My Body is a Vessel

One of my amazing friends from MOPS sent me a blog post from a mom of twins who wrote the most beautiful article about a pregnant mamas body and what we, as women, go through during pregnancy. When I read her post, I just about cried uncontrollably because I felt the exact same feelings she did.

Too often moms are overly critical on themselves and their bodies after bringing such a huge miracle into the world. I, for one, am one of those moms. As much as I hate to admit how hard I am on myself, I'm always critical about my hair, my outfit, my weight and how I look. While I'm not perfect, I'm certainly trying to be a little easier on myself and my changing body. No one is perfect, so why do I expect myself to be perfect? 

When I found out I was pregnant with twins, all I could think about was how big I was going to get, how many stretch marks I was going to be left with and how much weight I was going to gain. I found myself consumed with googling "twin pregnancy" to see pictures of how big other women were during their twin pregnancy journey. I was horrified by some of the pictures I saw and couldn't imagine how my body would endure this transformation.

For starters, just to get pregnant, I put my poor body through so much with both of my pregnancies. Since Jonathan and I had to go through infertility treatments, my journey into motherhood may be quite different than others, but special and unique none-the-less. Before I was even pregnant, I was giving myself daily shots and going to the doctor 2-3x a week for monitoring. Once we got pregnant, I had to continue giving myself daily shots for the first 11 weeks of pregnancy…that's 77 shots alone! I should have taken a picture of all the needles in our kitchen. We had one of those "sharp" containers in our kitchen, but I swear it looked like we were drug addicts with these huge needles in our house! I also had weekly doctor appointments up until 12 weeks to monitor the babies to make sure they were growing and healthy. On top of all that excitement, I had EXTREME morning sickness…so I was on just about any medication the doctor could give me to try and control my nausea and keep me from losing more weight. 

Luckily my second trimester was pretty uneventful, but my third trimester…ha…has not been so easy! Going in for NSTs 2x a week, getting put on strict bed rest at 31 1/2 weeks, going into pre-term labor at 34 weeks and now just trying to carry these babies as far as I can to avoid NICU time. That's not to mention the delivery and recovery to bring the beautiful miracles into the world.

Now, when I think about all my body has endured…I am a champ! And I need to continue reminding myself, my body is a vessel for my babies! 

I got this :)

16 more days and counting!