I've titled this post "Signs" because that's what I felt I was looking for ever since Maverick was born. Signs that would let me know if we were indeed finished having children, or if maybe, we weren't.
The timing of Maverick's birth coincided with my grandmother's death with in almost a month. The combination of the pregnancy hormones along with the grief was not a good combination for me and I'll admit, it was rough. Very rough at times.
I think I may have mentioned it before, but we (mainly I) made the decision to give away our parrot, Connor. It was not a decision that I took lightly, but I knew it needed to be done for the sake of my health.
I know this may be TMI for some people, so skip this next paragraph if you must. I exclusively breastfeed my babies and therefore do not get my cycle back for 5-7 months (as a rule) after each birth. With Maverick, I was so stressed out, that I was getting my cycle every TWO WEEKS. This was stressing me out more, and my midwives were concerned that I may become anemic due to loss of blood. They had no explanation for this other than my stress level. I needed to take drastic measures to reduce my stress and since giving away a child was not an option (Not that I really considered it anyways) the bird was the first to go. Luckily, our dog, is easy as pie and doesn't require much attention. Dogs are good like that.
During this time period, Maverick also went on a brief nursing strike and that certainly didn't help the stress level. Luckily, it was short lived and things slowly started to get better.....
Back to the "Signs" part of this post. Like I said, ever since Maverick was born I would look for signs to point me in the direction of "we are done" or maybe let's have another...
I would flip-flop on my position SEVERAL times a day based on how much the crying/stress level was. It got to the point where I finally decided to give this decision over to Derek (in my mind) so that I could get some peace about it.
Fast forward to Chandler's 5th B-day. Around this time, I was late. Like more than a week late. This is generally not like me, so I decided to take a pregnancy test. In the hour or so from the time I thought a pregnancy could be a possibility to the time that I took the test, so many things went through my mind. How would I tell Derek? What would his reaction be? This baby would be due at Christmastime, a time that I had thought in the past, I would avoid at all costs! How could we afford another one? And then the test was negative.....and I was sad.
It was then that I knew that despite all things, I really longed for another baby.
So I told Derek that I wanted another baby and if he did not then he needed to be sure about it and let me know so I could move past this, and get on. He wouldn't say that he was done. He had a few remaining hesitations (mainly the money factor) but admittedly wanted another too.
We decided that we would start "trying" once the renovations to our house were complete (hoping to wrap things up this week! HOORAY!!) Well, it turns out that the only real sign we needed to know we wanted another baby was:
I have been SO SICK this time and even throwing up, so haven't felt like doing much of Anything. I'm 12 weeks now, and starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Derek and I are going on a "Babymoon" this weekend for the FIRST TIME EVER since having kids. I'm hoping to catch up on the blog then!
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