Last year I got motivated to do a recap of my 2012 blogging, and it was actually really fun for me to look back over the year and see how much had happened in our lives. It’s so easy to remember only best of the highs and the worst of the lows, but blogging has allowed me to really look back at some of the smaller moments that also impacted our lives. That being said, it’s kind of fun to see a recap of the highlights too, so here goes nothing for 2013!

January – I started off 2012 by writing about my newborn that wouldn’t sleep, and I started off 2013 by writing about my worries that my toddler was sleeping too much! Funny how life changes. 🙂 We were starting to think about TTC#2, but moreover we were just busy as heck this month. At the end of the month I headed to MN by myself with Stella for a 10 day vacation and to celebrate my youngest sister’s wedding festivities, including her super fun bachelorette party where Stella was the star of the show.

February – My husband and I had been struggling with feeling disconnected, and I wrote a post entitled 10 Reasons that outlined why I loved him. It was a great reminder for me to read through that list today! This was also the month I hit my “line in the sand” weight and decided to focus on getting healthy again. My new FitBit was helping with motivation, and I ended up losing 10# before my BFP a couple of months later. Not awesome, but much better than nothing. I also wrote “Who Could? Who Should? Who Would?” about planning out the family will, etc… and this is something I have totally failed at implementing. Once this kid arrives I am kicking this back up the priority list though. It’s important!

March – I opened up the month with Hesitation, which was all about my fears of getting back into the TTC world. It’s pretty amazing to me to look back at that now and realize my cycle returned just two weeks later and about 6 weeks after that I was pregnant from our first cycle and one of those cliche miracles in the ALI world. Wow. March was also an incredibly tough month full of sickness and death and discussions about faith. Heavy stuff…

April – In April I wrote A Breath of Fresh Air about the crucial difference between infertility amnesia and healing. It was also a fun month of travel, as we took our first family trip together that was not specifically to visit other family! We had a blast in St. Louis, and I even got to meet up with a couple of different ALI bloggers while we were there. Charlie also built a new back deck off the house that we used all summer long – it’s been a great addition to our home.

May – The month that everything changed! May 1st I announced to blog land that I was 4 weeks pregnant, and I spent the rest of the day all weepy from your amazing comments! I was struggling with thoughts about whether or not to accept a new job offer that happened at the same time (I ended up turning it down), and I spent the next few weeks worried about the viability of the new pregnancy and Freaking the F* Out. My morning sickness was debilitating, and I was trying to continue to get any food down, much less healthy food. I wrote a post entitled the body about my eating disorder issues and trying to have a good body image, and I nursed Stella for the last time. SO bittersweet.

June – This was a quiet month for me in blogland as I was still puking all day, every day, and was really just trying to hold it together. I did write a post entitled Looking Back for the PAIL Blogiversary that looked at the changes in my life over the past 4-5 Junes that is kind of fun to look at, and my parents came to visit over Father’s Day. I got to go to my first midwife visit at 12w at the end of the month as well!

July – In July I finally found the words to write about my breastfeeding journey with Stella. Honestly, I still cry if I reread that post. I also wrote out my thoughts about how we chose to pursue the route of a midwife assisted homebirth. I followed it up with a fired up post about Setting the Bar Higher and my frustration with the “just be grateful” mantra instead of just supporting one another in our birthing choices. Later on in the month I touched base with The End of Diapers? about how we had tackled potty training with Stella.

August – In August we found out that the kiddo in my belly is a boy, and I wrote about how crazy I thought it was that most people assumed we wanted One of Each in order to have some sort of “perfect family.” Later on in the month I joined in another PAIL Theme about feeding your child and how selfish my breastfeeding journey has been.

September – I spent most of this month obsessively researching all of the Medical Choices During Pregnancy that are open to women. It was really eye opening to me to realize how often tests & procedures are done routinely “just because” and not because of any evidence based reason. I’m pretty proud of all of the information I included in that post – check it out! I also touched on why I continue to blog — the reasons have definitely changed over time.

October – This month I was mostly focused on work / maternity leave issues and what to do about our daycare situation. Sometimes it sucks to have to buckle down and think about adult stuff, eh? I did chime in at the end of the month with my thoughts on my first birth experience and how it affected my plans for this upcoming birth.

November – In November I took the time to write out my hopes and plans for traveling in the future because traveling really does equal happiness for me, and I also spent a little time complaining about insurance and how little our plan covers. This is still a mess, but since kiddo has decided to come in 2014, at least it alleviated a lot of the choices I was worrying about. 😉

December – This was a busy month for us because it included Stella’s 2nd birthday and I reached full term in this pregnancy. We’ve had a lot of financial ups and downs this past month that I haven’t gotten into, but I am still trying to focus on helping to finance college for Stella and having faith that money issues will work out. That brings us to the present day where I’m having issues being patient while waiting for this little man to arrive!

It’s been a crazy year, and it’s hard for me to believe that we’ve gone from being afraid to start the TTC#2 train to anxiously awaiting the arrival of our son. Money will always be an issue, but we have plenty of love, and as cheesy as that sounds, that will help us to make it through this together as a family!