Word on the Street with Stephanie

I got to see my sweet girl yesterday. One of the good things about having a high risk pregnancy is that you get to see the baby at every appointment. I have already been assured that all of these extra ultrasounds are not harmful to the baby so I have learned to relax and enjoy watching her give the technicians a run for their money. She is so active that they often have a hard time getting the pictures they need. Normally I would apologize but this time around I just smile and think 'that's my girl'. I find these ultrasounds reassuring. I can feel her moving but there is nothing more calming than seeing her move around and having the technicians zoom in on her little heart beating away. I was told that everything looks good and her left ventricle is continuing to grow, although it is still slightly smaller than the right. This is on par with what the pediatric cardiologist told us to hope for because it means they know what they are dealing with and how to fix it. Our ne

It has been over two months of tests, uncertainty and passive aggressive "suggestions" but we finally have concrete answers. After more ultrasounds than I can count, it has been determined that our baby has Interrupted Aortic Arch and everything else is fine. There was some concern about part of her skull but that has since been resolved. I am now seeing an OB team at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and while it is a long way to go for regular check-ups, I know that my baby and I are in great hands. They will continue to do ultrasounds to ensure her left ventricle is growing (even though it is smaller than the right side) and as my pregnancy progresses we will meet the neonatal team who will provide round-the-clock care to our sweet girl until she is transferred to Sick Kids. This is the easy part. The hard part will be after she is born. I have already been told that I will only have time for a couple minutes of skin-to-skin contact with my daughter before she is taken for t

It took me some time to work up the courage to write this post. Did I really want people knowing all of the struggles we have gone through to date? When I was able to answer yes to that question, I decided to go ahead and write. I find writing cathartic. It is my outlet and allows me to express the feelings I have been too afraid to say out loud. It took us over a year to get pregnant with our second child...14 months to be exact. I was one cycle away from beginning a fertility medication when I realized my period was late and that beautiful double line appeared on the test. I cannot even describe the joy I felt as the tears flowed down my cheeks and I planned how I would tell my husband. It turns out I was much too excited to do anything creative and I ended up blurting it out while we were driving to a family dinner. I did everything I was supposed to do. I continued taking my prenatal vitamins, tried my best to eat a balanced diet (even through the all day sickness) and just genera

"Just relax" "Have fun" "Don't think about it and it will happen". These are all things I heard while on the journey to conceiving our second child. But as the months passed and we still weren't pregnant, those 'helpful' tips became more frustrating and harder to hear. I was constantly calculating how old our daughter would be by the time she had a sibling if we got pregnant this month, or next month or the month after that. And I felt this sense of failure as a woman, a wife and a mother that I was unable to give my husband another child, or my daughter a sibling. As a species, woman are incredibly hard on themselves and I was no different. In hindsight, I'm aware that being in that state mentally did not help me in the slightest but I simply could not help it. Around 6 months into trying, I spoke to my family doctor who told me to wait a few more months and then he would send a referreal to a specialist. A few months later I found my

I had taken some time off from blogging in order to get settled into my parents' home (where we will be living until we find our next home). Moving was exhausting physically, mentally and emotionally. My husband had the great idea to move on our own without the help of a moving company. At first I was happy he wanted to save money but as we got closer to our moving date, panic began to set in and we both realized it wasn't a good idea. The one positive is that we did not have time to be sad about leaving our first home. We were way too busy to think about it. We did it all with my Mazda 3 and his Ford pick-up truck. Let me just say that neither of those vehicles has the capacity to move an entire house without a substantial number of trips to and from our storage facility. Although it didn't seem like we had much, we were so wrong! Throw in a one-year-old and we had total chaos on moving weekend. Thankfully, we learned our lesson and when it comes time to move again, we w