The journey to becoming a mom

Hello! It's me....Jamie. Welcome to my first blog post! If you're here, you may be trying to conceive, have recently conceived, are already a parent, or just plain like me (ahhhh :) shucks).

I started this blog to document my journey in becoming and, eventually, being a mom. My husband and I started trying to conceive in the summer of 2019. If you know me in real life, you know I'm control freak with a brand of having all my ducks in a row. So trying to conceive was hard. Really hard. It felt like I had no control. I was worried I was already too old at 34, trying for our first. Every month, every negative was just confirmation for me that my dreams would never come true.

So, I did the only thing that's never failed me and I started studying my way to a baby. I joined multiple groups for women trying to conceive. I learned all the acronyms (SMEP, BFP, LMP, CM, CP, etc...) and I googled everything. The number of open tabs in my browser gave my husband convulsions. There just had to be some secret trick I was missing. Or, some symptom of some problem that was so obscure that I was overlooking it and I just needed to find it so I could tell my doctor.

Eventually, I discovered a book on natural family planning and I was blown away by all the things I didn't know about my body (you mean I can tell what side I'm ovulating on by swelling in my lymph nodes? Bodies are crazy!) My body was giving me all the signals about my fertility for both preventing and achieving pregnancy, but I just didn't know the right words to search in Google. Side note - I was also kind of furious to know that there were effective alternatives to hormonal birth control and the non-hormonal IUD. All the years wasted with chemically changing my body chemistry or enduring extremely painful periods in order to prevent pregnancy (only to find out it's actually not that easy to get pregnant)...more on this in a separate post.

After reading this book, and supplementing with some additional research through my favorite resource (medically peer reviewed papers through the National Center for Biotechnology Information), I changed some minor things in my day to day habits and in our "baby dancing" routine. After 6 months of not even the faintest positive test, we ended up conceiving within 2 months after those changes. Sadly, it ended in what is known as a chemical pregnancy (a miscarriage before 5 weeks). Shockingly, I conceived again only 2 weeks after this loss in my next ovulation cycle and, as of this writing, am now 16 weeks and 3 days pregnant with a baby girl.

After diving into the deep end with TTC communities and pregnancy communities, I found myself wishing that I had documented everything I was learning somewhere for future reference. So, here we are. I can't wait to share.