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Friday, January 11, 2013

Can't believe I'm doing this...

***I am going to preface this post by saying that I cannot believe I am posting this - because it's pretty personal. And there is stuff in here that I wouldn't tell many people, but I am NOT good at writing in my journal so on the blog it goes because I want to remember what's happening in my life right now.***

So I have zero patience - anyone who knows me even a little bit well could tell you that. So when people get pregnant and they wait until they are 12 weeks or 15 weeks or whatever to tell people, it blows my mind. I can't IMAGINE waiting that long to tell the whole world something that I am so excited about. And no, I am not announcing I am pregnant. I wish.

I'm 5 days late. And I just "knew" I was pregnant, but the two tests I have taken, a week or so apart, both confirmed that I am not. And it's not a big deal - this is our first month of not preventing. I REALLY didn't think we'd get pregnant so fast, but for some reason seeing that negative, twice, had me pretty depressed the last few days. Enter the desire to binge. Which in a way is AWESOME - I figured out my trigger {depression} - I figured out WHY I want to binge. And now I can do something about it!

When I don't eat well, that contributes to my depression, which makes me want to binge, which makes me depression, enter vicious cycle so time to fix that!! If worse comes to worse, I can always ask my Dr. to put me back on a mood stabilizer to help with my depression but right now that is the VERY last option. I haven't been writing in my gratitude journal much at all and I know that really helps me not feel depressed. Focusing on all that I have and being grateful has made a world of difference in my personality the last few years. I haven't been reading my scriptures, which also contributes to my depression. I like having a close relationship with my Heavenly Father and I can't do that if I am not reading my scriptures. And I feel guilty for not reading, and guilt always starts my depression spiral. I have been "comparing" myself a lot to friends and people I follow on Instagram - "well my abs don't look like that" or "yeah my arms definitely don't look that toned" or "my jeans are nowhere near that size" and my personal favorite "she weighs HOW much? You fatty!". So I am going to limit how much time I spend on Instagram & Facebook. Those are the two sites that seem to really get me "comparing" and making myself feel bad for not being smaller, more athletic, more toned, better eating habits, blah blah blah. And I have LOTS of my before pictures on my phone that I can turn to that remind me how far I have come. So I have a plan of action to help me with the binging!

Back to not being pregnant... So I just kinda sorta got a feeling when I was in high school that I would have a hard time getting pregnant. Like since I was probably 16 I have thought that when it was "the right time" I would have to really fight to have a baby. So when I prayed about it at the beginning of 2012 and felt really strongly that I needed to lose weight first, I figured that might make my "feeling" go away. And it's made it go away some... I used to be 100% convinced that I would need medical intervention to get pregnant. Now, it's more like 50/50. Some days, I feel like the Lord will bless us for the hard things we have overcome and the changes we have made to be more righteous and that we will just have kids without any trouble or miscarriages or anything. Yeah I don't know how many amazing, kind hearted, loving people there are in the world who have a hard time getting pregnant but I know it's a TON. Just because I have lost weight and gone through the temple and done all these great things doesn't mean that the Lord is going to hand me the rest of my life on a silver platter.

So maybe we will have a hard time getting pregnant? Or maybe we will get pregnant easily but not be able to hold onto the baby and have lots of miscarriages? I don't know. And that's hard for me - to not know. I am very goal oriented, with timeframes and deadlines. Things need to be accomplished at a certain time, and I like to know what the time frame is. Not knowing when Jake will go through the temple has been super hard KILLING me and that's probably EXACTLY what the Lord wants - for me to learn patience. And I have a pretty good feeling that having a baby will be the same way, because I am not learning this whole patience thing very well apparently {I had to wait a while, without a time frame, before I could go through the temple too, before we bought our house, etc.}. And I'm started to get to a place where that's ok if the Lord wants to take his time. Really. I'm not 100% ready to let go of trying to control everything but I am getting there. Because there are some awesome things we can do in the meantime.

We changed our budget this week so that we are living off of Jake's job 100%. We have been saying for a while that we needed to do it, and we made a new budget so that we can ACTUALL do it. It's different from what we were doing before, so it's definitely going to feel weird the first few months of limiting how much we spend certain places but that means that 100% of my income goes towards funding our Emergency Fund. We already changed my direct deposit so that it goes right in savings and we aren't tempted to spend part of it before we transfer the rest to savings {I HATE pulling money out of savings - I always feel really guilty about it so having it go right in should help a lot}. By saving 100% of my income, we will have our fully funded Emergency Fund by July 1st. What an awesome thing to have for Independence Day - we will be able to declare ourselves financially stress free in case Jake were to lose his job!

I can continue to work on losing weight. Right now, I am kinda in a weird place where I want to tone my legs and my arms and build muscle and all that jazz but I don't necessarily want to work on my abs because having a baby will kinda ruin that {temporarily!} anyway.  But in the meantime, until we have a baby, I NEED to be working on them to get my body in as good of shape as possible so that I have something to work towards after baby. I am smaller now than I was in high school. I am smaller now than I was at our wedding. So it's not like after a baby I can say that I want to get back to my high school body. I want to want to get back to where I was when we found out we were pregnant. So continue to workout I shall!

I really want to be sealed before we have a baby, in case of a miscarriage for one but I just really want to be sealed first. It's coming - I know I have said that so many times but it really is coming. So it's not that bad that we aren't pregnant yet - we want that to happen first.

We I want another dog before we have a baby, which means we need a fence so that the dogs can play outside {this is gonna be a bigger dog, since Max is little}. That's coming - and financially it's a burden but because I am able to work {where if we had kids I wouldn't be} we can make that happen before we have kids.

We want to go on a trip. Preferrably a cruise but at this point, we just want to do something other than St. George or Vegas haha. I would like to go somewhere... different. Somewhere we may not be able to go to again for a long time.

I am grateful that we aren't pregnant yet. Even though I feel so ready, and I want it SO badly, obviously the Lord has something else in mind. And I trust the Lord - I know what He has in mind for me is SO worth the wait. But I don't know what He has in mind- and THAT is what is hard for me. Not knowing what He wants me to learn, and how long it will be before we are able to be parents. And I think I sound super whiny - I have SO many friends who have been trying for years with no success. We've been "trying" for a month. I shouldn't even be stressed. But because I have had that "feeling" for 9 ish years, I am worried about whether or not we will be able to get pregnant in a reasonable amount of time on our own. But it'll all work out - I'll keep you posted on what happens from here on out with our goal of expanding our family!

1 comment:

  1. Hey Ashley, I don't know if you ever heard my story of how Scarlett came about or not. But I didn't get married in the temple initially either. We got married in 2008 and then Jon was going to deploy in June of 2010. We wanted to get sealed before he left so we spent many months working on that. I also didn't want to have any kids until we got sealed, just like you. We also talked about trying to have a baby before he left. I said absolutely not because I didn't want to be pregnant by myself because he was leaving! We got sealed on June 10th, and on June 13th I found out I was pregnant. I was SO upset (as sad as that sounds) but what women would want to get pregnant RIGHT before her husband left for a YEAR? So anyways, I finally got used to the idea and then after a while I was SO excited. So looking back, I really remember two main things. Number one, Heavenly Father truly knows what is best for us in our own individual situations. Me being pregnant while my husband was gone, ended up being the best thing ever because I was able to concentrate my time and effort and emotion on getting ready to have a baby (baby showers, decorating, shopping, dr appointments, etc) rather than spend that year sitting and sulking because my husband wasn't around and my life was miserable. At the time I remember saying "If I got pregnant, it would seriously be the WORST possible scenario ever." But honestly, my pregnancy is what got me through my husbands deployment. It was actually THE BEST scenario for me. I would have never known or thought it, but heavenly father knew. Also, the other thing I always think about, is at the time we got sealed I didn't know I was pregnant. But when I found out, I realized that that tiny tiny baby that I had no idea was inside me when I went through the temple, WAS in me when I went through. That made my experience SO much more meaningful to me. I won't go into detail, but when you go through the temple there is a part where you are blessed physically, and little did I know that there was a tiny being inside me. Like I said, looking back that made the whole experience have SO much more meaning. Anyways, I just thought I would share. Sorry this is so long. But you are doing what you should and so it will come when the time is right. I know that's what everyone says and sometimes we hate it, but I am living proof that it is TRUE! :)

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