This is going to be a bit long 😬

So I’m almost 37 (husband is the same age). I have 2 teenagers from my first marriage, they are 15 and 17, and my current husband and I have been together 10 years.

My husband and I started trying for a baby together in late 2016. I got pregnant right away but miscarried at 8 weeks. We hadn’t told many people so we just grieved quietly and waited until we were ready to try again. I got pregnant a second time in mid-2017 and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl April 29, 2018.

She was born with a rare chromosome disorder, and was only the 11th person diagnosed in the world. She had a long list of congenital abnormalities, and we saw at least 8 specialists regularly for all of her conditions. Unfortunately on January 5th of this year she died in hospital of an acute infection. They suspect she might have had an undiagnosed autoimmune disorder. She was 8 months 1 week old and the loss of her has absolutely devastated us. I was absolutely adamant about not having any more children, but my husbands doctor didn’t feel comfortable doing a vasectomy during such an emotionally difficult time and advised us to wait 3 months and then come back.

We weren’t having very much intimacy anyway so that didn’t seem like much time.

Then I somehow got pregnant in April, even though we only had sex maybe once that month, and we were using the rhythm method/withdrawal which had literally always worked for ages and ages. But I suspect now I just ovulated later because it should have been well after my fertile window when we did it.

Either way, I’ve had a lot of difficult feelings about this pregnancy. There’s so much grief and trauma still from my daughter, and I also feel somewhat...ashamed of getting pregnant so soon after her death. I don’t want people to think that I’m just trying to put it behind me and forget her. I would never do that, she was my whole world for her entire short life. I lived and breathed for her.

So, even though I am 14 weeks, we’ve been reluctant to really announce anything. Only our immediate families know, and a couple of my friends. I haven’t even told our teenagers because I’m so scared of how they will take it. My oldest has had such a hard time coping with the death of his sister. He has nightmares about seeing her in the hospital during the last days she was alive. They are both in therapy, we all are, but I know how tough this has been for me and my husband and I just don’t want to add anything more to their already full emotional plates.

Since all of you are strangers, you’re objective. If you knew us, even casually on FB, would you be judgemental of how soon after losing our daughter we got pregnant again? I realize I can’t control what people think, and I probably shouldn’t care, and I probably wouldn’t except I’m already judging myself. I just want honest opinions because when we do announce (or people find out however they do) I want to be prepared for their reactions or questions.

*So far this baby looks to be perfectly healthy. We did the 12 week NT scan at a high risk clinic and everything was perfect as can be. We also paid to do a NIPT (fetal chromosome microarray) but I need to do a redraw because there wasn’t enough fetal DNA. Hoping to do that next week, and crossing my fingers that by 15 weeks there’s enough DNA to find out everything we want to know.