There were several years in my youth when I would tell anyone who asked that I did not plan to have kids. These were the days of dedication to my future studies and career. Plus, I didn’t enjoy babysitting, so why have kids, right?

Sometime between the end of college and getting married five years later, Richard and I had all of those healthy pre-marriage conversations and came to the mutual conclusion that the life we wanted together included children.

Then in May 2015, he and I took one of our best vacations together – two weeks in Peru. We went on an adventure trek along the Incan trail to Machu Picchu, stayed in a boat house on the Amazon, and explored Lima. It was also two years into our marriage, and when we decided to pull out the stops (literally and figuratively) and start trying to have kids!

I distinctly remember swaying in the million degree heat and humidity in a flimsy boat on the Amazon and thinking, well, here we go! We also swam in the Amazon River that night. Fun fact – piranhas only live close to the shore, so if you plan to swim in the Amazon, aim for right in the middle!

Over the next six months, we started. Until then, I had no idea how hard, how specific, how miraculous it is to become pregnant. There really is a tiny window every month when it’s even possible! Don’t tell teenagers, but it’s a lot less likely to happen by accident than I was made to believe.

Many couples have it much harder than we did. I’m endlessly amazed by the intense & excruciating effort some women have to put in to have children. And I’m in awe of those who persevere to adopt when all else fails. That said, my first was one of the nearly 20 percent of pregnancies that end in a miscarriage. While we mourned our loss and discussed all of our contingency plans, we started trying again.

I could write for days about the stigma around miscarriage, about those few weeks each month when women don’t drink because we’re not sure if we’re pregnant yet, about all the peeing on sticks, about the isolation and shame and disappointment every time another month passes without the dreaded but hoped-for symptoms, about the white lies about being exhausted and nauseated… but we’ll save that for another day.

Suffice it to say that in about March of 2016, we were overjoyed that our first child was on his way. By sometime that summer, we were convinced he would be around to stay, and by November, our lives changed forever!

What did your journey to parenthood look like?

As a side note, I’ll add that during pregnancy, my doctors recommended a similar amount of exercise to whatever I was doing before I became pregnant. Well, in the couple of months before I became pregnant, I had a terrible flu, which meant virtually no exercise. So I spent the next 10+ months NOT exercising nearly at all. I’ll go into running while pregnant in another post, but for now, you can rest assured that I pretty much didn’t.