The Phinney Family is Growing...

Yes, you read that right!

*Now, I must first put a disclaimer on here: If you know me in real life (and I know who you are) do not spill the beans yet! We have a cute and fun way of revealing the news to our friends, and we will be doing so this Thursday. Please don't ruin the surprise by telling people (and besides, with pregnancy announcements it really should be the parents-to-be who reveal the news to those close in their social circle).

Remember back in April when I posted about our fertility woes and how I thought we'd eventually need to return to the reproductive endocrinologist to become pregnant again? I guess not. The day after I wrote that blog was the day we found out we were expecting again!

I'm one of those women who likes to think she is pretty in touch with her body. Even though I hadn't missed a period yet, I just felt off that day in mid-April. My boobs were super sore (the only early symptom I had with M2) so I peed on a stick. And a faint second line popped up. I nearly pooped my pants! Mr.P was thrilled when I told him that evening at dinner (I had so unoriginally wrapped the positive test in gift wrap and placed it beside his dinner plate). He was the one who was very adamant about having our children close together, so he was super excited and had a cheesy grin on his face for the rest of the night.

Based off my LMP, the due date should have been December 24th. Yup, Christmas Eve. However, at my first OB appt they did a "dating" ultrasound to measure the size of the fetus and determine an actual due date, and based off of that the due date got moved to December 19th. Today we had another ultrasound done to do the NT scan assessing our risk of certain birth defects (everything looked good, and our risk is considered low). Here is a picture from today's ultrasound where the baby was measuring 12 weeks, 2 days:

My lack of blogging has been due to my sickness this time around. Since week six I have had near constant nausea, and a few boughts of the pukies. Keeping up with a now mobile 9 month old has been a challenge while feeling sick. Unfortunately M2 just doesn't understand that "mommy needs to lay down for awhile" so I've had to suck it up and do my best to take care of her and take care of myself. A couple times while changing her diaper I had to hold my breath, change the diaper really quick, set her in her crib and go throw up. The nausea has been bad though, I think that feeling like you're going to throw up is worse than actually throwing up. With M2 I never had any morning sickness, and I really won the good lottery that time! I am hoping that as I come to the end of the 1st trimester this week the morning sickness will start to fade. I've been really fortunate the past two weeks that Mr.P has been on his paternity leave to help out, that has been really nice to allow me time to rest.

Complaints aside, we are thrilled! We are so happy and feel so blessed to have naturally conceived this time. Our new OB said that she sees this a lot where a couple needs fertility help getting pregnant the first time, and then conceives on their own the second time. We love our new OB and are really excited about receiving care from her (we did not want to go through the hospital where M2 was born due to how poorly they handled my labor/delivery). A good friend of ours works in L&D at another hospital and she handpicked this doctor for us.

I am excited and nervous to tell people the news. Already I've gotten a lot of stupid comments from people (including the nurse at the OB's office) about the Christmas due date. Uh yeah...nothing I can do about that. My sister has a December 18th birthday and our family always made sure her birthday was totally separated from Christmas and went out of our way to make her birthday special; we will do the same for our child. I am also nervous about the comments from people about how close in age our children will be (16 months apart)...but this was what we wanted, and although there are some cons to having them this close, there are many pros as well. Sure life will be chaotic for awhile, but we are up for the challenge and looking forward to meeting our new little one in about 6 months :-)