And so it begins...

For those of you who were not clued into to my recent cryptic fb post, yes, Shad and I are expecting a baby next March 2012. Are we excited? Yes! Nervous? You bet. A little shocked? Well yeah.

It's not that this particular baby was not planned. We always knew we wanted another child. The question of when was never far from our minds as each year past us by and we decided, a las, it was not the right timing. This year was no different as we contemplated growing our family to a party of six, which would include four children under the age of 9. As we weighed the decision, certain fears inevitably crept in: Do we have enough money for another child? Is our house equipped to hold 4 children? Certainly, we would need a bigger car, right? Can we both really work full time and give the children the love and attention we would want to give them?? Along with this anxiety, however, also came anticipation and excitement for the possibility of another child. We thought through the positive aspects of having a child right now: Our children would be closer in age than they would if we waited. We are both at a good point in our careers to have a larger family. Do we really want to be in a position where we have a teenager and a baby? And most importantly- is money really the most important factor when it comes to having a child?

We weighed the decision carefully, but in the end, we decided to let "fate" decide. We had decided a while ago that the next child we had was to be born in the spring. If it was indeed "fate" or God's plan for us to have another child this year, we would try for two months to ensure the baby would be born in either March or April. If I did not get pregnant, however, we would take this as a sign that it wasn't the right timing and wait until the following year. Thus we embarked of the adventure of trying to conceive. If you have ever been TTC you will relate that it has to be the most anxiety-filled period of time you will ever go through. From the time you ovulate and possible conceive to 10-13 days later when you actually find out if your pregnant or not, all you can wonder about is whether you are pregnant. This will drive you crazy! For me, this led to some overly obsessive web browsing on every possible pregnancy symptom that could occur and some over speculation that these symptoms were actually happening to me. Fast forward to that fateful day when I could actually test to see if I was pregnant. Both Shad and I had our doubts that we had indeed conceived, so when that + sign did happen to appear, all I could do was laugh. Fate, it seems, was with us all along.

So we begin the journey of pregnancy, and although we have been here before (twice), everything seems just as new as the first time. We are excited. We are nervous. We are trying to get over our shock that this is actually happening. But overall, we are just happy this is the direction our lives have taken us.