We’re Having a Baby! The First Trimester…

Oh my goodness.

Of all the blog posts I’ve shared the last few years, this one is my favorite yet!

Drew and I are having a baby!

This all still feels like a bit of a dream, and we are so excited, grateful and full of joy to share this season with you! Thank you for so many kind words, comments, dm’s, questions, and all of the love and prayers you’ve shown us since announcing over on social media last weekend! Drew and I have been dreaming of and praying for this experience and we are over the moon excited to start this new journey with you!

It’s been quite some time since my last blog post, so I know I have a lot to catch up on. As I wrap up my first trimester and the news is finally out, I thought the best way to do that was with a little q&a of some questions I’ve been getting since our announcement! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you thank you thank you for sharing our joy! I can’t wait for so much more with pregnancy, motherhood and all things baby in the days to come !!!

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first  trimester q&a

Any advice for staying patient and hopeful when ttc?

Note: I originally had this first question at the end of the post, but felt it was too important and needed to be said here at the beginning.

Please let me start by saying if you are in the process of ttc, struggling with fertility, or have experienced the loss of a baby or child, I am praying for you. I have walked alongside friends with so many different stories and journeys and I know pregnancy can be such a delicate topic.

If you are in that season of waiting, whether it’s been just a couple months or several years, please know that you are prayed over daily, and on my heart constantly. I truly don’t feel I have the adequate words to express my heart for you, but please know it is something I pray about daily, both for the women in my life who I know are in this season, but also those whom I don’t know. My best encouragement and advice to you are words that I know to be true in any part of life…

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11

Two women that I admire and look up to so much who have walked so gracefully through a season of waiting have posts here and here that I hope you’ll find as encouragement and will give you hope. You are not alone and are so prayed over!

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When is your due date?

Due date is early September! I am 14 weeks now! Hello, second trimester!

How did you tell Drew?

It was the craziest day! A few days after Christmas I woke up one morning and realized I was a couple days late. I took a pregnancy test, not expecting it to be positive, but it was! I was so excited and could hardly believe it. Drew was laying on the couch watching TV so I quickly rushed out of our bathroom and told him I was running to Target to grab some last minute things for our upcoming trip. I didn’t give him much time to question and I was out the door. I ran to Target (masked) and quickly grabbed a card and put the pregnancy tests in a gift bag for him to open. Side note: both Drew and I had started feeling a little sick around that same time. I was thinking maybe it was just a cold from some crazy weather changes and constantly going through the holidays, but we decided to go get covid tested later that afternoon just in case because we were supposed to fly out to Wisconsin in the next few days for my Miss America sister’s wedding that I was in on NYE. When I got home from Target, I asked for his help to open a Christmas gift I had gotten, and he wasn’t very happy that I asked him to get up when he wasn’t really feeling very good and was trying to rest! Once he opened it, that quickly changed 🙂 We were so excited and just spent the rest of the morning grinning from ear to ear, despite not feeling that great! Around lunch we went to get covid tested and ended up both positive. So, I had a positive pregnancy and covid test all within a few hours. It was quite the day and quarantine for us! Sadly we missed the NYE trip and wedding, but that time at home together for the days following finding out we would be parents was super special to us!

How did you tell your family and friends?

We wanted to wait until my first doctor appointment for confirmation and a sonogram before sharing the news with our families! At 8 weeks, around the end of January, I had my first appointment and then that weekend we told our families! Prior to that, the only people who knew we were pregnant were our wedding photographer and my principal! I think we did a pretty good job of truly surprising both of our families and neither of them really saw it coming, which made it so much fun! That weekend on Sunday we had Drew’s parents over to help move some of Drew’s old office furniture from our garage to storage. They really had no clue, and once they came over we gave his mom a gift “for their boat dock” that was really a chalkboard sign letting her know she would be a grandma! His whole family was so excited! Baby Evans is the first baby on his side of the family among him and his sister, and also his cousins, so we can’t wait for all of the fun things ahead, especially the holidays!

Trying to surprise my family was a little bit trickier for me. I thought surely over the course of the month of knowing, my mom would pick up on it somehow, someway, but she didn’t, and it was so fun to surprise her with it! I knew if I pointedly asked my family to all get together one night for dinner they might catch on, so instead I decided to approach it from a different angle. Baker, my two year old nephew, is all about singing happy birthday and blowing out candles anytime we eat a dessert at a family meal, even if it’s not someone’s birthday! The dates lined up perfectly with what was his half-birthday, so I decided to have a mini half-birthday celebration and take him his own cupcake to blow out candles! I got my family together for that Sunday night after dinner time and didn’t tell them, but I brought a gift too. Inside the gift was a baby doll and a onesie and t-shirt for Baker that said “Cousins Make the Best Friends”. I had Baker open the gift with the help of Nana and Pop and it took my mom a few minutes to realize what was going on. I had told her it was just a little truck I saw at Target and thought he needed. When she saw the onesie after he pulled out the baby she just kept saying “oh my gosh” over and over again. It was a super sweet night!

What part of pregnancy are you most excited for?

Oh my goodness, so many things! In the first trimester it was *so* much fun to share the news with our sweet family and friends and share our excitement with them! We waited until 8 weeks to share with anyone, even our families, so that made that time really really special for us. Moving forward I think the things I’m most excited for in pregnancy are getting to feel baby kick for the first time (I can’t wait for Drew to get to be a part of that too and feel kicks on my belly) and also creating/designing the nursery! I’ve been spending a lot of time on Pinterest dreaming up that space and I can’t wait to get started on it!

How are you feeling?

So many of you have been so sweet to check on me and see how I’m doing, and it means a lot! Emotionally, I’m great. Drew and I are over the moon excited and feel so grateful that this is the season of life the Lord has us in. We don’t take a second of it for granted and truly could not be happier.

Physically, being completely honest, pregnancy hit me pretty hard in my first trimester! One symptom I wasn’t really prepared for was the fatigue! Prior to pregnancy I was not a napper, I’m very much a get up and go kinda girl, but around week 5 or 6 I lost so much energy. I’ve had to learn to give myself a lot of grace in this season, because with a full time job of teaching Kindergarten it’s been a bit of a challenge, hence why I took a major step back on social media and here on the blog! Most days after work I was on the couch at home the remainder of the evening until bed, which is very unlike me. Also, there have been several days at school when students were away at enrichments that I had to lay on the floor behind my desk to help with the nausea and fatigue when it was intense! Thankfully it’s not quite that bad anymore and I’m starting to feel better day by day!

Have you been sick? How do you manage morning sickness and nausea?

I started getting nauseous and sick around week 5, much earlier than I anticipated, and am still working through that now at 14 weeks. Once the nausea started happening it was pretty much a constant thing up until maybe about a week ago. The only times I really didn’t feel sick were when sleeping or sometimes right after eating. Thankfully, I am usually able to keep food down, but I’ve definitely gotten sick multiple times and the nausea lingered just about all day every day. In the last couple of weeks it’s not as constant, and a bit more sporadic, but when it does hit it is much more intense than before! I’ve been living off of saltines and sprite zero to help get through it! I’ve also tried several different things like these pregnancy bath salts, ginger candy, Unisom + b6 vitamins, and many more things, but unfortunately I can’t say I’ve found anything that had made me feel fully better. I won’t lie and say it’s been easy, because it hasn’t been, but I am still so grateful. Every time I feel sick I try to remind myself how precious this experience is and that the nausea is a sign of a healthy growing baby.

What was your first symptom?

Because we were actively trying, I didn’t notice any symptoms prior to finding out I was pregnant. After I was a couple days late and had a positive test, I started to notice a heightened sense of smell for sure though, so I guess you could say that was my first symptom. Things that Drew couldn’t smell were super strong to me! Also, acne… I’ve never had such horrible hormonal acne in my life. My cheeks and jawline have been really bad the last three months.

Any funny cravings or food aversions?

I haven’t had any specific or strong cravings so far. It’s more like on any given day something will sound really good and I’ll have to have it right then, but no one thing has just been a go-to craving yet. Although I have been living off of one specific breakfast sandwich at Starbucks daily because it’s the only thing that I can barely stomach in the mornings with nausea. That, and pink lemonade!

My aversions are mainly to smells rather than foods. I absolutely cannot handle the smell of Keurig coffee, or hot coffee at all, but funny enough iced coffee still occasionally sounds/tastes good to me. My biggest smell aversion has been to our fragrances in our Pura device, so it’s been unplugged the last couple of weeks, and I am eagerly waiting for the day to bring it back! Also, the presence of our pantry makes me gag… every. single. time. It’s not just the smell of it, but the very presence of looking/standing in it, weird I know!

What life changes have you made since finding out you were pregnant?

Besides being severely slowed down from my normal pace there have been some other changes for me in daily life as well! Unfortunately I haven’t really been able to work out at all in the first trimester. There have been occasional walks here and there, but I’m hoping as I start to feeling better to consistently be active moving forward! Also, I’ve made a lot of changes to my skincare routines (this website is super helpful to find pregnancy safe products) as well as cutting back on hot baths! I never knew that was a thing for pregnancy! A few books I’ve been reading that are super helpful are these and also this blog has a lot of great advice that airs much on the side of caution. Of course it’s always most important to ask questions and advice from your doctor when in doubt!

Do you know the gender? When will you find out?

Not yet! Call me crazy, but we (mainly me) decided to forgo finding out the gender by blood test, which we could have done last week. Drew wasn’t thrilled about it because he’s impatient and ready to know, but we are going to get to find out together, just the two of us, at an ultrasound here in a couple of weeks… and we are *so* excited about it!!!

What do you think, boy or girl?

I hesitate to even answer this one because I am trying not to have too many expectations! Boy or girl, we are thrilled and cannot wait to welcome this sweet baby into our family! I know God knows just exactly what our little family needs and that’s what it will be, and I remind myself of that daily because it really is the best feeling to know He already knows!

With that being said, Drew and I have both felt from the very beginning for some reason like it was a girl. A lot of my symptoms have pointed towards girl as well, but that’s not always the most telling either, so who knows. I think because of all of those things I’ve been imagining baby as a girl a lot, so I am trying to stop doing that and just enjoy this season of the waiting! Boy or girl, we truly don’t care and are just so excited to know!

Do you have names picked out already?

We have a couple of girl names picked out that are family names that I have loved forever! Both of them are really special to us! However, boy names seem to really be tripping us up right now! Thank goodness we have plenty of time to get that all figured out!

Have you bought any clothes for baby yet?

Y’all, not a single clothing purchase has been made for baby… yet! Are you proud of me? Because I sure am of myself! I know this will likely quickly change once we know the gender, but for now I am going to pat myself on the back because I think that may be a new record for me! 😉

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Whew! That was a long one! Hopefully that fills you in and gives you a little update on what’s been going on the last few months I’ve been away! I’ll be sure to do this again at the end of the second trimester, but until then if you have a question, feel free to leave it in the comments! Thank you again for the sweet messages, well wishes and for helping us celebrate this sweet season! We are so grateful!

xx,

Madison