A couple of weeks ago we shared HERE that we are overjoyed to welcome another Tupta Tot to our crew in a few short months! We are just so grateful and excited to get the opportunity to parent another child and watch Ellie thrive as an older sister. Here are the questions you sent in since we shared the news! Thank you so much for your sweet messages and for celebrating with us!

How far along are you?

As I write this post, I am 29 weeks and 6 days but we shared the news around the 28 week mark!

When is your due date?

Whenever baby decides it is! 😉 On paper though… April 16, Easter weekend. April 16 is a somber date to us along with the entire Hokie Nation. When I heard that date originally I was pretty upset but then found out that is also Easter weekend and am just really excited to see how the Lord works His timing.

Why wait so long to share?

Let me preface all of this by saying that I think the “standards” around sharing about pregnancies, timing wise and sharing at all are plain silly. I totally understand when people don’t want to share early on in a pregnancy, that’s how I felt with Ellie especially after losing our first baby, but if you feel like doing that, DO IT! If you don’t want to share about it at all, DON’T! Just because the most common timing to share is after the first trimeter, doesn’t mean that you have to follow that. Like I said, it doesn’t mean you have to share about it at all!

As for why I waited so long… The short of it is that I just wasn’t ready. I thought a lot about why that was and realized it was for a few reasons: we have a lot of distractions in this season we’re in with the house, work, and loving on Ellie. Stephen didn’t care when or if we shared at all but considering how all over the place my brain is to begin with, I felt like I needed more time to process and soak it up without having to talk about it, answer questions, etc. We were just as excited and joy-filled with or without “everyone” knowing! I don’t know if that makes any sense at all. It was just special to me to keep close during that time and when I felt ready to share, I did! All of it feels pretty silly in some ways to me. I’m not anything “big” on social media or anything of that sort but at the same time I have developed really special relationships with so many of you via social media and it felt wrong to not share with you before baby’s arrival.

Another piece of it is that since opening up about our journey to conceiving Ellie, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to so many of you going through your own trying to conceive battles. It has truly been an honor to talk with you and pray alongside you! I know this isn’t the case for everyone but it can be hard to see pregnancy announcements when in the thick of it and I didn’t want to be the source of anyone’s hurt. I know, I know… I can’t control a person’s emotions but I’m also subconsciously always cognizant of how it could be received just because I know how it feels. It’s just so hard to navigate on both sides. Above all though I hope that if you’re going through your own trials, you know you are not alone. We are praying over you and your womb and your marriage and God’s sovereign plan.

Are you going to find out the gender with this one?

We aren’t! It’s going to be another “It’s a *insert boy or girl name we have picked out here*” situation! The most genuine surprise we’ll ever have and SO FUN! I also felt like it gave me a really big push (no pun intended) of motivation to get Ellie out into the world when in labor with her. I don’t doubt it’ll be the same with this baby come game time!

Here’s the precious little miracle Tot on the left and Ellie on the right. How cool is that?! I can’t get over it.

Any book recommendations you’re using for Ellie’s transition to big sister?

I love this question because I hadn’t really thought about this at all! I haven’t researched books for this yet but if you have recommendations, I’d love to hear them! My aunt got her this book so that’s a start!

Who will care for Ellie while you’re birthing?

That’s a good question. Ha! The way things are going currently, the doctors are all for me going into labor naturally (PRAISE GOD!) which I’m very excited about but it also makes planning pretty difficult. Especially considering we live 12+ hours from both sets of parents. We have briefly talked about what our plan will be but haven’t set anything in stone yet. Once I’m in active labor, she will either go to our good friend’s house or depending on it plays out we’ll have a babysitter come over and be with her until my parents can get down here to be with her.

What are you doing for the emotional and mental preparation of labor?

Stephen and I are going to sit down and go over all of our resources from our birth course that we took with my good friend Lauren before Ellie. I can’t recommend her course enough. We might also do a 1:1 with her just to make sure Stephen and I both are in the right headspace going into labor and delivery. No matter how many children you have had previously, I think it’s important to do this for every birth. If not, it’s like going to the Olympics and not being in the right headspace to focus and perform your best. That would be just dumb. I also am going to start working through the Christian Hypobirthing app in the next couple of weeks. Physical preparation for birth is important, yes. But mental and emotional preparation is really what is key to remain calm, maintain endurance, and trust that your body will do the work the way the Lord intended it to.

Will you be induced this time?

I was induced with Ellie (you can read her birth story here!) for a few different reasons, one of them being that I had gestational diabetes with her and they worry about a “big baby” in that case (woof… Don’t get me started on that!). Fortunately, I am negative for diabetes with this one (THANK. YOU. JESUS!) so they are going to just let this baby do it’s thing and come when it’s ready! I am excited at the thought of birthing a baby without Pitocin if all goes “according to plan”, that’s for dang sure.

Do you plan to birth this baby unmedicated again?

Yes! That’s my intent but I also don’t put that expectation on myself. If fit hits the shan and I need intervention, I get intervention. However, Ellie’s birth was close to, if not worst case scenario pain wise with the Pitocin and her positioning. We made it through though so with that in mind I intend to just let me body perform as it was created to.

Will the babes be sharing a room?

We haven’t totally worked this out yet with all of our other projects going on. We know that the baby will be in our room for 6ish months. During that time we’re going to transition Ellie to a twin bed and then around that six month mark we’ll either put both of them in the same room or we’re going to make the other bedroom (our current temporary kitchen) into a combined guest bedroom/nursery. It’s most likely going to be the latter because we’d love to have another baby here in Columbus if the Lord decides that’s part of our story so we’d then move this baby in with Ellie and then the third into that nursery/guest bed space. Either way, yes! They will share a room eventually!

Are you going to prepare a nursery?

This goes along with the last answer but nope! We didn’t have one for Ellie since we moved six weeks after she was born and had to complete her room in the Mississippi house once we got here which we didn’t finish until she was six months old. It was perfectly fine for us! I totally understand nesting and wanting to have a space set up for baby but I think that’s more for the parents than anything. All a baby really needs is a milk source, a clean diaper, and a place to sleep and they are dandy.

Did you have to do all the things for this baby that you did with Ellie?

You can read a lot about things we changed in our life on our trying to conceive journey here. In general, I did pretty much everything the same because that’s our lifestyle now. We don’t have any fragrance in our home, we use products that do not contain endocrine disruptors, we support our gut health, we stay very active, etc. The biggest difference is that we weren’t/haven’t been eating a paleo style diet (which we didn’t do the month Ellie was conceived, by the way). In general though we eat nutrient dense meals that we cook at home. I also did use my Progessence Plus method this time around too, which I believe truly is a gift from God!

For tracking, I had borrowed a friend’s Ava bracelet in the months leading up to getting pregnant with Ellie. The month we actually conceived though I wasn’t wearing it or tracking at all. This time around I used this tracker that another friend let me borrow and I really loved it, especially compared to ovulation testing strips. It’s more on the expensive side (you need to buy the testing strips too) but I need my data clearly spelled out for me and this does that. Like with Ellie, this pregnancy was 100% God’s doing. Not only was the cycle tracking app I was using to store ovulation strip data completely off (like around 12-15 days off) compared to what the Clear Blue Tracker data reported but Stephen also just happened to come home from training during that time. All. God. Needless to say, I think that’s why I was so shocked when I tested the following month.

How did you tell Stephen?

Stephen was gone at training and Ellie, the pups, and I were back home in Virginia with my parents when I found out. I remember being so exhausted the night I took the test because Ellie had been so sick and was also going through a big leap so she wasn’t sleeping really at all. In a zombie like state I had an “out-of-nowhere” realization that I should’ve gotten my cycle around that time but hadn’t and so I figured, “Eh, I’ll just take this test and get it over with.” so I did and I remember when it came back positive I thought I was just delirious so I took a shower and went to sleep. I took another one the next morning and was still shocked. I think I remained shocked for another 9ish weeks after that! I was planning on coming up with a fun way to tell Stephen that following weekend when we were together for our friend’s wedding but while going over logistics on FaceTime he kept saying, “I’ll DD at the wedding!” and I kept saying, “No it’s not a big deal, I will!” He was so persistent that I eventually looked at him and was like, “NO. I CAN’T DRINK ANYWAY!” He took a bit to process what I was saying. I think he was just as surprised as I was.

Does this pregnancy feel the same or different compared to Ellie?

It’s hard for me to say exactly because I was still nursing Ellie through the first trimester so I don’t know if my symptoms were worse or better because of that (she weaned around 14 weeks). The second trimester felt almost identical to what I remember experiencing with Ellie. Basically, I felt completely normal with a good dose of fatigue here and there. Week 25 though I felt like I did a 180 and started feeling a lot more pressure and pretty uncomfortable. I soon developed pretty bad SPD (symphysis pubis dysfunction) and vulvar varicosities, neither of which I had with Ellie. It’s definitely not pleasant to talk about (or pleasant feeling) but in case you are experiencing that too, know you’re not alone! Chiropractic care and pelvic floor therapy are doing wonders for me but I do have some really painful evenings if I don’t rest enough during the day or if I’ve been sitting down for a long time (after a long car ride, for example). I surprisingly feel a lot better if I workout compared to when I don’t but I’ve eliminated all bilateral type movements such as lunges, step ups, etc. for now as those definitely make the pain worse. Based on my doctors recommendation, I also caved and bought this not-so-glamorous support contraption thing last night. I’ll report back on how it is!

Let me know if you have any other questions or if I can be of any help! Until next time…

You can find all of the other blog posts I’ve written about our TTC journey and pregnancy HERE.