Our baby "Peanut"

A lot of new things have been happening at the the Sterzer house, but I think I will post the biggest news right off:) I am 13 weeks pregnant with baby #5! Crazy, crazy, and more crazy, right? It's been a unique process to get here I guess. When Carson turned 1 last year, I got rid of all of my maternity and baby stuff. It wasn't an immediate thing. I went back and forth on whether we were complete with 4. I was 80% sure I was done, although Rob said he was 110% sure to make up the difference. I still felt a longing to have th experience of pregnancy and a new baby again, but it is a special time of my life and I realized I can't do it forever and need to eventually move onto a new stage in our lives with raising these kids that we have. I thought, hey, maybe this body can be mine instead of a baby maker and milk machine every other year. So I started running and thinking about the possibilities of my new independence. No more losing baby weight, newborns up all night, potty training horrors of another child. We have 2 girls, 2 boys and it seemed locically perfect and complete.

Then...in April I had consistent nausea for a week,like only I get when I am pregnant. I was worried because on the IUD getting pregnant can cause a lot of probs. So I went on an emotional ride for awhile utnil I could get into the OB. I told ROb to get a grip on the fact that I may be pregnant again. I jekd about it but I couldn't iamgine another explanation. I wasn't sure how he would react. But I was just as excited with him when he was searching online for baby names that same hour:) So thre was this "click" in our heads as we discussed what this meant. All of the sudden we could be havng a fifth which seemed huge. Or we could have IUD complications and have a miscarriage or other complications. The IUD freaked us out a bit when we realized what it could do to our baby. All of the sudden we were attached to this baby , Kennedy, that we didn't even consider the week before. We realized at that moment that if I wasn't pregnant than we wanted to be. So the next week when the doctor told a shocked me that I wasn't pregnant I told him to take out the IUD so we could try for a fifth. In the next couple months that followed I got tests done to help figure out why I was sick with severe nausea, exhaustion, headaches all of the time. Doctors did tests on all of my female workings and foudn me in healthy condition. The only explanation being that stress was making me sick for the past few months. I didn't think I was that stressed until all of this happened to make it worse:) So I decided then that if I was letting myself get sick then I had the power to make it better as well. We didn't put off getting pregnant to find out what was wrong with me anymore and got pregnant in July. At least now I am sick for a reason:)

This pregnancy seems more complicated to me. I am the kind of person that if I say something stupid or unintentionally hurt someones feelings it makes me feel like crap and I dwell on it forever until I can figure out how to make it better or just tell my anxiety to let things go. In this case I feel like a constant bully to everyone in my life who is struggling to get pregnant. Which is about 4 of the closest women in my life. In April, when I thought I was pregnant despite birth control, I cried like a baby to Rob "how am I going to tell them all that I got pregnant on accident when they have been trying so hard to get a baby!" We felt that this was right for our family but we kept it to ourselves that we were trying and when I was pregnant I waited until 12 weeks. My belly is starting to pop and make hiding trickier.

I am excited for us and seeing my baby last week moving around and kicking those tiny little legs was just what I needed to reassure me that this is what I want...I just want everyone else to have their babies too so I don't have to be a 9 mth reminder to them of what they are struggling with.

In 1 mth we will find out the gender. Although Cheyenne draws pictures of her baby sister, I remind her that it could be a boy too and to prepare for that. It's hard because all we picture is a girl as well, and Rob worries that if this girl I am imagining isn't baby #5 then I will push for a #6:) Next post will be some super cute pics of my fabulous 4:)