Our Journey: Life Before & After Our Miracle : Skylee Rae Week 34 :)

Friday, January 31, 2014

Skylee Rae Week 34 :)

How your baby's growing:

Your baby now weighs in between 3 and 1/2 pounds and 4 and 1/2 pounds (about the size of a butternut squash) and is almost 18 inches long. Her fat layers — which will help regulate her body temperature once she's born — are filling her out, making her rounder. Her skin is also smoother than ever. Her central nervous system is maturing and her lungs are continuing to mature as well. If you've been nervous about preterm labor, you'll be happy to know that babies born between 34 and 37 weeks who have no other health problems generally do fine. They may need a short stay in the neonatal nursery and may have a few short-term health issues, but in the long run, they usually do as well as full-term babies.

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The Story of Our Struggle

We met in 2009, and were married in January, 2012. We both decided to wait to have a baby, so that we could enjoy being young and newly married. Surprisingly, even with our precautions, we discovered we were pregnant in May, 2012. Sadly, the pregnancy didn't last long, and I had a miscarriage at approximately 5 weeks pregnant. We were both devastated. I struggled with the question of how I could love a little one so much that I thought I "wasn't ready for". After the miscarriage, we decided to stop using precautions and to allow a baby to happen when the timing was right. Almost exactly a year later, on April 30th, I received the phone call from the doctor that my blood test came back positive. I was sure this time would be different. I painted a shell (with the words "will you be our baby's daddy") to announce the pregnancy to Daniel (just like he proposed to me). We made Mother's Day gifts to announce the pregnancy to our families on Mother's Day. The day before Mother's Day, however, I started bleeding, and on that following Monday I received miscarriage confirmation. The first miscarriage was hard, but this one truly devastated me. I didn't want to function. I literally wanted to just withdraw from everyone and spend each day in tears. Thankfully, as a few weeks went by, I felt stronger and my heart was healing. Daniel was my rock. He held me, cried with me, and walked me through a really hard time in my life.

The doctors had told me my uterus is extremely tilted back, which kind of explained why it had taken me exactly a year in between pregnancies to conceive again. Actually, I had two different doctors tell me that because of the extreme tilt, I could possibly never get pregnant. So, knowing that, I really didn't think a third pregnancy would happen......at all, or at least not any time soon.

Only a month and a half later, I tested positive again (on Daniel's 23rd birthday). I immediately sent a picture of the test to my family and his family. I saw no reason to try to make some kind of special reveal like I had with the last. That only made it harder when I lost that little one. I went to the doctor and got blood test confirmation, and they began having me come in every other day to have blood drawn to see if this baby was growing properly. Things looked good, and the weeks began to go by. I started making it to little milestones.
We found out when I was 17 weeks that we were having a baby girl. Words cannot describe the complete joy and happiness I felt making it to the ultrasound for gender determination. As the weeks continued to go by, I grew more and more comfortable in my pregnancy, and the anxiety started to lessen. After going through two recent losses, it kind of steals the joy of pregnancy because you are constantly worried about "what if". In December, when I was around 24-25 weeks, I tripped on some stairs and landed right on my stomach. Not long after I began having contractions, and my doctor sent me in to Labor and Delivery. My heart was terrified. I couldn't fathom making it all this way with this pregnancy and then losing her. They gave me a shot and some meds to stop the pre-term labor, and sent me home. The next day, the contractions continued to come, so back to the hospital we went. They gave me more meds, and kept me overnight to make sure the labor had stopped. When they sent me home, they prescribed me with a medication to take every 6 hours. I took that medication from week 25 all the way to week 36, and our little girl continued to healthily grow. Currently I am 38 weeks pregnant and we are beyond ready to meet our little miracle baby.

I've had alot of people give me "the side eye" for being pregnant at 22, and for not waiting till after I finished nursing school (which I am set to graduate in May 2015). That was my original plan. But I am living proof that plans don't always go the way you want them to. When we lost the first baby, we decided not to try to control when we would have our first child. Because I've had such a struggle with my body carrying a pregnancy, I didn't want to possibly miss my only chance to have a little one. We don't regret our decision for an instance. I still fully intend to make it through nursing school, and even though we are young, we are fully prepared to take on the responsibility of little miss Skylee Rae Hester.