in fact I think I went most of month 9 without taking the pills at all, thanks to that tea. Plus being due in September was really difficult. It's just SO HOT here in the summer, not uncommon to be 110 degrees, that when you're already having hot flashes, it's pretty much like being boiled alive. I also had painful braxton hicks contractions the entire second half of the pregnancy. Thankfully, she was born nearly 2 weeks early!
My second pregnancy was a sad one. I just knew somehow that I was pregnant. I couldn't get a positive test though! I remember staring at the test wondering WHY it was wrongly saying negative! Sure enough I missed my cycle. We hadn't planned a baby, it was a surprise, and I told my husband I felt sure I was preggo though the test would not confirm it. I was happy, walking around with my hand on my tummy humming cheerfully, but wondered when the morning sickness would start. The sickness never started. One day I felt ... off. I just didn't feel right. That day I started spotting just the slightest bit. I spotted again the next day. Just a drop. And again the next... For about a week just a tiny spot of blood each day. And I was sinking into an uncontrolable depression. Something was WRONG. I went through the motions. But inside I was all wrong. A month after the spotting I started bleeding. I bled so much I should have gone to the ER. I was soaking an overnight pad every half hour. I should probably have died, as much blood as I lost. I remember putting the baby Chicklet down for a nap and collapsing into bed, only to wake up an hour later with myself and all the bedding soaked in blood. I numbly just cleaned myself up and took a heating pad to my computer chair, putting the baby in the playpen with some cheerios, and curled up in my chair in extreme pain, not even realizing how bad a shape I was in. I was too numb and fuzzy from bloodloss to know how bad I was. My husband didn't know what was wrong with me or how bad it was to know to take me in. Finally, 7 days after it started, the bleeding just suddenly stopped. I spent the next months inventing time-consuming projects and becoming addicted to message boards to take my mind off of my inner pain. I was mourning a baby that the little white test told me never existed. Finally, God let all that bottled up hurt inside me just explode one night, in the middle of the night, and HE put a friend online in the middle of the night who asked the right questions, and confirmed for me that YES it was a baby and the test can't take that away from me and that YES, I may have only been 7 weeks but I have a RIGHT to greive for my baby! When she gave me that validation I was finally able to begin to greive for my lost baby, and so I began to heal. For a while it was all I wanted to talk about. The floodgates I'd held back so long were flung wide and months of greif POURED out. My dear friends bore with my constant need to talk about it. Then it began to hurt less, I began to need to cry about it less, I began to reach out to others who had lost pregnancies, and I thought about it less and less.
Then, just 4 months after my loss, my husband told me he was finally ready to try for another baby. He had been mostly a spectator in the miscarriage. He didn't even really know it happened until the floodgates were flung wide and I began to greive, about a month before his announcement. I had been so depressed I didn't talk to anyone until then, and then after that point I talked to everyone about it. But when he told me he was ready for another baby I had mixed feelings. I was afraid of another miscarriage. I was afraid my greif had not run it's course enough to love another baby yet, and I was afraid that if I didn't agree enthusiastically he might change his mind and we would not ever have another! When we married we'd agreed on 4 kids, but after Chicklet, he had changed his mind and said he only wanted just the one. Just Chicklet. So I agreed happily to begin trying in the spring. I was secretly glad though, that we were waiting until spring to start trying because my heart was not ready. Meanwhile, we stopped using contraceptives and I began to chart. We used the rythm method. And whaddaya know, I was new to charting, messed up, and wound up pregnant that very first month. I was terrified when I found out. I wasn't happy about it because I was too scared. I had heard that if you get pregnant too close to a miscarriage it increases the risk of miscarrying again.
And with Bug, it was a very difficult pregnancy. There was extreme prolonged pain in the general vicinity of my ovaries. The midwife thought I might have an ectopic pregnancy. The pain was very intense and crippling and lasted for many weeks into the pregnancy, even after we confirmed by ultrasound that the pregnancy was not ectopic. Then, toward the end of the first trimester I was spotting. Then for the duration of the second trimester I was contracting, sometimes for too long. I had to try every trick in the book to get it to stop sometimes. It kept getting worse into the third trimester. One night it was beginning to feel like real labor. I was only about 7 months along I think. I was praying like crazy and it suddenly stopped. I told my midwife at the next appointment, and she said to drink half a glass of wine if it ever got that serious again. She said the wine should get it to stop and if it didn't, go to the ER immediately. We were counting down the weeks until I was 36 weeks along and it would be safe for him to be born. And I did have to use the wine trick 2 or 3 times when it got really scary and nothing else was working. Then I was 36 weeks and the contractions, all that scary preterm labor, STOPPED. That's right, it all stopped. My belly was so huge. I was roasting alive in the hot August sun. Packing for a move. My hips kept dislocating and I was in so much pain all night long from him being so HUGE that I barely slept. I could not move at all without pain. I was exhausted from just getting up and down out of a chair. I couldn't reach my legs. I felt sick from being so tired and hurting so much. We moved to our first owned home right before his due date. His due date came and went. The day after, I spent the day cleaning and unpacking and in general feeling like a beeched whale. I was SO much bigger in the belly than I was with my first! I could barely reach the stove to cook without putting my belly in the frying pan. I wore myself into complete exhaustion so of course at 7:30 pm when I plopped down on the couch totally done in, labor started. He was born the following morning. I didn't have the strength to both sit up and push him out simultaneously so hubby had to keep me from falling off the birthing stool while I pushed.

So you see, after those 3 pregnancies, this one kind of took me off guard when instead of being absolutely terrified of the pregnancy, looking at that second pink line, I was overwhelmed with JOY! Such joy! I'm so excited to be having another precious little blessing! It doesn't really make sense, but hey I'll take this strange all-consuming joy! Who wants to be scared and miserable when they can be so happy? Of course I'd be happy and excited about a new baby regardless, but it's weird to be so happy it overshadows the yuckiness of pregnancy. So despite the early and intense morning sickness I've been experiencing with this pregnancy (as I posted about yesterday), I'm really joyful and hopeful overall!
And something else strange... when I saw the positive test I somehow just knew this one is healthy. I wasn't scared of miscarrying. I don't know why, but I just felt ... like this baby is safe. Weird I know. But here I have made it to 7 weeks, a good sign. :)
So, I may be moaning and complaining about the heat this summer, and spending more time with my head in the toilet this winter, but I am HAPPY so very very happy to be having another baby! THANK YOU GOD FOR THIS SWEET BLESSING!!!