Category: Anxiety

My life is about to change.

I’m currently 25 weeks pregnant. Baby is due at end of January. I’m very excited to become a mama!

My husband, Mike, hasn’t quite wrapped his head around it yet. But I know once he holds his little boy he’ll go into full on dad mode.

Yes we’re having a boy!

What was finding out like?

Finding out I was pregnant was a shock. We started trying in January but given my age and my anxiety, I was pessimistic and expected it to take a long while before I’d get pregnant. A few months later, my period was a week late so I took a pregnancy test. I was fully expecting that the test would be negative and I’d just get my period late, which happens quite a bit for me.

But there was a big fat “pregnant” reading on the digital display staring right back in my face. I screamed! Mike ran into the bathroom to see if I was ok and see what was wrong. I jumped for joy and showed him the positive test!

His reaction? “Oh boy!” like in a nervous sort of way. He wants to become a dad but at the same time, change is really hard for him and he especially has a hard time visualizing what change is like. Once change is thrust upon him, he adapts.

What has the pregnancy been like so far?

First trimester I was super tired all the time. I had like 2 weeks straight where I couldn’t work. I was lucky to make it out of bed and to the couch. I was quite surprised by this and didn’t realize first trimester was so tiring. I don’t know how other pregnant moms can work in that first trimester and how they keep it a secret from their co-workers and manager. Thankfully I am my own boss so I didn’t have to tell anyone I didn’t want to.

I did have morning sickness but it wasn’t bad enough to cause me to vomit, thankfully. But I definitely was nauseous a lot and ended up losing 5 pounds.

Thankfully my energy returned in the second trimester and I’ve been able to get a lot of work done preparing for baby. We’ve got the nursery painted and starting putting together the nursery furniture (Mike did most of the work).

Tiredness is starting to return again. I have a day here and there where I just take long naps and get almost nothing done. Sometimes when this happens I freak out and have a meltdown. I think this is happening because I know I only have so many weeks left to get work done on the business. I have a lot of goals I’m trying to tackle before I take my leave.

Heartburn has also started becoming a daily thing.

I ended up going off of my anxiety medication early in the pregnancy because the meds have a negative impact on the baby that I didn’t want to risk. I had a couple weeks of anxiety after going off of it but somehow recovered. I’m very thankful that my anxiety hasn’t been that bad. I know a lot of expectant moms have anxiety over the baby and whether it’s ok and developing well. But all my tests have gone well, no sign of issues. Baby is healthy! Yay!

My mood was kind of all over the place in first trimester but has leveled off in second. I still have my meltdowns but they aren’t frequent.

I suspect the reason I’m feeling so good is because my lovely kitty, Diamond, keeps me company and brings me a lot of happiness. And because I’m just really excited to be a mother. Especially when I feel my little guy kick or move around, I just smile and feel so happy.

My most recent symptom has been hunger. I eat two breakfasts now and have to snack a lot. I get really strong urges to eat big meals and I get cravings for random things. Usually carb heavy stuff. Earlier in the pregnancy I was craving cheeseburgers.

I feel a little weird being older and just starting my family now. There’s lots of people my age with kids in their teens. I got a late start. But hopefully our choice to delay having children will allow us to provide better for our children and for ourselves financially.

Balancing work?

I plan to take 3 months off from PaperDemon while caring for baby but I wont be able to take a complete break. I’ll likely still need to do checkins with my team to make sure things are still moving, as well as handling financial matters like processing orders and paying bills and payroll.

But I will take a complete break from website development. This makes sense because if I deploy new code while having limited availability, I might trigger instability on the site that wont get fixed for a long while. So it’s safer to just have a code freeze by December and have it last until I get back to full time.

After three months of baby leave, the plan is to get child care. But that plan may have to change if the pandemic is still ongoing. It also just might be hard to leave my little guy with a stranger at that young of an age so we’ll see. I may be able to get some help from family.

It’s going to be hard because I really want to keep working. I love working on my business. But I also really want to focus on baby. We’ll see how it goes!