Hello! It’s been a long time, and if you follow along on Instagram (@shaesburns), I’m carrying a baby! Today I’m 21 weeks pregnant, four months and just over halfway there! The time has flown, and I thought I’d write an update to start off all of the pregnancy content I’ve been inspired to write. I’ve learned and researched so much so far in this pregnancy and you know I believe in sharing, so I’ll document my journey here.
We planned this.
I’m just going to address the big question that you’re most curious about, yes, we planned this. Some background…After we got married, 4 years ago, I decided to go off of birth control and track my cycle using an app. Around this time I became interested in clean beauty, I also wanted to get off of medication, so it all happened hand in hand. Since we were married, it wouldn’t be too controversial to my extended family members if we ended up pregnant. So, I used an app to track my cycle, because I don’t think either of us imagined having a baby without a house and dual income with Josh finishing his doctorate. The app worked for us! We tracked and used protection on my “fertile” days. This is the app that I used; it’s free and is pretty spot on since we used this method for four years!
After Josh graduated, and we both worked full time jobs for a year and then bought our house, we decided it might be fun to “try”. We came to this decision in January, so I used the same app to plan romantic date nights on the days that I was fertile ;). A few months passed by and nothing happened, so my PCP actually told me to purchase some LH (ovulation) test strips from Amazon. She said they were much more efficient, cheap and exactly the same as the expensive fertility trackers you see at the store. The pack that I bought (exact link above) for $13 gave me 50 test strips and 20 pregnancy tests. Let’s just say I still have a box of 49 test strips and 16 pregnancy tests left because the first night I tried the test strip, it said I was “fertile.” It was right because 1-2 weeks later, I was having night sweats and waking up at 2 a.m. starving, which was very abnormal. After the third night of experiencing weird symptoms, I used four of the pregnancy tests, I took one and saw the faintest second line, texted C (my bff) and she confirmed that we thought it was positive. I took another one, still barely positive. This is the best part, when Josh got home I showed him my tests and made him take one because I needed to know if my tests were broken. His test came back realllll negative. When I didn’t get my period a few days later (I was still half expecting it since I read that pregnancies this early in the game mostly don’t work out), I took the 4th test and the line was much darker. I was pregnant.
Things no one told me that I wish I had known.
There were a few things that happened in this whole process that I wish I had known about:
- Take prenatal vitamins before you’re trying to get pregnant, apparently it helps you not get morning sickness? Vitamins are just good for you anyway and taking prenatals isn’t really any different than your multi.
- When you’re pregnant you get spotting for a few or more days, which might make you think you’re getting your period but you don’t.
- Maybe plan a cuter way to tell your hubby you’re pregnant than to make him take a test on his own, haha!
Look out for more updates to come!
xo,
