You have a baby...in a bar...

Ok, not really a baby and not really a bar but I love Sweet Home Alabama so I thought it would be a fun blog title.

Our Friends Larry & Heather

Last weekend hubby and I went to a local brewery with some friends to eat yummy food truck food, play Exploding Kittens, and in the case of everyone except me, drink beer.

I had a ginger beer and it was lovely

Love a good food truck, unfortunately they only really had one item I could eat but it was delicious. 

It really was great to spend an evening out with our friends just having fun.  Much of our lives is spent working and doing things we feel obligated to do so when the chance comes to just relax and have fun it's important to take advantage of the opportunity.   Also Exploding Kittens is a surprisingly fun game, even when you loose.  You should check it out.  #notanadvertisment

The Cone of Shame makes its first appearance

I found hubby having to wear the cone of shame hilarious

Let's do this

As promised - time to start at the beginning of my journey to become a mom, and because biology, that really begins when I was a baby myself but we are going to fast forward a bit to when I was in high school and first put on birth control. 
For the full story check out THIS POST but here is the abbreviated version.

From the time I was 16 until I was 26 I took a pill every morning that kept my cycle in control, regulated my hormones, and suppressed any symptoms that there might have been something actually wrong with my reproductive system. 

When my husband and I decided it was time to start a family I went off of birth control and we naturally assumed that in a few months I would be pregnant.  On December 27, 2011 I took my last birth control pill, and chaos ensued.

After some interesting issues I had surgery in May of 2013 to remove a polyp from my uterus.  My husband deployed for the first time shortly before the surgery and I was scared to death.  Luckily my mom is amazing and faced her fear (and discovered her love) of flying to come be with me and help me recover in case anything went wrong.  The surgery was successful and my body decided to act like normal once the polyp was removed - which was an amazing miracle.  I was cleared by the doctors to go back to trying to have a baby as soon as my husband returned from deployment and so when he got home in November of 2013 that's exactly what we started to do.  

Being healthy makes all the difference

I never hid my infertility struggles from my blog, but I didn't always do a great job of openly sharing them either.  In fact when I decided to take some time to really embrace the journey and wanted to document what I was going through my gut reaction was to start a blog separate from this one because I felt like that content didn't belong on my "Navy Wife" blog.  But now that I think about it I was really just not in a good place and not accepting of the journey I was going through.  Yes, I am a Navy Wife and when I first started Modern Meets Traditional the purpose was to meet other women who had experience with the military lifestyle and could help me figure out what to expect.  But in reality this blog is just my life and my journey written down for the world to see.  So last week when I decided to go live with my pregnancy announcement on the blog I also decided that I should migrate my infertility struggle over to this blog where it really belongs, because it is part of my life and part of what has made me who I am. 

What is the purpose of this drawn out essay?  Well it is simple.  I want to make sure that you, my dear loyal, too lazy to unsubscribe from a presumably dead blog readers understand everything that has really happened over the past two (ok three, ok seven) years.  Which means there will probably be lots of reminiscing and revisiting old blog posts over the next couple of  months, but I don't apologize for that because these memories are what have made me who I am today. 

So later this week we will start at the beginning.  Hope you are ready because it's been one hell of a ride. 

All the food

This week I have been ravenous.  On Tuesday I emailed hubby and told him if my appetite was any indication of what we are in for in 13 years when we have a teenage boy we should start looking for jobs number 2 and 3 right now to get ahead of the expense!

So - fellow moms - what was your pregnancy appetite like?   I hadn't expected this since you hear about lots of nausea and sickness in the first trimester and having everything press on your internal organs so that you can't eat alot during your third trimester.  Did you find yourself constantly starving around the 1/2 way mark? 

BTW, I'm 20 weeks today!!! Happy halfway mark to me!!!

I'm pregnant!

Like really pregnant, not just a little bit.  Like 1/2 way to delivery have seen the babies boy parts on the ultrasound pregnant.  20 weeks today. 

And I am so freaking excited!

I don't know if I am ready to be a boy mom but I am going to do my best to deal with the snakes and snails and puppy dog tales.  I have no doubt that K-9 is going to be a wonderful puppy with the new baby and totally have visions of a boy and his dog toddling around our back yard.  I'm working on a post talking about our infertility struggles and what I think finally made the difference and am going to try to get into updating more regularly.   Maybe someday I'll even get back into the swing of twitter lol!

Lenten Reflections

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday which marks the first day of Lent.  Traditionally this means it is time to enter into a period of fasting and pennance in order to focus more on your relationship with God.  Every year I do things a little different and instead of giving up something silly, like chocolate, I try to add something that actually does help further my relationship with God.  
This year since I am pregnant I am technically exempt from fasting (thank you because I have been ravenous this week!) but and still going to abstain from meat on the proper days because for me that isn’t a struggle at all (I’m just not much of a meat eater).
But what am I doing to actually further my relationship with Christ? I have dug out my old note book and resumes writing the Bible (yes you read that correctly) every day I will spend time copying words from the scripture into my notebook.   Studies show you remember and comprehend more when you copy your own notes from class during study time so I figure this helps me better retain what the Bible says.
On the kind of silly side I am also taking advantage of this time to prepare more for Baby L by choosing one item per day to get rid of - there will probably be more than 40 items make their way out of this house but I’m going to make sure at least one thing is put in the get rid of pile. We have been in this house for 4 years now and still have boxes that were never unpacked in what will be the baby’s room.   No time like the present!

Exciting announcement!!!

The Modern Meets Traditional household is having a baby!!!!

Baby L will be making his appearance in July 2019.  Why Baby L?  Because our dogs are Izzy, Jersey, and K-9 so obviously L is the only choice for a name.

I've waited to announce this on my blog since we have had such a long journey and I'm so bad at updating the blog and am fairly confident I have exactly 1 follower at this point :) But I did want to update the blog-o-sphere since I have a feeling I will making a reappearance during this new phase in my life.   In preparation for this adventure I  am importing old posts that I wrote for my attempt at a Spartan blog and my Infertility blog so feel free to go back in time and peruse the old entries from 2018 and 2017 that have magically appeared :) I will also start working on giving it a bit of an overall facelift since I just installed a random theme when my custom design died a couple of years ago.