We’re Having a Baby! : )

So it’s true! We are having a baby! We are soo excited about it and to finally share with everyone. We are expecting our little pecan to arrive early October.

Be fair warned, this post is gonna be long. : ) The Lord has been at work in so many ways. And as much as some of the details in this story may not seem important, I can’t help but share and glorify God in the process. The last 12 weeks have been a roller coaster of emotions! I’m already learning so much. Here are a few lessons I’m learning:

1. God is our comforter – I am queen of daily comforts. I have said before, I love routines like my hot tea in the mornings, reading at night before bed. I have two or three “sleeping positions” that will have me knocked out in two minutes flat. I’m used to a comfortable, simple life. Pregnancy has officially shaken that! Some of my favorite foods are on the do not eat list, sleeping with a bump is getting increasingly more difficult and, oh the morning sickness! I am very intune to what’s happening in my body. This is a second cousin to hypochondria. It’s not that I make up feeling bad. I just feel even the small things that you probably shouldn’t feel. Not the perfect pairing to pregnancy. I’ve never experienced anything like it! 6 weeks straight of sickness that is quite deceptively called MORNING sickness. It’s more of an all day affair. Oh y’all, I had no idea what a wimp I was. God has been strengthening my “tough girl” muscles so much. I know I’ll need it in the coming months and, of course, as a mom. There have been so many tough days where I’ve just wanted to throw up my hands in impatience and say, “I can’t do this! I’m tired of feeling sick and tired. I want to be productive, go to the gym and clean my own dishes!” My patience is growing and the days don’t drag on like they used to. I’m finding comfort in the Word more and more instead of trying to find little external comforts in my day and when I do see those small comforts in my day, I am increasingly grateful knowing it’s the Lord sending them to me.

2. God is our provider – I experienced the biggest month of business in January. When I decided to do stationery full-time, event planning was still a source of half my income. The Lord has blessed me each month since starting in September to make about the same amount I was making with the event planning. But in January, our orders and profit doubled! At first I thought I didn’t know if I could keep up with this happening each month. I had become super busy. But the Lord knew what I could handle. We found out on January 24 that we were pregnant. It was about a week or two later that I started getting super sick. The past two months, I’ve only been able to work 3-4 hours a day and have had to nap or lay down the rest of the day in complete exhaustion. And God has limited my client list to where those 3-4 hours have been enough! That boost from January has been more than enough to make the past two months of shorter days OK. I’m always in AWE seeing how God plans ahead for me. I had no idea in the middle of January WHY we were having a big month. March is usually the big month of the first six month. But God had a better plan.

3. God sends people in our lives to walk with us – Tyler has been such a blessing throughout this whole process! He’s taken over the cooking and cleaning for the most part and simply rolls with things. If I go to bed at 8, he’ll get tucked with me and read until it’s an acceptable time for a non-pregnant adult to actually fall asleep. ; ) He loves me unconditionally, even when I cry because he got the wrong kind of cheese from the store. Or when I wake up cranky. His unconditional love was one of the things I loved about him most even when we were just best friends and I couldn’t imagine that it could grow even more, but it has and it’s been amazing to experience.

4. Mommyhood is hard work but worth every bit of it – This might seem like an obvious one to you, but the first two weeks after finding out I was pregnant, I experienced some slight depression. Everything I researched or read talked about how hard and terrible being a mom was. It had me so discouraged and honestly, made me feel like my happy life was ticking away and would be over by the fall. It was a weird time in my life where I should had been so overjoyed but instead felt so sad. Around that time, I remember Emily posting a photo of her little boy asking to hold her hand as they drove through the car wash. That photo meant so much to me! It was a sweet moment and Emily mentioned how she wanted him to stay like that forever. She was enjoying him so much! I still don’t know why that spoke to me the way it did, but I think it’s hard for moms to put into words how much of a blessing being a mom is, and maybe that’s why we hear more stressed out stories or see more Facebook statuses about the hard parts. I ended up emailing Emily to say thank you because I went back to that photo often the following weeks and it got me out of that sad place. Emily has an incredible story that anyone who wants to become a momma someday or who is a momma should read. I honestly think it’s the reason she has so much gratitude for her sweet boy and it was a changing point for me! Since then, I have been blessed to hear so many more stories from moms so excited about their role. It’s meant so much to me and I think was a good reminder that I truly want to be conscious and articulate as best I can what a blessing being a mom is.

Y’all, I am so thrilled to see our little pecan’s face in six short months and hold them in our arms. Until then, I’m reveling in this opportunity to grow, to be stretched, to step out of the boat, to learn how to worry less and trust more and to continue to love our pecan and my sweet husband even more.

12 weeks baby bump! : )