On January 7th of this new year, we found out that we are expecting baby number four! It is still early in my pregnancy, but I want to keep track of my prenatal journey and reflect a little upon our journey to conception on my blog, like I did while pregnant with Serafina. Plus, I am very excited to be a new mom again and wanted to share the good news!

We always wanted more children, but with Serafina’s autism and delayed development, in 2013 when we were considering trying again, we decided to wait. We just both felt that the time wasn’t right. Things did get rough for our family for a while when Serafina was going through some big difficulties and frustrations and so it was a good thing we didn’t try to get pregnant that year.

We found out in September, 2014 that Serafina was on the autism spectrum. Since then she has gone through many changes and phases and is changing more all the time. We have also had over a year to adjust and adapt to the reality of living with and raising a daughter who has special needs.

Through everything we’ve gone through in these past years, I have still always known that Serafina wouldn’t be my last child. Sometimes I feared she might be, but Craig and I both wanted another and felt that we were not afraid to try again in 2015.

In 2014, I had a rough year. It was a year of soul searching and needing to grow as a woman and mother. I was also adjusting to our new reality and was going through many stresses as Autumn was going through the 9 year change, I watched Serafina struggle and lose her speech, and faced the fear of potentially having to give up my dream of having a large family. The stress led me to lose weight and lose my cycles and so I had to gain weight and get my cycles back and regular before we could try for another baby. This began in November 2014 and I got my cycles back January 2015 and thankfully became regular like clockwork for all of the entire year. This meant for me, cutting back on my physical activity and adding milk products back into my diet. I believe that adding some cheese, yogurt, and sour cream (I still don’t drink milk) here and there in my diet helped my fertility. I still prefer vegan food, lots of veggies, fruits and whole grains, but to stay healthy and have a menstrual cycle, I have found that I need a bit of dairy. I also love to be active and have to be careful not to do too much and to eat enough to refuel myself.

For the beginning of 2015, I was still a bit scared of starting to try, so we were just sort of not trying, not preventing, but that didn’t seem to be working, at least not as fast as I wanted it to. I looked up some information online about tracking my fertility and predicting ovulation and we did that from August-November. Still no luck. At this point, I was worried that it might never happen and that maybe I wasn’t even ovulating.

In November, 2015, after coming back from our Vancouver trip, I decided to buy a Clearblue digital ovulation predictor kit and that helped me to find out when I was ovulating in my cycle. We used it for that month and December as well. December was a strange month for me, I got my period early and ovulated way late in my cycle. When I was taking my tests, I kept getting high fertility for 5 days in a row, with no peak. I was down to my last ovulation stick and on the 23rd of December I got my peak fertility reading. We conceived on Christmas eve, a wonderful gift and just what I wanted for Christmas! Surprisingly, it was also the last month of 2015.

So, here I am, nearly 5 weeks along, due to have our newest addition around September 13th, 2016. By that time, Autumn will be one month away from turning 12, Kesa will be 8, and Serafina will be 5!

I am feeling tired and a bit moody already. I cried a few times and my hunger has come on strong more than once. Still no cravings or food aversions, but I am sure that they will come soon. Also, no nausea or any other typical symptoms yet, since I found out early.

We are hoping for a healthy and happy baby! Your positive thoughts and prayers are greatly appreciated!

I am so looking forward to holding a new baby again! 🙂