I’m so excited to be finally sharing our news and wanted to give you a little background on our pregnancy journey. I’m currently 17 weeks pregnant and due January 8, 2021.

ABOUT US

Jon and I have been married for almost 5 years now and as many of you know we moved to Dallas from Canada right after our wedding. Jon is now 35 and I am 32. We decided to wait until we were married for 4 years before trying to get pregnant (this October we will be married 5 years!). We definitely are glad we waited! Moving to a new country is exciting but hard in of itself, plus the fact that we had never lived together before, and really wanted to appreciate our new lives together meant having children wasn’t a huge priority early on.  The move created a lot of changes for what I could do for work, and as a result I jumped into the world of being a blogger. Over the next few years I devoted a lot of time to developing @myviewinheels (with lots of help from Jon my official photographer), made many new blogger friends, and in the process was afforded many amazing travel opportunities. We have thoroughly enjoyed our lives here in Dallas, all the opportunities that have come from living here, so really weren’t thinking about starting a family to soon. 

I always knew I wanted to have kids, but I never had “baby fever” and was very content waiting a while. I knew our lives would definitely change once a baby came along, so, selfishly you could say, I was not quite ready to give up this easy, carefree life we had been living. Jon was definitely in the same mindset as me and was in no rush at all! Haha!

I don’t know if there is ever a perfect time to start having children really, but I new it was important for us to have a family that included children. Probably the biggest factor for choosing now, though, was that I wanted us to be young enough to be really active in our children’s lives and knew the older we got the less likely this would be. Sometimes you just have to take that leap of faith, and so we did just that, and so began our journey to parenthood!

WHEN WE STARTED TRYING

We started trying September 2019 and actually conceived right away (the first month). But when I was about 5 weeks pregnant, we discovered through some tests and other issues that I had an ectopic pregnancy. So the weeks following that were full of bloodwork and a short 5 hour stay in the hospital where I had to have methotrexate which stopped the ectopic pregnancy from advancing. It was pretty discouraging to have miscarried, but also inevitable with an ectopic pregnancy, and it made me nervous it could happen again. My doctor said that I was more likely to have a second ectopic pregnancy if I had already had one.

Fast forward to January 2020. We had to wait 3 months after the methotrexate to make sure it was out of my system before being given the all clear. But by then, even though we could start trying again, we ended up waiting because of some big trips we had already scheduled over the next couple months. Our plan was start trying again in May! 

BUT, as we all now know, Covid-19 arrived and of course everyone’s lives and well laid out travel plans have been cancelled for 2020!

Once we realized Covid-19 wasn’t going away anytime soon, we decided it was a good time to start trying for a baby again and that hopefully Covid-19 would all be over by the time the baby arrived!

I track my cycles through the Flo App so I knew when I was going to be ovulating. We started trying in April and wouldn’t you know it, I took a positive test 3 days before my next period! I had gotten pregnant right away! (I had a feeling I was too since my breasts were sore like first time I was pregnant!)

I was super excited to know that I could get pregnant so quickly, but immediately I started to worry about having complications again. I called my doctor the day I took the positive test and went in the same day for blood-work. They needed to monitor my HCG levels to determine if it was going to be ectopic again. Thankfully, after a couple weeks, my levels were high enough that they could determine it was not ectopic!

Having a miscarriage prior, took away some of the joy and excitement of finding out I was pregnant again. I was scared we might have to go through the same heartbreak. It has been one of the reasons for waiting so long before letting everyone in on our happy secret! Thankfully my 16 week appointment went really well, and this definitely has put our minds at ease. Now we are moving ahead with so much more anticipation and excitement. 

Until you go through an experience like this (or any difficult experience) it is pretty hard to empathize with other peoples’ pain.  But maybe one blessing can be that it allows you to understand someone else’s pain a little bit better.  For any of you mommas who have gone through a miscarriage, I understand and feel for you. It is a difficult and dark time, but hang on to the faith that things can and will work out.

I am so excited to be sharing this journey with you all. I am going to need a lot of advice and recommendations from all you ladies since this is my first baby!

Photos by Jenna Vanzant Photography