Sometimes I am amazed at how far I’ve come in this pregnancy. As we are approaching what would’ve been the one year mark from my original due date before my last miscarriage, I can’t believe that we will soon be welcoming our little girl. I wish I could tell the Jen back then that everything would be OK, and that her dream of another child wasn’t that far away. But life isn’t like that is it? I wish I could tell the Jen that found out she was pregnant in January that we would safely be making it to 32 weeks, but I can’t. That Jen had to suffer a bit. And as I reflect on that time in my life I can only be grateful for how far we’ve come. I wish I could say I was thankful for the journey but I’m not. I am thankful for the healthy baby girl in my belly right now. I am thankful for her moving and her steady heartbeat, and I am thankful that I will soon hold her in my arms…but did I really have to go through all that?

I remember after going through what we did before having our little man telling people that it was kind of like waking up from a nightmare. Once I had him all the bad dreams went away, and everything that it took to get him didn’t matter. It was a bad dream that I had woken up from, and it was wonderful. But you can’t tell someone who is going through a hard time that it will all work out, because A: that doesn’t help them in the present and B: You never know. It’s only after the fact that a person can get some relief and know that everything is OK.

In January I was an absolute mess. It’s crazy to think that every time the doctor would call and increase my progesterone prescription that I jumped to negative thoughts and believed my pregnancy would end. But I did. I cried and I cried a lot. After finding out last time at 12 weeks that I lost my baby, all I could think about was that it could happen again. No matter how many times doctors and nurses told me that the odds were in my favor I just couldn’t allow myself to believe it. I didn’t think I would be a person who had two miscarriages so why couldn’t it happen again? At the time I wondered if I could give my son the gift of being a big brother, and if I could, at what cost?

But we made it through that time. People will ask if it went by fast and I have to say NO…it did not. The cold winter didn’t help and time moved as slowly as possible. It wasn’t till about the 20 week mark when we saw our baby girl, and I could feel her regularly that I felt more able to relax. That is when time began to move. Now as we are in our 32nd week I can tell you that time is moving faster than I ever could have imagined it could. Only our little girl knows when she will be making her appearance and in the mean time I am scrambling to grab control over it. I know I can’t….but I try.

I feel that I almost went through two different pregnancies. The one BEFORE and the on AFTER she began to move. When it comes to having a baby we can never truly know that everything will be OK. There are so many “what ifs” and its enough to drive a woman mad. The worrying about your baby begins the moment you find out you are pregnant….and if we are being honest, it continues for the rest of their lives (or so I am told). But the fear I felt when I was hoping and praying that this pregnancy would last was scarring. I feel like each struggle we’ve had in the baby making department has left me a little broken. But aren’t we all a little broken in some way? It’s crazy to say that this is my FOURTH pregnancy when I only have ONE child. But it’s the truth.

But no matter the journey we are here. We will soon be welcoming our little girl into our family and it doesn’t matter about what happened before, because it’s the past. I suck at it, but I can only live in the present, and my present is pretty awesome right now (OK well not totally awesome since I am uncomfortable and huge, but you catch my drift). We have come so far, and taken a road that was a little twisty and turny but we are here. I just can’t wait to meet her.