5 Answers to Your Early Pregnancy Questions

I love surprises! That wasn’t always the case though, because back in my twenties and thirties I was a real planner and felt the need to be in total control of where my future was going.

Coincidentally (or not) it was in my late twenties that I struggled with infertility for over five years. Let’s just say that this pivotal time in my life afforded me the opportunity to find out, in the not-so-easiest of ways, that planning and scripting my life would not necessarily turn out the way I had intended.

My original plan after marriage was to spend a couple of years building my career, traveling, and creating our dream home. Then, we’d begin a family—probably three kids—and the rest would be history.

Well, that sure didn’t happen! Five years after trying to start a family, we finally became the blessed parents of a beautiful baby girl through the amazing gift of adoption. During that time without kids, we enhanced our careers, traveled quite frequently, and bought our dream home. I also spent that time obsessed with becoming pregnant and didn’t enjoy my existing circumstances as much as I should’ve because I longed so much for a baby.

That was the start of when I began to embrace life’s surprises! Shortly after our adoption I gave birth to seven more children, we moved from our dream house to my former childhood home so we could be closer to our families, I stepped away from my career, and after 25 years of a mostly good marriage, became divorced.

Because I was now getting good at going with life’s flow and not staying attached to any outcome I thought I had to have, I was able to truly live in the moment and appreciate what was happening in the “now”—not the past or future.

So, getting back to how I now love surprises, I was given quite an amazing surprise this past year for my birthday. My daughter and her husband announced they were expecting their first baby—my first grandchild—on Christmas Eve of this year! I was not only pleasantly surprised but so excited I could think of nothing else for weeks after the announcement!

My daughter was super thrilled as well, but she was full of questions that she needed answers to and a tiny bit embarrassed to ask her doctor, because she didn’t want to seem like she was a pesty patient.

Thankfully, she felt comfortable...

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