Justin and I learned we were pregnant with our 3rd child (we miscarried our 2nd one-and I hate the idea of not acknowledging that pregnancy at all - I also have a hard time calling this baby "number 2" when really it's number 3) in February 2014, just days before I left on a 10 day trip to Israel with our church. Due to our previous miscarriage, we decided not to tell anyone about this pregnancy for a while. We didn't even tell Justin's parents (who were in Israel with me) until the day before the 8 week ultrasound.
We had our 8 week ultrasound on March 21, 2014 and saw our sweet baby and heard it's heartbeat of 155bpm. We were thrilled! But we still didn't post anything on any social media outlet. We wanted to wait to have one more appointment, our 12 week appointment, which was on April 18th, 2014. At that appointment, we didn't have an ultrasound but we heard the heart beat on the Doppler and it was in the 160's. Everything looked completely normal, so we decided to tell the world about it then.
To see all the posts related to this pregnancy, click here.
Yes, that's a lot of pee sticks. But let me explain something. Notice that there's only one digital one and the rest are the kind with the 2nd line. If you don't know, what makes that 2nd line show up on the test is the increasing hormone called beta that indicates a successful pregnancy. You can read my miscarriage story
here, but long story short-it was an ectopic pregnancy and my beta never got over 128. It was doomed to fail from the beginning. Anyway, the higher your beta is, the darker that 2nd line gets. So basically, as soon as I saw a faint 2nd line on one test, I took the digital test to confirm. After the digital test, I knew I was pregnant, but with a failed pregnancy on my heels, my concern was weather or not this pregnancy was also doomed to fail or if it would be a successful pregnancy. I was about 4 weeks along when I got the positive test and I didn't have my ultrasound until 8 weeks. You can ask anyone that's had a miscarriage, but 4 weeks is a LONG time to wait to see if your pregnancy is going to make it or not. So to ease my mind, I got a ton of these cheapo pregnancy sticks that had the 2nd line. I used them once every other day or so to verify that the 2nd line was getting darker. It definitely eased my mind until that 8 week ultrasound where we heard the heartbeat!
This was the first picture we got of our baby at the 8 week ultrasound when we found out that we were due on Halloween 2014!
And this is how we told everyone that we were pregnant again! Carter really is going to be a great big brother. He's already talks about baby all the time and frequently gives him/her kisses on my belly! Such a sweetie!
This was when we opened a box of balloons to discover that sweet baby was another bouncing baby boy! Baby Brother Garrett was on his way!
Sweet Carter was loving the balloons idea! He had so much fun with that box for a solid week and a half after the gender reveal party too! You can see the post on the gender reveal party
here.
The beginning (9 weeks along):
The middle (20 weeks along):
The end (38 weeks along):
And here's our sweet boy when he was delivered:
To read Garrett's labor and delivery story, click
here. I'll warn you, it wasn't pretty!
