Before I Was Pregnant

I quit taking birth control pills over two years ago. They were making me crazy.

I've been on several different kinds of birth control pills in the course of my reproductive lifetime. With each kind, I would use it for a long time and then it would slowly start having bad side effects. With the first one, I started having breakthrough bleeding, where I would bleed even when it wasn't time for my period. With the last one, for about two weeks every month I was an emotional wreck. Its hard to figure out what's going on when you're just FEELING out of sorts and don't have any physical symptoms to point you in a certain direction. But I started to suspect that it was the birth control pills. I talked to Husband about it and we decided that it would be best for me to stop taking them.

I researched the "calendar method"-- because what married couple wants to use condoms all of the time? I didn't go so far as to take my resting body temperature every morning to see when I was ovulating, but I did make a little calendar and write down when my period started and ended. I kept track of my cycle and monitored symptoms like mood, breast tenderness, and cervical mucous. I got to know the rhythms of my body quite well.

I'm very thankful that I did this for so long and got to know what to expect of my body, because it helped me realize that I was pregnant. Like I said before, I had a bit of bleeding at first, and a less observant woman might have mistaken this spotting for her period. I noticed, though, that lots of things seemed different that month with regard to my normal cycles, and so I decided to take a pregnancy test, just in case. Turns out that my instinct was right.

As bad as my morning sickness is, I'd never be one of those ladies that didn't find out she was pregnant until she was, like, six months along. BUT I could have fairly easily missed that first month. How sad to miss out on a whole month of pregnancy! And I would have been drinking the occasional beer or three in the meantime, completely unaware of the baby inside of me. Yikes!

So, little Baby, this is the story of how we met, you and I. Mommy's aversion to birth control pills and two obsessive years of tracking her menstrual cycle eventually lead her and Daddy to say, "This is silly. Let's just see what happens." So we stopped trying to avoid pregnancy and just relaxed and enjoyed our time together. And then the best thing in world happened, Baby-- YOU!