2 weeks and a lifetime later

Happy (slightly belated) 2 week birthday to my little man. We're settling in nicely at home. My hormones have settled down for the most part; now when I have mood swings I can usually see a correlation to how much sleep I lost the night before and how crazy the kids are being. Elizabeth informed us the other day that I'm a "little elephant" and I didn't burst into tears or otherwise meltdown. This is a definite improvement.

As I think back to January, when I first found out I was pregnant, it doesn't seem possible that it's been 8 months (I was late finding out I had a bun in the oven). It seems more like it's been an entire lifetime. At that point, I couldn't even believe I was pregnant, much less be excited about it. The news was totally unexpected. You always hear that contraceptives are 99% effective but you don't expect to fall in that other 1%. My copy of What To Expect When You're Expecting didn't exactly cover how to cope or adjust. None of the pregnancy books I read did. They talked about the happiness and joy of expecting a new baby but didn't get in to how to deal with feeling like you don't want a pregnancy you've found yourself in unexpectedly after trying to prevent it.

To say it was a shock would be something of an understatement. I cried and they weren't happy tears. I had just weaned off of the Zoloft I had started taking at 38 weeks pregnant as a precaution against PostPartum Depression. My youngest was 9 months old, I wasn't even out of the "danger zone" for PPD. I was still losing baby weight and had just gotten back in to clothes without elastic waistbands. I had plans for all sorts of things I wanted to do that were now thrown out the window or put on hold for an unknown amount of time. It took a while to get past the surreal feeling of "This can't be real. I'm not actually pregnant." and to accept that yes, I was in fact heading straight back in to maternity clothes. The entire pregnancy was a roller coaster of emotions.

And yet, I look at my baby and now I can't imagine life without him any more than I can imagine life without either of my girls or my husband. It's incredible to me that I've come full circle. For most of my pregnancy I was scared that I wouldn't bond with my son, that I would feel disconnected or something because of how up and down my emotions were, how upset I was to be pregnant, and how long it took me to even accept that I WAS pregnant, much less be excited about it. That hasn't been the case at all. It's been a bumpy road and an incredible journey with a lot of emotional twists and turns, but I'm happy with the destination I've arrived at and I look forwards to a new and incredible journey and destination with our newest family member. In the beginning, I didn't see how the birthing day could be a wonderful day but it was. It was one of the 4 best days of my life.