We're Having A Baby! – Cait McDonnell

It’s finally time to share our big news, we’re having a baby! Mike and I are beyond excited to become parents and to start this journey of life as a family of three, especially after our miscarriage last December.

We decided to start trying again as soon as my body recovered from our recent loss and when I saw a faint second line on a pregnancy test in April, I couldn’t believe my eyes!

Here’s what happened:

My Mom and brother were coming for a visit the first week of April and I told Mike I wanted to take a pregnancy test the day before their arrival. In risk of sharing too much detail (y’all know I don’t hold anything back), I wasn’t technically late that month yet. My cycle was still a bit off from the miscarriage and I wasn’t expecting my period for at least a few days. But I figured what the heck, let’s try a test anyway.

Mike woke up at 5:30am as usual and went downstairs, I usually stay in bed for another hour. I was so excited though and my stomach was filled with butterflies so I told myself I should just take the test, it’ll be negative and then I can go back to sleep.

Well, it wasn’t negative! I stared at that thing for a good 5 minutes and even took another to be sure. A quick science lesson: HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin, is a hormone the body makes during pregnancy. As the first trimester increases, so do HCG levels. This is the hormone that most home pregnancy tests detect, therefore showing a positive result if HCG is detected in the urine.

After two tests showing positive, though with faint positive lines, I was pretty darn sure I was pregnant and told Mike to come upstairs where we both stared at the tests a while, giggled and cried a bit.

The thing is, we didn’t want to get too excited, we didn’t want to get our hopes up. I had just had an early miscarriage a few months prior and we knew it could happen again. We definitely managed our expectations this time around but we were both very hopeful for this baby.

That week I continued to take a test each day and the second pink line got darker and darker each time (meaning that HCG was increasing, a good sign!).

We told my Mom and brother while they were in Charleston that week which was so exciting even though we all were a little subdued because it was so early in the pregnancy.

The following few weeks I did quite a bit of blood work, checking and re-checking HCG and progesterone levels and we went for an ultrasound at 6 weeks because my doctor wanted to confirm this indeed was a viable pregnancy.

When I saw a smile flash across our doctor’s face before I could determine what I was looking at on that screen, I knew we had good news. We even saw the flicker of the heart beat! That’s when we both relaxed a tiny bit and really let ourselves smile.

I’m now 16 weeks and y’all, it’s been hard to keep a secret from you! Only our parents and a few very close friends knew early on and we slowly told more family once I hit the second trimester. I wanted to tell you guys many times and even thought some of you would start to wonder, especially when I was MIA from social media because all I could do was lay on the couch sucking on peppermint candies with a ginger ale in hand. (More on how I felt during the first trimester coming soon). We decided to keep this (mostly) to ourselves until we felt comfortable, and here we are!

I am so grateful to be able to share our sweet baby news with y’all. Everyone’s journey to pregnancy is different and each path needs to be respected and given lots of grace and love. I will never forget seeing that positive test in April and feeling happy, scared, excited and nervous all at the same time.

We are thrilled and thankful to start this next chapter in our lives.

I have a lot of pregnancy related posts to share and am going to start with a blog post recapping the first trimester and a bunch of details. In the meantime, though, here are some answers to questions you may have 🙂

How far along are you? 16 weeks

When are you due? December 9th

Do you know the sex yet? No, and we won’t be finding out! Mike thinks I’m going to cave when it comes time to decorate the nursery but we’ve both always said we’d wait to find out, so that’s what we’re doing! Plus, I feel like it’ll be good motivation to push at the end 😉

Have you thought of names? We have a running list and think girls names are much easier to choose than boy. We won’t be sharing the name until baby is here though, so sit tight!

Any food aversions? Oh yes. During the first tri I basically didn’t want anything that I normally eat — avocado, eggs, vegetables, chicken, steaks. For the most part I’m back to eating all of the above though there are still times where Mike will recommend we get something to eat and I veto it right away.

Do you have any cravings? Nothing in particular yet. There were a few funny things in the first trimester, like being in Publix and deciding that I NEEDED salt and vinegar potato chips that very second, and eating half the bag while walking around the store. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had those things, probably 10 years ago!

How have you been feeling? There were weeks in the first trimester that were pretty rough. If you’ve been following along for a while, you may know that I have a phobia of vomit. Thankfully, that didn’t happen (I really hope I don’t jinx myself by writing this). But nausea was there almost constantly throughout the day and sometimes at night. I’ll go into more detail in the first trimester recap post!

Big thanks to our photographer Julie Livingston for these perfect shots of us loving on my (still tiny) bump! My skirt can be found here and dress here(not maternity). These are the links to Mike’s pants and shoes.