Andy & Jessica

I’ve always prided myself on being a tough girl.  I have always just felt that if I ever happened to get run over by a bus, I would just brush myself off and walk away from it.  I never imagined that I would suffer from morning sickless, let alone all day sickness.  I remember that at about 7-8 weeks pregnant, I was chatting with my red-headed, freckled-faced cousin, Leanna, who called to congratulate me on my pregnancy.  I was bragging about how I wasn’t sick and how I wasn’t going to get sick.  The next morning, pregnancy sickness came on full force.   It was really bad and lasted all day for weeks.  The home remedies recommended by my doctor’s office (Unisom at night, vitamin B-6, ginger snaps, etc.) did not work at all.  It seemed to help a little when I stopped taking my prenatal vitamin in the mornings and stayed away from Total cereal (which contains a lot of iron).  I finally had to go on a prescription drug so that I could keep food down.

We had bought a package of 3 pregnancy tests. I think it was the First Response brand. I chose it because it is supposed to predict pregnancy before the other tests. It said it was only about 60-some percent accurate at testing pregnancy as early as I took the first test. I took the first test on a Friday night after work. For the two weeks before that, I was acting as if I had indeed gotten pregnant on our first try in July. I was eating super healthy foods, ensuring that I heated up the deli meat sandwiches they feed us during lunch meetings at work, etc. I was crushed to see that the test said I had failed to get pregnant on our first try. In fact, was so mad that I marched down to the kitchen and found some chocolate ice cream with chunks of something delicious and some other junk food that I had been depriving myself of for the last two weeks. I believe I even had a can of pop (another thing I had decided to cut out since I figured I could be pregnant). I gave my poor, darling Andy a rough time. I told him that he had failed to deliver on the one thing I wanted for my 30th birthday. Poor Andy! Well, I spent the next few days acting as if I wasn’t pregnant. On the next Tuesday, we had a lunch meeting scheduled at work and I was sure they would be serving deli meat sandwiches AGAIN. (You see, a pregnant woman should not eat deli meat without heating it up to steaming because it can contain a bacteria that causes the mom to get really sick and the meds to fix the mom are not good for the baby. In fact, the baby can die as a result of this.) I impulsively decided on that Tuesday morning before boarding the bus to work that I would take the test again. I sat the stick down and prayed while waiting that God would draw in two lines. I wasn’t really that optimistic. I was shocked when a second line appeared before my eyes. The second line was dimmer than the first. I thought that meant the test result was inconclusive. I ran down to tell Andy (who was playing on his computer) the news. I said, “Look, Andy, I’m half pregnant.” He jerked back in his computer chair and asked with an alarmed voice, “Did you draw that in?” (No, buddy, I’m not that desperate.) He then read the instructions and we learned that the indicator line is often dimmer than the other line. So, that day I heated up my sandwich at work. I re-tested the next day, again with a positive result.

Getting pregnant for me was as easy as counting to 14. Really. You see, this pregnancy was planned out and I managed to get pregnant the very first month that we tried. My parents had warned me growing up that the Forbes’ were fertile (in other words, no sex before marriage). I had believed them. I believed them to the point that I planned maybe a year ago to get pregnant in August or September 2006, figuring that would give us time to get the house painted. Relatives and my mom’s friends laughed at me when I confidently told them that I was going to get pregnant in August or September 2006. When we finished painting the outside of the house at the beginning of July 2006, I moved the date up. I decided that I wanted to get pregnant that month, before my 30th birthday on August 5, 2006. That gave us just one try to get the job done. And we succeeded! (Sorry if this was more information than you wanted to know, but you apparently kept reading.)