A Mosaic of Emotions: Motherhood & TTC All Over Again

Becoming a mom broke me open in ways I couldn’t have predicted. 

48 hours after her birth, my daughter had some respiratory distress right as we were getting ready for hospital discharge. She was routed to the NICU for some additional monitoring, and I remember sitting cross legged in the chair next to her isolette, sobbing. I turned to my husband and told him that all of a sudden, it felt like my heart was living outside of my body. 

We were incredibly lucky that her NICU stay was short, and we were sent home the following day with some early and repeat monitoring to complete outpatient with the pediatrician. Those challenges resolved themselves naturally, and our overwhelming relief was channeled into feeding, snuggling, and adjusting our lives to our new family of three. 

I am almost two years into motherhood, and I have to say, it’s still exhaustingly & impossibly beautiful every single day. 

Of incredible importance to my husband and I was giving our daughter a sibling, or some siblings.

At my six week postpartum appointment, my doctor asked me what I’d be using for birth control. I shared that at that time, we were not going to be using any. You see, knowing that it took IVF to become pregnant with our daughter, we didn’t even know if it was possible for a natural pregnancy, and if we were lucky enough to find one, we were ready & wanting it. 

In the beginning, we were intimate without intentionality.

I was breastfeeding (via exclusive pumping) and so my postpartum period had returned but was irregular. We were too tired to focus on ovulation tracking and scheduling sex, but we still wanted to reconnect as mom and dad. 

When my daughter was 4 months old, we scheduled a return appointment with our RE.

We wanted to know what it would look like if we decided/needed to return to IVF and the two embryos we’d frozen in 2018. 

It was at that appointment we learned that our RE would not schedule a new embryo transfer until I was 12 months postpartum from having my daughter. I understood the timeframe for “optimal uterine recovery” was 12-24 months, but I really wanted babies closer than that. I felt strong in my postpartum body and I knew people got pregnant much closer together than that naturally.

My husband and I agreed that we would spend the next 8 months trying naturally to conceive.

We also decided to schedule our next embryo transfer for shortly after my daughters 1st birthday as a backup plan. 

In the next post, I’ll be sharing a bit about how COVID-19 changed our timeline, the tests and procedures we needed to complete before FET prep, and a recap of the last 8 months of our Journey to Baby 2.O.