What an eventful week! We are finally at 16 weeks, which means that I am now having weekly progesterone injections. Many of you saw our recent gender reveal this week too! We are so excited to be having a boy join our family. Unfortunately, that came as a result of an ultrasound to check my cervical length. I hadn't been feeling very well for the couple of days prior to my 16 week appointment with my doctor. I mentioned how something just felt funny lately. She took it very seriously and did a cervical exam when I was there which didn’t give any red flags but wanted me to get an ultrasound done too just to make sure. The ultrasound was a few days later on Thursday. When they were checking my length they found it to be only 2.3cm which is shorter than what my doctor wanted it to be. Due to this early cervical shortening I will be having my cervix sewed shut on Monday in addition to the weekly progesterone injections. Between these two treatments and the limited activity I have been prescribed the baby should stay put for a while. *Side note: my doctor is incredible and the trust we share is critical during any pregnancy but in particular a high-risk pregnancy. Many doctors would have blown me off as the anxious/paranoid women and who knows where I would be now.

Here is some honesty though, it hit me last week that at this point in the pregnancy with Owen I was half way done with my pregnancy. Kind of hit home that I will never really know when this baby is going to come. When you have a high risk pregnancy it seems to be constantly questioning everything you do because who knows if that is what caused the complication. It is a constant battle with reminding yourself that it wasn’t your fault and you couldn’t have done anything differently. Let’s just say my subconscious has been winning almost every night with the terrible nightmares. As you move through a high-risk pregnancy many think that as you will experience less anxiety the further in your pregnancy you are. So far that has yet to be the case. The magic viability week of 24 weeks is coming up in just 7.5 short weeks and in the early days I thought that would be my magic day to loose some anxiety. I will be very grateful for that because it means the chances of us bring home a healthy baby are going to increase exponentially from there. The flip side to that is that it is only about 2-3 weeks before my water broke with Owen so I don’t think that my anxiety will be going anywhere unfortunately. Every symptom or cramp or hip pain I have, which is completely normal for pregnancy, I worry is an early sign of labor. What I am coming to realize though is that taking the mental side out of this is not the only thing that is going to fix it. Since finding out I was pregnant I've been living in a “fight-or-flight” mode. This fight-or-flight mode is exactly the same way my pregnancy and even postpartum went with Owen. Despite how different each pregnancy is, the trauma associated with each one is carried over. I knew this pregnancy would be hard when Austin and I started discussing having another baby but I don’t think I understood how poorly I processed Owen’s entrance into the world. Instead of dealing with the trauma I decided it was easier to just shove it in the back corner of my brain and not deal with it, which is biting me in the butt now.

For now our sweet boy is staying put but for the next couple of weeks we need lots of prayers (for his safety and my sanity of limited activity!) Thank you to everyone and we hope this will be a lot less wild of a ride then last time!