Pregnancy

Before I was pregnant I never really understood people sharing their birth stories or taking photos in the birthing room. It seemed like too much information and to be quite frank, a bit gross. Then I got pregnant and I devoured these stories. I stayed up late at night gazing into the cold glow of my phone watching birth video after birth video (and forced my husband to watch with me, too). Having enjoyed, devoured, and experienced so many other’s stories, I feel it’s only fair that I share mine too.

Infertility is an incredibly isolating experience that can be difficult to understand if you haven’t been through it. Like other stressful life events, infertility tends to draw out underlying relationship tensions and disparate feelings and along with it, many well-intentioned people struggle to say the right thing. Even with good intentions, things can come out wrong, become hurtful, and sound invalidating or minimizing. Although everyone is drastically different, I wanted to share my experience and the things that helped me feel supported through our infertility journey (and also the things that hurt me most).

When we finally got pregnant, we had coincidentally already planned a trip to Nassau, Bahamas for Thankgiving weekend in October. To our surprise and excitement, this existing trip was going to turn into our zika-free babymoon, with me being 29 weeks pregnant! This trip was perfect because it was a nice, short, 3.5 hour flight from Toronto and a much-needed trip of pure relaxation. We stayed at the new Baha Mar family of resorts and couldn’t have been happier with our decision!

Looking for a gift for your pregnant wife/friend/coworker? I’ve gathered the top “pregnancy must haves” that I’ve truly appreciated this pregnancy that would make the perfect gift for the soon-to-be-mama (and NOT for the baby!) If anyone deserves to be spoiled rotten, it’s a pregnant woman. Nourishing new life is a round-the-clock job that takes a physical and mental toll. This gift guide contains something for everyone, from the newly expectant mom to the one who’s ready to pop!

My husband Kevin and I have always known we’ve wanted kids. Perhaps we were premature and way ahead of ourselves, but from the first months we were together, we had already talked about our future dreams and set a “plan” and timeline for how our life together would unfold. But we were in for a treat when we were faced with something we couldn’t necessarily “control” — infertility. For the longest time, I hated that word. Yes it’s just semantics and yes it’s a real thing to be diagnosed “infertile”, but to me, I refused to think I was incapable of anything, so I always dropped the prefix and called it our fertility journey.