Our Pregnancy Story (Intro)

I have been thinking for a long time that I needed to write down our pregnancy story & share our experiences with others around us. We have had a lot of questions about what we are doing and why, and hopefully writing this story out will answer most of those questions.

Of course, we love to talk about our experience because it has been incredible and life-changing. So if you have questions, feel free to ask us.

I will be posting the story in 3 parts because it is very long, and when I finish that I will post the whole thing as a page at the top of my blog for easy reference. :)

I hope you enjoy reading.

First, here are the two major links that I include throughout the story:

Hypnobabies

Beautiful Baby Birthing (Donna Young - Midwife)

And now here is the beginning of our story:

Why am I writing this? I feel a need to. A need that has been mind-consuming for the last several weeks. As I have put it off and put it off, I have also realized that I want to. I want to share the experiences that have changed my life. I want others to know what I know, even if it doesn’t change anything for them. I want women to know that there are options - something that I never knew. I just want to share happiness and encouragement and a little bit of hope.

*****

Every time I talked about being pregnant & having children with my girlfriends (before I even got married), I often expressed the desire that I could skip the pregnancy part and just have the baby. I didn’t want to go through being pregnant. I didn’t want the weight gain, the awkward belly, having to buy new clothes to fit my new body. I didn’t want the morning sickness (or worse) during the first part of the pregnancy or cravings or feeling ill at any and all times. And I most definitely did not want to give birth to a baby with all the pain, drugs and I.V. and having to be at the hospital and deal with doctors. Basically, I didn’t want to be pregnant. Ever.

I had always thought that becoming more educated about pregnancy and childbirth would be encouraging. I took several classes as part of my education both at Snow and BYU, hoping that I would learn that pregnancy wasn’t as horrible as I imagined and my desire to be pregnant would increase. Don’t get me wrong - I wanted children, I just didn’t want to have to be pregnant to do it. I figured though, if I had to be pregnant I could suffer through it. I just assumed that I would be miserable the entire time because everyone else that I talked to had been miserable and I had heard all the horror stories.

In December of 2012, I read a blog post written by a friend of mine, Katrina, who had just had a baby and her story changed my views about pregnancy and ultimately my life.

One of the very first things Katrina said in her daughter’s birth story was that she had had an absolutely painless birth. I scoffed. I snorted. I raised my eyebrows to my hairline. I then assumed she had the perfect epidural - which I had never heard of because I knew all about the side-effects that women suffer from or they got it too late or too early. Turns out I was wrong.

To be brief, Katrina explained that she had used a natural-birthing program called Hypnobabies to retrain her mind and body. Similar to the idea of ‘The Secret’ (what you dwell upon most will come to pass-so make it positive), the Hypnobabies program focuses on encouraging women that pregnancy and childbirth is natural, normal, healthy, and safe. It is a program where women retrain their minds and bodies to realize that giving birth is what their bodies are meant to do, and just because society never shows or tells about good birth experiences, it doesn’t mean that wonderful experiences cannot happen. The program also works on helping women eradicate their fears because fear of giving birth is part of what leads to so many complications in childbirth - fear creates tension, which causes pain, which then brings more drugs & tests, which then in turn creates fear again.

My friend’s story gave me hope. I wasn’t completely sold on it and I wasn’t sure that I would be strong and brave enough to make it through the pregnancy and birth without giving in to the pain that I was positive that I would feel. But for the first time ever, I realized that there was another option to being completely miserable.

It took me a long time to do anything about the new knowledge that I had gained. Partly because I wasn’t pregnant, so I didn’t feel the need to worry about it and partly because I wanted to know what Daniel thought about it. I knew that I was excited and hopeful, but I wasn’t sure what to do next. I got to the point where I thought about what I had read almost daily. It became so consuming that I finally got Daniel to read Katrina’s blog post so that I could get a second opinion about whether it was as awesome as I was imagining it to be or if maybe I was crazy and desperate. Good news - he got excited, too. But we still sat around and waited - unsure what to do or when. Hypnobabies moved to the back of my mind where I thought about it occasionally, but not seriously or with any idea of the direction we would go when we got pregnant.

Well. Of course a catalyst eventually came and we found out that we were pregnant. We were ecstatic and suddenly had a lot to do. We had to decide on a doctor, a hospital, and a birthing program. We knew immediately that we wanted to use Hypnobabies. In fact, Katrina was one of the first people that we told we were pregnant because we emailed her to ask her a few more questions about Hypnobabies.