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January 16, 2020
I’m 19 and a half weeks pregnant now and I can’t believe I’m halfway there. I feel like these months have gone so fast and yet have felt so long.
This week has been particularly overwhelming to say the least as I’ve been in overdrive trying to balance being a pregnant stay at home mom and starting my blogging business.
I feel like stress always has a way of jumping on you at the exact moment you’re not equipped to handle it. This week while my husband has been out of town for work, I’ve barely slept thanks to my pregnancy insomnia. When I say barely slept, I mean on Monday night I got the rude awakening at 12:30am that Braxton Hicks contractions can start this early on in your 2nd pregnancy. With one hour of sleep, I spent the entire night dealing with these, pretty much setting me up for a week of extreme exhaustion.
Our rabbit Willow has taken full advantage of my fatigue and laps of judgment (thanks pregnancy brain!). In one week, I have left a package of gum on the couch, which she ate part of, neglected to clean up a clementine on the coffee table that our son left, which she also ate, and she found her way to a blueberry muffin this morning that he left on the end table beside the couch and knocked a mug onto the floor. Needless to say, I’ve been worried sick that I’m causing undue harm to our rabbit. Logically, I know she’s fine. This rabbit has a stomach of steel. When I was pregnant over four years ago, she also got into my gum and my taffy. Notice a pattern? My pregnancy brain and her rambunctious escapades seem to go hand in hand. Regardless, she’s okay. Just like she is this week. But I still feel awful about it, thanks in part to my hormones, and have been beating myself up over it.
Besides her escapades, our son this week had trouble going potty. I did all I could giving him fiber and water, but last night, he left the dinner table and said he was going to bed without going potty. When I asked him to go first, he ran away crying, curled up in his bed, and refused to leave it. I was crushed. I knew there’s nothing I could’ve done differently this week to get him feeling better sooner, but I still felt like I just dropped the ball. Thankfully, my parents came over and after an hour and a half of convincing him and bribing him, he went…and then he got his reward of “the biggest ice cream in the world” as he happily announced. To top off last nights experience, I spent the entire afternoon a flustered and panicky mess after his teacher alerted me that she noticed a growing bulge on the front of his neck. She also made sure to add on how that was the first thing that happened to her when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Spending hours at his playdate after worried that my son was terminally ill, I was relieved to go home and have my dad (thank god he’s a doctor!) check him out. Thankfully, he’s fine and it’s just his neck muscles growing, which makes sense because his head has always been the first thing to grow during a growth spurt. But that moment of panic still lingers and the stress that I endured completely wrecked me.
Running on no sleep, I’ve somehow also managed to spend every waking hour working on this blog. So much so that I feel like at points the stress is completely defeating me. I want so badly to turn this into a business and to gain a following but it seems impossible at times. The more I learn and research what I need to do, the more I feel like my life doesn’t have enough time to do it. How can I keep up with writing biweekly posts, growing four social media platforms daily, making Pinterest graphics, and starting an Etsy store? It’s all so overwhelming. Not to mention I have no idea how to help my blog get discovered on Google with SEO or any idea how to grow my social media followings. The more I learn, the more I discover that all of these platforms have changed their algorithms so much the past couple of years, that for even your followers to see you, you mostly need an advertising budget to constantly promote your posts. I know I can’t afford even the most minimal budget and it makes all of this feel so fruitless.
I just want something to go right this week. I want to sleep. I want our rabbit to not take advantage of my state of mind. I want our son to feel good. I want my blog to get even remotely noticed so I know there’s a chance I can make money from this and help our family be more financially comfortable. I just want something to give me 10% of peace of mind.
The fact of the matter is though, nothing in life is perfect. Nothing in life is instant. All I can hope is that with some sleep and rest I can get back into the positive headspace I so badly need to be in. I know that at the end of the day, a lot of how I’m feeling is just my pregnancy hormones and lack of sleep taking its toll. The beauty of pregnancy is that every day and week is a different experience and tomorrow I could wake up relaxed and rested with a smile on my face.
In the meantime, I think I’m just going to try to zone out today, listen to Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”, daydream about a fun babymoon road trip or a relaxing spa day alone, and keep my fingers crossed that this week will turn around. And even if it doesn’t, the optimist in me knows that the week is almost over and eventually everything will find it’s groove again.
Read Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven