An Unexpected Gift

I touched on this subject a few weeks ago, but it's been in my mind, so here's a whole new post...

I'm so thankful we used donor eggs. It's such an amazing gift for one woman to give her eggs to another. But that's not the unexpected part.

The unexpected gift is the freedom from anxiety that we experience in our second pregnancy.

(Recap for those of you who haven't been following since 2010: first pregnancy in March 2010 ended in miscarriage at 9 weeks due to chromosomal abnormalities which shocked and devastated us; second pregnancy in November 2010 ended in miscarriage at 8 weeks due to chromosomal abnormalities, which we were sorta anticipating, given the problems with the first pregnancy, but still devastated us.)

Using donor eggs (and, more importantly, CGH-testing them) has freed us from that anxiety. It reset our expectations and has given us every reason to believe this will be a normal pregnancy. I know there's all sorts of things that can go wrong, but they're not top of mind, and they don't cause us stress.

The second pregnancy we were full of trepidation. We knew, intimately, how badly things could go, and so we were really reserved and cautious every step of the way.

This pregnancy, we've let go of all that. We know (to the best of modern science's ability to tell us) that we won't have a miscarriage due to chromosomal factors. And after seeing the strong heartbeat and perfect sizing last week, our RE says there's a 96%+ chance of making it to term, ignoring the CGH results.

An important lesson for us came from our first pregnancy. We had told our immediate families as soon as we found out we were pregnant. And we hosted Easter dinner, with all of them. My husband says it was the happiest day of his life. And he lamented that, after the miscarriage. But I told him the miscarriage did nothing to change that day. That we have to live in the moment because not embracing the happy and joyful times doesn't do anything to prevent the sad times. And that if we hadn't embraced that first pregnancy, he wouldn't have that wonderful memory of Easter.

So we're fully embracing this pregnancy. I'm occasionally anxious, but I think it's not far off the 'occasionally anxious' that any pregnant woman has. We're not telling anyone until right around 12 weeks (the timing works out that we'll be seeing all of our family between 11 and 12 weeks, so we can tell them in person) - and that is a leftover from previous pregnancies. But we know how we'll be telling them, and we've talked about all sorts of date-related pregnancy stuff.

I'm so thankful to be 8 weeks pregnant today.