At the beginning of a pregnancy, it can be very difficult to determine if you are pregnant or not. In my case, this was not my first child, so I knew exactly what early pregnancy symptoms to look for.
The first one is an obvious one, which is when you miss your period. It is possible that you can miss your period for other reasons than pregnancy such as stress, but in my case it was because I was pregnant. Even before you miss you period you can begin to feel tired, lightheaded, and be irritable. These are all of the early pregnancy symptoms I experienced which told my right away I was expecting. You will also notice that your breasts are tender and may even be swollen. This did not happen for me until the second month of my pregnancy.
When nausea hits and you begin feeling sick to your stomach and you can not keep anything down than this is definitely a sure giveaway of early pregnancy symptoms when combined with the symptoms above. In my case once the nausea hit I knew another baby was on the way. In order to confirm my pregnancy I purchased a take home pregnancy test. In just a few minutes my thoughts were confirmed. Even though we were not planning to have another baby at the time, we were still overjoyed. This is when a lot of preparation began to get ready for the new baby.
Toward the end of any pregnancy you often worry about your baby coming too soon or coming late. In my personal experience my child came a little earlier than the doctor and my family had expected. Since this was not my first child, I really thought that I was fully prepared and knew what to expect. Especially since my doctor give me lots of tips and suggestion on how I could tell if I was starting to go into labor. The first sign I begin to experience are the Braxton Hicks contractions. I know that these contractions usually occur when your body is getting ready for labor. For me this did not seem unusual since they started about a month and a half before my actual due date. After a visit to my doctor I was informed that my cervix was already starting to dilate which made me feel pretty nervous. Especially since the due date was still a whole month away.
To avoid putting any further stress on the baby and myself I was places on bed rest for a few more weeks. My doctor felt that this would help to slow down the dilating of the cervix. Since I was a stay at home mom this really interrupted our family life. I could not walk up and down the stairs and do any type of lifting. So we had friends and family members come over to help with cleaning the house and doing the laundry. We also had plenty of people to prepare meals, and do the food shopping. Even though life as we were used to was slightly interrupted everything seem to work out just fine. The best part is that I was able to pop my feet up and relax for two whole weeks.
After about two weeks of just sitting around, doing nothing my water broke. This means that your membranes ruptured. When this happens the baby is coming no matter what. Since it was only two weeks early and the baby looked good from all of the tests labor was not stopped. After about an hour the baby was born. I guess it was just one of those cases where the baby did not want to wait any longer.
