We’re Expecting!

Dave and I are super excited to say that we are expecting our second child in April 2015! After months of agonizing over trying to have another baby or not (see my One in Four post) our decision was simply made for us. I don’t want to freak anybody out who is currently using this method of birth control but I got pregnant with an IUD in! The odds of this happening are about 6 in 1,000 so combine that and Elsie’s 1 in 100,000 to 200,000 chances of cystinosis and we are definitely buying lottery tickets for the rest of our lives 😉

The funny thing is that neither Dave nor I have even worried too much about whether or not our baby will have cystinosis. Mostly we’re just grateful that we don’t have to make that decision anymore, which made us realize that it wasn’t the thought of having another child with cystinosis, we know we can handle that, it was just the moral dilemma we had with knowingly taking the risk and giving them that life.

That being said we will be testing our baby prenatally to see if they have cystinosis. Luckily we recently had Elsie tested for her genetic mutations (I’ll post on that joy later!) so all we need to do is have some cells taken during amniocentesis and tested for the same mutations. This isn’t something that we have to do, we could always wait for the baby to be born and then do a blood test, but we want to be fully prepared when the baby is born. I don’t want to be worried and scared during the first few months of my babies life and I feel like if we know ahead of time I can just be happy when they are born. And have their cystagon ready should they need it, but fingers crossed this baby won’t even be a carrier of cystinosis.

Besides the usual feelings of extreme exhaustion and being slightly nauseous throughout the day I haven’t been feeling too bad. With Elsie I was quite sick right up until the third trimester so I’m actually relieved this time around, but poor Dave is basically a single parent right now as I’ve been so low on energy I barely do anything besides the bare minimum in the housework department. Luckily for him our parents and my super awesome sister have all pitched in with doing dishes, vacuuming and tidying the house in the last month so that has been awesome.

We’ll be sure to keep everyone updated as the testing gets done and my pregnancy progresses. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how Elsie transitions from being the one who gets all the attention to having to share it but she’s such a loving, helpful little girl that we’re sure she’s going to be an amazing big sister!