So honored that this post was featured on SkinnyScoop.com!

Tonight was my oldest daughter’s Kindergarten introduction meeting.  I knew this day was coming and I handled it like a pro.  No tears, no sorrow…  that will come later.  Be prepared, I will blog about it!

And who had time to think anyway with a 1 year old screaming at the top of her lungs while the Principal was talking and a 3 year old who wet her pants right in the middle of the meeting?

On the way home, it hit me though, I was JUST pregnant with Katie!  Just yesterday!

And in a few months she’ll be entering Kindergarten?

WOW!

I started thinking about her pregnancy and got lost in thought as I drove my three daughters home.

I remember finding out 3 days before my wedding that I was, indeed, pregnant.  It was a mixed emotion kind of thing.  I was thrilled to be pregnant, but the timing was not exactly what I wanted.  Had a hurricane not wiped out our wedding 2 months earlier causing us to move the wedding to a later date, the timing would have been perfect.

Instead, I had a 10 day Mexican honeymoon in a room booked right next to the bar that would, essentially, go to waste.  And it did.  Especially after I started spotting in Mexico.  As I decided if it was worse to miscarry in the hotel room or a Mexican hospital, I felt the first real connection to the pregnancy.

I did not want to lose it.

By the Grace of God, Katie hung in there and a little heartbeat sounded over the ultrasound machine just a week later!   Very early to get one, the Doctor said, but, indeed, it was there!

As I traveled back and forth to Doctor’s appointments, struggled with the question of when to tell my boss I was pregnant, and ate my way to a 60 pound weight gain, I relished in pregnancy.  I made plans, wrote my “I never” list and brushed off advice from others because, I, having never been pregnant before, arrogantly thought I knew it all!

Hmph…

I watched every baby show I could get my eyes on, complained to the chagrin of my husband about everything he did, and made continual jokes that the “glow” I had was not pregnancy, but post vomiting sweat.

I was a gem.

But I cried when they told me she was a girl, decorated her nursery to the last detail months before she as born, and planned my birth to the very last “lay her on my chest” moment.

I was pregnant.  And secretly prayed every night to the One who gave her to me that I would be good enough for her!

The birth was easy – at first. I opted for an epidural, later wishing I had not so early in labor (4 cm in minimal pain), did not walk like I wanted and just laid there sleeping while I waited for the ‘crowning moment’. But at 18 hours and 9 centimeters, the epidural wore off. The pain was not terrible but it was consistent. They would not let me out of bed so I rocked on my knees, pushing tubes out of the way, tried deep breathing techniques I had seen on TV, and told myself that I could do a natural birth.

But the anesthesiologist thought he knew better and kept pumping the failed line with drugs, to no avail.  After an hour of that, there was an order for a new epidural.  But the drugs made me loopy and I was tired of moving and shifting and trying to hold still while they tried to ‘make me more comfortable’.  I fought it and screamed in pain as they poked my back over and over again.

I wish I had been stronger and told them to stop!

An hour later, with still no epidural in,  Katie’s heart rate dropped and an emergency c section was imminent.  Here came the spinal.  I cried through the painful tears and called myself a failure.  Turns out that Katie never would have come out anyway.  Her shoulder was lodged under my pelvic bone.

The first cry was amazing.

I looked at my swollen faced, majorly cone headed, daughter and she looked back at me.

I was a Mom.

I sat in my room, holding my daughter and relishing in God’s greatest miracle and I knew that no matter what, I was always going to be good enough for her.

Two more pregnancies and c sections later, our family walks this Earth with us now.  They are loud, rambunctious, messy, cranky, beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and priceless.

They are the reason my “I never” list is crumpled in a ball in my mind and that planning things to the last detail has become more flexible.

I look at my c section scar sometimes, wishing it not there, wishing I could have had them all the way nature intended.  And then I look at my children and I know that that scar, thrice opened, is a simple reminder of what it took to get them here.

The love in my heart is the constant reminder of why I wanted them here.  And why it still makes me tear up to take a walk down pregnancy lane.