Sleep By Alex Podcast Ep 4 - I'm Pregnant!
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Sleep by Alex podcast. I am a certified pediatric sleep consultant and a mom of three, and I will be bringing you quick science backed sleep advice to get you and your baby or toddler sleeping well
Hey everyone. Thank you for coming back. As always, I am so happy you're here. Today's episode is going to be a tad bit different than the previous ones. I'm not necessarily going to be bringing you quick sleep advice for your baby or toddler, but I am sure you will still find some tidbits of useful information in here because
most of us listening to this are either pregnant or have been pregnant, or plan to be pregnant. And today I'm talking all about my pregnancy So far. Yes. I'm pregnant again with my fourth baby. I can't believe it. I'm gonna have four kids. I could be totally crazy, but I guess we'll find out in a few months.
Today I'll be sharing about my journey of getting pregnant [00:01:00] and my plan with the kids and how my first trimester went. Some tips and tricks for surviving that, especially if you have other kids. , things I'm nervous or excited about.
Lots more.
First, a little bit about me and my family. If you don't know already.
I have been with my husband since we were in high school, so that means we've been together for like 19 years now and we've been married for about nine years and we currently have three kids.
My three kids are two, four, and six. They are boy, girl, boys. So the girl's right in the middle.
And now number four is due at the beginning of October. Funny enough, both of my boys are October babies, so they're a little bit later in October, the 18th and the 24th. This one's due October 4th, so we'll see if we'll get a third October baby. It's just my time to have babies, I guess.
And it also means that by the time this baby is born, both of the boys will have a birthday shortly after. So my oldest will be turning [00:02:00] seven right after the baby's born, and my youngest will be turning three and my daughter turns five over the summer.
That feels really exciting and hopeful for me because my first two were pretty close together. They were like 20 months apart. So it definitely felt like having two babies at one time. And then each subsequent pregnancy I waited a little bit longer. So the second two are like two years, four months apart, I believe.
And then the third spacing will be almost three years. Exactly.
So when I hear that I'm gonna have a newborn with a three, five, and 7-year-old, I'm like, are you kidding me? I can totally rock that. My three-year-old is out of diapers and can talk to me.
And then the others are seven and five, and they'll also be in school. So I'm like, okay. I know obviously having four kids is going to be hard. There are gonna be so many moments that I wanna pull my hair out and just cry, and I'm sure I will, but I, I'm really not nervous this time around.
I am just [00:03:00] so excited and hopeful for this baby. And while I know that there's going to be so many tough moments, my kids are all really excited for this baby to be born. , and I think they're gonna be the perfect addition to our family. So I am currently 17 weeks along.
It feels like forever because I found out I was pregnant at like. Three weeks, five days or three weeks. Four days or something crazy like that. I'm sure some of you're on the same boat as me when you're like testing as soon as physically possible, and then you feel like you've been pregnant for an eternity when you're like barely in your second trimester.
You all sent me some questions too that I can answer on this podcast on my Instagram, so thank you so much for that.
So I'm gonna kind of like pepper those in here, here and there. Um, but I will answer the question, did I always plan to have four kids? Because if you would've asked me, gosh, like a year and a half ago, I would say no, we're 100% done. We're having three kids. So I always knew I wanted a lot of kids and [00:04:00] by a lot, I mean like three or four.
I'm like, I definitely at least want three, but four, I would love to have four.
The first three were like, no question we're gonna have three. And even with a third, like being pregnant with him, I told people, no, this might not be the last one I had in my head. I would for sure keep going and.
And have a fourth kid if I was able to, then he was born and how do I put this without getting into the weeds? Basically life got a little crazy at the same time as him being bored. And it was hard having three kids just completely rocked my world, and I think we were just going through a lot as a family in general at that time.
And I also, now looking back on it, like totally had postpartum depression for at least the first six months, if not longer, which obviously didn't help with the situation. And I was like, oh my gosh, what [00:05:00] did I do? This is crazy. I cannot have four kids. This has been so hard, such a big adjustment for me and for our family.
, and it wasn't because Cal was a hard baby. I actually loved his baby stage. He's the only one that I truly just like soaked up every moment of that sort of like newborn stage. It was just life in general rocked me and I thought, you know what?
I don't think we should do four. I think like three is good. And that's that. And so eventually I started getting rid of all the baby stuff. I got rid of the swing and the bouncer and
the sit me up and the snuggle me and everything. Luckily I kept most of my baby clothes, like all of my favorite stuff because I just didn't feel. Emotionally ready to get rid of that stuff. I feel more emotionally attached to like the little clothes that my kids wore rather than these big things taking up space in my garage.
So I hung onto some of the clothes, which is good now, but I truly thought , okay, [00:06:00] I should be done. This has been a hard year of our life, and maybe that means that we don't need a fourth kid.
Then I wanna say when Cal was like a year and a half maybe, we were definitely just getting in the swing of things and life got more manageable. Obviously the kids were older, so that definitely helped. But just the things that happened outside of having Calvin started to get more manageable as well.
Mentally, I was just in a better spot. And I started to truly feel like there was somebody missing from our family. . It's hard to explain to somebody that doesn't have this feeling, but.
I would just look around at us and obviously be so happy and thankful. Like I have three beautiful kids and a husband and a house, and like look at this great life I have. And also, it's almost like I could see like the silhouette or the ghost of like another kid that wasn't there. It was so weird and it just started [00:07:00] happening randomly when I totally thought we were done.
I will never forget. We went somewhere and I set up my camera. I like propped it up to take a picture of the five of us, and we took a little video. We took a little picture. I. And then later I looked at that picture and I just started crying because I looked at it and was like, oh no, , there's one missing.
I know this sounds really woowoo and probably really strange, so I'm sorry if I sound crazy, but I just looked at it and I remember texting one of my best friends being like, uhoh, I am just so sad. I'm so sad because there's one missing. , I wish that I could have this fourth baby. I hate that. I can't.
It was basically kind of accepting that like, I shouldn't do this, although I feel like it's missing and now I have to kind of grieve that like. Maybe the family that I have isn't exactly how I pictured, which sounds so ungrateful, and I'm [00:08:00] just being completely honest here, so I could totally sugarcoat it for you and be like, I was so happy with my three kids and I totally was.
But if you've ever wanted another kid, when you already have a beautiful one at home, you know the feeling. It's like you can have two feelings at once of being so grateful for your family and also feeling like something is missing.
And so then I went through a period of a couple months where I was very sad, crying all of the time, it was the feeling of, I'm really sad that we're not gonna have this fourth kid. It just felt like I was sort of grieving that last child that we won't have. While telling myself , you shouldn't have the fourth kid, so you should just, you know, grieve this and move along.
And then after those couple months when that feeling didn't go away and it really stuck around and it wasn't just one of those like baby fever feelings, it truly felt deep in my core. Was like, you know what? My husband and I were talking to each other about this the whole time, back and forth.
We truly went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Do we have [00:09:00] another one? Do we not have another one? And eventually we came to the conclusion of like, we cannot base our decision about this fourth baby on things that happened at the time that Cal was born that we had no control over, .
Yeah, just because life was hard in that moment and life was hard transitioning to three kids just because of the way life was going at that point. We really don't need to make our decision about this fourth kid based on what life was like two years ago. Let's really think about what life is like now and if this is something we truly want in our family.
And eventually we came to the conclusion of I think I would regret if I didn't at least try. So I went into the trying process, sort of not hopeful, which was interesting. I kind of just like didn't feel fertile, which again, sounds so woo woo. I know, but I just wasn't. Feeling it. I think I was trying to set [00:10:00] myself up to not be disappointed.
, okay, we will like kind of try for this fourth baby, but I'm not super hopeful. And if it happens, it happens if it doesn't, and I can't even tell you why I felt that way. I just think I was trying to protect myself and not be super hopeful about it. And the first couple months we tried, I kind of had that mentality like, Ugh, this probably isn't gonna work.
It is what it is. I don't know. Once again, I can't explain why I had that. That's just how I felt.
Then all of a sudden after three months of trying and not getting pregnant, which is not that long, I totally know, but something shifted in my mind. Something was like, Alex, you're telling yourself over and over again, you're not gonna get pregnant. So you're probably not going to get pregnant. So then instead of thinking , oh, this is never gonna work, and if it works, it works.
If it doesn't, it doesn't. Whatever. I started telling myself, this is gonna sound so weird, but I started telling myself, you are so fertile. Like there's a lot going in there in your womb [00:11:00] it is a great place for a baby to be . I started telling myself these affirmations. It sounds so. Silly. I know, but I just started telling myself , this is what you're meant to be doing, and this fourth baby is meant to come and your body will take care of it.
And I kid you not the next month I got pregnant. So I know there's a lot of aspects that go into getting pregnant. It's not because I gave myself affirmations, but it truly helped with my mentality that next month, going into it and trying. What also made the tracking ovulation piece so much easier was using my Aura Ring paired with natural cycles.
So Natural Cycles is an app that takes your temperature and helps let you know when you're ovulating and confirms ovulation and all of that. Um, I had natural cycles for a while and I was using their thermometer just so I can track myself and see how I'm doing and prevent pregnancy before,
but then when I was [00:12:00] going to try and get pregnant, I decided to get the aura ring because it was so much easier just to wear a ring all the time instead of worrying about taking my temperature the first moment I woke up. So the ring truly helped so much. It was very accurate when predicting my ovulation, which was so interesting
and the Aura Ring even knew I was pregnant before I was even able to test, like tests were negative. It was really early. It was probably . I dunno, three weeks and a day or two. And every time I woke up, I would say like, Hey, are you sick? Hey, what's wrong with you? Hey, you have a gear down. Like, Hey, take it easy today.
And I'm like, I feel fine. I'm not sick. What's happening? Uh, then of course, a few days later, I tested positive. So that was very interesting to see as well. Also, before I started getting pregnant, I started training with somebody who, it was teaching me fertility awareness methods. So I was kind of using that stuff in combination with my temperature on the aura ring and natural cycles.
So anywho, I just got into the [00:13:00] weeds with that in case you were curious how I track ovulation and got pregnant. So basically I think it was the fourth month that we tried. We did get pregnant, which is amazing. I mean, four months feels like forever when you're in it, but it is so short in comparison to many, many people.
So I was very happy about that.
Something funny about finding out that I was pregnant, and this is very strange. I've never heard this from anybody else. So please let me know if this has ever happened to you. I knew that I was pregnant 100% before I, well, not only was the AA ring kind of like being weird, but with all of my pregnancies, the second I'm pregnant, and I'm not saying like I, when I'm pregnant enough to test, I'm saying the second that sperm hits the egg, sorry for the visual, but the second sperm hits the egg.
Something very weird happens to me. And my teeth start vibrating. And vibrating is not the right word, but that's what it feels like. My teeth feel very weird. It [00:14:00] feels like they're vibrating in my mouth.
And so I remember us being on a walk as a family, and I turned to my husband and I'm like, my teeth are telling me I'm 99.9% pregnant. This has only ever happened to me every time I get pregnant. So I really kind of knew intuitively that the positive test was going to come. And then I think it was like a couple days later we're shopping around at Costco and the whole time I was feeling so nauseous and I'm like, that's weird.
Did I get car sick? Like I get car sick. Really easily. Even if we just drive to the store and I look at my phone, I can feel nauseous, for an hour after that. It's terrible. But I was thinking like, wait, I didn't even look at my phone. , I'm not carsick. What is happening?
This is so strange, and I remember us getting out of Costco and we got a big thing of sparkling water and before we could even like unpack everything into the car, I ripped it open and sucked down to sparkling water. I was like, okay, that's helping. Weird. And then of course, a couple days later got the positive test.
Then the first trimester, literally. Rocked my [00:15:00] world. Mine seemed to get worse each pregnancy. So the first was fine. It was a couple weeks of a little bit of nausea in the morning. The second one was like five or six weeks of nausea, but not all day long. Just here and there.
The third one, for a couple months I was down for the count in bed. Super nauseous, couldn't drink water, you know, could barely eat anything. The fourth one, even worse than that, it felt very similar. I was in a fog for months. I could not physically function. I couldn't even go on a walk. I was so sick.
And really the main difference between the third and the fourth was the third one, I ended up definitely powering through. I never ended up taking nausea medication. I did just like all the remedies that you could do for nausea . And I survived, and then it quickly went away right at 11 weeks and then I was okay.
The fourth one, I couldn't even get by with just the remedies, which I'll get into next. , this was the [00:16:00] first time that I had to start medication or else I would have been just like vomiting all day, which I didn't wanna do because I have three other kids and I was coaching a softball team and doing this and doing that, running this business.
And I'm like, I can't be in my bathroom throwing up all day.
So here were my favorite things that helped with the nausea in the first trimester. If you have mild to moderate nausea or kind of like the starting of nausea in the first couple weeks that you want some little remedies for. Here are my favorite things.
I had these little stomach drops that I like to take and they are not prey pops. So prey pops I used to like, and I got them this time, but oh my gosh, they hurt my mouth so bad. I could have like one a day and even then my mouth felt so raw . So if that happens to you, I would check out these other ones that I got.
I will link them in the show notes. They were perfect. They were smaller than the prey pops. They didn't hurt my tongue, they tasted good and they definitely gave me a little something to suck on. They have like ginger and lemon in it [00:17:00] and B six and all of that. And those definitely helped when I needed them.
I also had these little inhalers, I don't know, it's like a little tube that looks like chapstick and it's filled with some sort of essential oils or whatever, peppermint, and I forget what else is in it. Um, and you just take the cap off and you like stick it right by your nostril. And inhale. That definitely helped take the edge off so many times.
I also had a little oil roller, that I would put like on my head and on my wrist and behind my ears, and it's kind of just engulfed myself in, in the scent of like pepperminty.
I also wore the bands on your arms the pressure point bands for a while as well. I tried a couple different ones, so I'll link the ones that I ended up liking. , no, those are not going to work for everybody. Some people swear by them and some people are like, they did nothing for me.
For me in the beginning. It definitely helped. And now helped in the sense of like, it took me from, I'm about to vomit to, okay, I'm just really nauseous. So to me it was worth the like $8 [00:18:00] I spent on them, to take me off the edge a little bit.
Once again, I'll link all of these in the show notes if you're interested in trying any of these, but to be 100% honest, these only really helped me those first couple weeks
by seven or eight weeks, the nausea was so bad this time that this was the first time I did from my doctor get recommended to take Unisom and B six. I am not a doctor. Do not listen to this prescription. You should talk to your doctor. They'll tell you how much to take. But the combo of Unisom and B six literally saved me.
Saved me. I had to be on it around the clock.
I was, , very tired, but I called it my happy pill. I'm like, this is my bedtime pill where I can take it. I can sleep for literally like 10 hours at night and just escape the way I am feeling. And it helped me survive. It helped me go from, I'm gonna be puking all day to, I'm really nauseous all day, but I'm not throwing up.
So talk to your doctor if you get to [00:19:00] that point, because seriously. I wish I had done that in my third pregnancy as well.
Now I am 17 weeks along, and it's very interesting this time the nausea hasn't just gone away by 12 weeks like it did before. At 12 weeks, it went away for a handful of days, and then it came back again and it goes away, and then it comes back, and then it goes away, and then it comes back. For the most part, I have a few days off, a few days on still, even at 17 weeks, and it's usually only in the evening, so it's like four or five, six o'clock.
Once I eat dinner, I'm usually okay. Sometimes before bed. I'm still nauseous. And it's not every day and it's not like I feel like I'm gonna throw up. I've officially weaned off of the Unisom already, so it's nothing terrible, but it's definitely still there, which feels a little frustrating 'cause I've never had that where it like lingers for this long.
But I am feeling a thousand times better. I've been able to get back to working out. I've been able to get back to eating vegetables and like regular food, not just egg o waffles and eggs. So I am very, [00:20:00] very happy about that.
How I'm feeling mentally is just honestly so excited and grateful. Like, I cannot wait to get this baby in my arms. I can wait. I want it to grow nice and big and cub when it's ready, but I am so, so excited for this period with a new baby. I am also going to be bringing you along our baby sleep journey, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast because I know October feels like a while from now, but
it'll be here before you know it. And I plan on each week, literally bringing you along with me through the baby sleep journey. Like, Hey, baby's one week old. Here's what sleep's looking like. Here's what I'm doing to get sleep on track. Here's two weeks old, here's three weeks old, and I wanna bring you alongside of me because it can be great to see all these like tips and tricks on Instagram, but.
What is it like actually implementing these things in real time with a baby? And how do you juggle doing all of this when you have [00:21:00] three other kids? So I'm gonna share all about that once the baby's born things I'm nervous for, I'm actually, I'm not nervous about the baby stage, obviously I know. It's my fourth time around.
There are so many ups and downs. I'm gonna have a great moments and I'm gonna have moments where I'm breaking down. But overall, I don't have a feeling of nervousness about having this fourth baby.
I am mainly nervous for prodromal labor. I think I'm saying that right. So my first baby was an emergency C-section. My body never really went into labor. My water broke, but it never went anywhere from there. I'm not gonna get into it right now, but it just didn't have a chance to really get into labor.
My second two were VBACs and I went into labor naturally and you know, went through all the stages. But with both of them I had prodromal labor, which means for like five or six days before I actually had them, I was in a sort of false labor.
And the thing with Paro labor [00:22:00] is the contractions truly feel. Like actual labor, they hurt just as bad. Yet they'll stay at like 10 minutes apart for five days straight. So when you're contracting painfully 10 minutes apart for five days straight, first of all, not only is it painful and miserable, you also don't sleep.
So that's what really gets me. By the time I went and had those two babies, I had been up for days basically. It was such a wild feeling and it was like being trapped in some sort of hell on earth, so I'm really nervous for that to happen again.
I feel like because it happened with the last two, it's probably gonna happen with this one. At least I know what to expect going into it. But boy, are those five days long.
One final question that I will answer is, do you know the gender of the baby? We do not know the gender of the baby, and we are not going to find out this one is going to be a surprise. So for my first two, I [00:23:00] found out for the first boy and the first girl, there was no way I could have waited with them.
The third one, I was finally feeling inspired to do it, and we already had a boy and a girl, so I was like, sure, let's have it be a surprise, I guess. And it ended up being so special and fun.
So the fourth one was no question. I was not gonna find out again, and I'm really excited.
To be honest, I don't really have a feeling either way of what it could be. I think it would be so neat if it was a girl and have like, boy, girl, boy, girl. But then again, if it was a boy and I had three boys, like that'd be amazing. 'cause how fun. Our house would just be like full of chaos and fun and I love that
so we'll see.
Okay. I think that's really everything and anything about this pregnancy so far. I know that was a lot of blabbing. If you're still around and listening to this, thank you. I know I like to hear about people's pregnancies and journeys through parenthood, so
I thought maybe some of you would like to hear about it and maybe feel like you're not so [00:24:00] alone in some of the feelings that I've had. I can't wait to take you guys on this journey with me. Like I said, I am going to. Share this baby sleep journey with you. So I can't wait to do that on this podcast.
The podcast will be a good way that like forces me to sit down each week and recap the week and let you know how sleep is going.
So make sure you subscribe and stick around until this baby is here.
