Guilt and Answered Prayers

Parenthood is associated with many feelings that are felt much more intensely once you've experienced it first hand. Love. The kind of unconditional love that has no competition. Joy. The type of joy that radiates contagiously from one silly face to the other and then seeps down deep into your soul and grows roots. Fatigue. The kind of fatigue that has you looking forward to nap-time, just so you can take a nap too! Pain. I'm not talking about physical self-infliction like stumping your bare toe on the coffee table pain. I'm talking about how your child's physical and emotional pain might as well be your anguish. Guilt. Oh the guilt. Even if you know you deserve that night out, or that hour of working out alone, or that massage/facial (and believe me, we all deserve those things), the guilt is always lingering, especially when tears are shed upon your departure.

Lately I've been feeling some guilt about Mabel already being 14 months old and me not having written a single blog post about her life, or even her gestation! Writing is like working out. Once you get out of habit, your brain gets floppy and the more time passes, the harder it is to start again. The words get jammed. It's like speaking a different language you haven't used in years. The bright side is, I still have many years of my two darlings to write about. So bare with me as I polish off the rust from my writing machine.

To start from the beginning, the very beginning, Mabel was a perfectly timed answered prayer (as all prayers answered or even un-answered are, even though it doesn't always feel that way). We started trying to conceive as soon as Dillon turned 1. A few months later, I went back to my OB to request the same process to conceive that worked in the past. After two rounds of treatment, we were still at ground zero, so I started seeing an acupuncturist who specialized in Herbal Medicine. This lady was a formal nurse, and she was hardcore. She insisted I lose 10 pounds, change my diet, decide to be content no matter what happens, and see her very often. She talked a great deal about the temperature of food's chemistry. I didn't eat salads or have ice in my drinks; I cut out all processed foods, carbs that weren't in the form of a fruit or veggie, gave up dairy, ate mostly organic, and took some giant herbal supplements. I don't know what you'd call it but I call giving up icecream, cheese, and bread, just to get pregnant, a supreme level of dedication. I'm not going to lie, her intensity stressed me out a little bit. I also retired from working 12 hour nightshift's and accepted a dayshift position, hoping it would help with my hormones. In order to do this, I had to take a second job, but we thought it would be worth the sacrifice.

My friends joked that I wasn't suppose to get pregnant yet, since we were destined to have our second round of babies in the exact same order that we had our first. First Ale, then Cristina, then me, then Jessica. March rolled around and we were about to have Ale's baby shower when Cristina told us she was expecting...........

In this picture, 3 out of the 4 of us are pregnant!

Meanwhile, I was also referred to a fertility specialist who was very sweet, but scared the crap out of us by going straight into talking about IVF, and wanted to do a slew of timed tests on me. I was completely honest with both the my Western Medicine doctors and my Eastern Medicine practitioner. Guess what? None of them were thrilled about the other. They were each skeptical about the other's methods! I will always wonder why both worlds can't just get along and treat cohesively, for an all around wholistic and safe approach.

Here comes the good news. I never needed to go back to see that fertility specialist. One day while I was at work, I started breaking out in hives. These things meant business; giant itchy whelps covered my entire body every day for a week. I was miserable. Patrick was in high anxiety mode about my mystery allergic reactions and it didn't help that he was already worried about the Chinese herbs ever since the Fertility Specialist snubbed them.

I knew something weird was going on with my body, so on March 15th I peed on a really cheap pregnancy test from the dollar store and the faintest pink line appeared in the window. It was so faint I thought it was probably just a figment of my imagination, my subconscious seeing what it wanted to see. I told no one, but it was all I could daydream about. A day later, I bought a nicer test, the kind for dummies, and the results we undeniable this time. I could barely swallow my heart back down into my chest, and immediately called my friend Jessica to take some very important pictures for me, and to keep from exploding with giddy excitement........secrets are HARD. I decided St. Patrick's Day would be a fitting day for Patrick to receive a life changing card with some adorable announcement pictures.......besides, how could I keep it a secret from him for much longer than two days?!?!? He wanted another baby just as badly as I did.

From there, we managed to keep our little secret until Easter, to which we made some creative eggs to give to each of our parents.

From that moment on, we would endearingly refer to our growing baby as "Tiny".

Our prayer was answered, but my allergic reaction had us on the edge of our seat until the first ultrasound because I read that pregnancy hives are common with twins! Thank goodness for technology to ease our minds about THAT worry before a heartbeat can be auscultated!