Hi all!
My name is Leila and this whole forum thing is completely new to me. So, please bear with. :)
I am due August 4th (halfway there!)– and this will be our first child. I’m 32 (will be 33 when baby comes) and my husband is 11 years older. We have been married for 5.5 years. We had been TTC for about 3 years. I had a m/c a year and a half into TTC and then it took another year and a half to get preg again (this time with the aide of a fertility doc on our second round of inseminations). It has been a slow process of accepting that this time is for real and (fingers crossed) nothing bad is going to happen. I didn’t want to tell anyone until we were well outside of the first trimester but DH really wanted to tell his mom when we were visiting for the holidays (we were 9.5 weeks at the time). That was very hard for me as I was still so very cautious.
Up until I started feeling movements a month ago (around 16 weeks) I was constantly still wondering if everything was still okay. Now it’s starting to feel a little more “real” and I realized that I’m way behind in figuring out how we’re going to parent this little bundle!
My husband is great with kids and has worked with kids most of his working career. As a result of that, we haven’t had a ton of conversations up to this point on how we would actually raise a child/parenting decisions/etc. I do know that he tends to go with the “establishment” to guide his decisions (for example, immunizations) and wouldn’t question what to give/when to give it if I weren’t starting to question it. So this kid is going to inspire a LOT of conversation in my house! Hopefully it won’t be difficult to come to a common decision on things (for example: when we got married I wanted to combine our last names into a new name and after a year and a half of discussing it he just couldn’t ever get on board with it. On the day of our marriage we still hadn’t decided what we were going to do, so I just didn’t change my name. Now we’re faced with deciding a last name for our child – here we go again!).
More about me: I live in the Pocono Mountains in PA. We moved here from NC about 2 years ago and don’t have any family nearby (nor have we made very many friends yet). We are having the baby at the closest hospital, which is about 30 minutes away. A homebirth isn’t an option as there are no midwives around that my insurance pays for and there are no birthing centers in the area either. So I’m having a hospital birth with one of 8 doctors who may be on call the day I go into labor. 
I’m a nursing student and I will have 1 year left as of my EDD. School is supposed to start back again 3 weeks after I am due and I’m not sure if I’ll try to go back right away or if I’ll take a year off. My husband works in Community Recreation and his busiest time of year is the summer. I really would love if he could take 2-3 weeks off in the beginning but I think that’s probably dreaming.
Anyways, I know I’m kind of a late joiner into this group but I look forward to getting to know you ladies and I know I’ll be learning lots!
(sorry for the ridiculously long post -- apparently I have no ability to summarize!)
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