Hi fellow march mamas!
*warning- this is going to be a long entry*
I was going to start this journey more towards the middle of the month but i figured it's close enough and a new cycle to boot i might as well take the plunge. This is going to be the journal for our road to baby number 2, physical fitness, as well as financial fitness in preparation for that. Plus you will be priviledged to my ramblings about raising Riley and school as well
So a little background so you don't have to go digging for it anywhere on JM. My name is Annie, hubby's name is JJ (jeremiah joshua) and DS is Riley. age 27, 29 (haha he'll be that big 3-0 in january and he's buggin about it!) and riley is 19months. JJ and I met online in 2003, chatted via AIM for a couple of months, when I came back home to Nebraska for summer break from Arizona we graduated to talking on the phone. I moved back to Arizona into an apartment with a roomie July 31st and that's when JJ and I had our first date. He proposed 2-6-06 and we married in Arizona on 11-10-07. We were married about 7 months when we found out we were expecting Riley
and before my pregnancy was even over i knew i wanted another baby. JJ originally wanted one child but i put my foot down and said no, we both have siblings and i don't want to deprieve my child of that experience. I have 2 older brothers and 1 older sister (she's pretty much disowned all of us and we have done the same. she's just a big s.h.i.t. stirrer...but i guess every family has to have one, right?) JJ has 2 half brothers, one half sister, and a stepsister via marriage. Well, after Riley was born JJ suddenly decided that he wants 3 children, not just 2. I've always to avoid a "middle" child because my sister was the "middle child" until i was born and well, i've saw how she turned out
My sister could put Jan Brady to shame... I've sinced opened up to the idea, i know that the only way our children will have issues is if we treat them differently which i don't plan on doing.
I'm orginally from Nebraska, hubby from Arizona. We moved back to Nebraska the same weekend that we got married, that was fun in and of itself
He was let go a week before our wedding, we had been planning on moving to NE that spring and my family offered to help us move back since they were driving to AZ for the wedding anyway if we wanted to move early. So we packed our stuff all that week leading up to the wedding on top of last minute wedding chaos, got married on Saturday, went to the NASCAR race in phoenix on Sunday and by monday we were on the road.
As of now I'm currently working at a Cabela's callcenter part time, going to school full time for my RN and hubby is working full time as a forklift operator. I will graduate in 2013, i'm finishing up my gen eds this semsester and next and then I start my nursing classes in Fall of 2011. I've always wanted to keep between 2-3 years between my childrens ages. Because of this we are possibly planning to TTC our next little one in October or November of 2011, depending on how my first couple of months of nursing classes go which if we succeed would put that baby being born somwhere around July of 2012, which fits into my spacing "plan", i'll have a summer class until mid-june and then go back to school the end of August so i'll have my summerbreak for "maternity leave." I'll probably only be going to school 3/4 time since i will have all my gen eds done and working part time, either for cabelas still or as a CNA somewhere since i have to get that certification out of the way between now and August of 2011. If I don't feel up to TTC in October or November next year due to classes TTC will be put off until January of 2013
which will suck and throw off my spacing but it won't be the end of the world. The reason we would have such a big gap is because of the attendance policy for the nursing program, I think you can miss like 2 days or something a year, i just know it's really strict due to accredidation and because obviously you can't learn nursing skills if you're not there. If we have a baby anytime other than end of june/july/very beginning of August I will miss classes and have to wait an additional year to graduate. I will have a 6-week summer class(it's a lecture-only class so i won't have to worry about lifting patients at the very end of my pregnancy) from may to mid-june 2012 but i made it to 39wks and 2 days will Riley (5 days short of our due date) so as long as i have a July due date and don't get knocked up with twins
or on bedrest it shouldn't be an issue.
Another part of our journey to baby #2 is going to be weightloss. Hubby and I want to both be more physically fit which will really be a benefit to me not only when i'm pregnant again and chasing a toddler but also help me in my future job. Hubby has about 40-50 pounds to loose and i have double that, between 80 and 100. I'm currently 208 (I HATE that number but i'm the only one who can do something about it and the first step is admitting you have a problem or facing the truth of it, right?) and only 5'1" so that's a lot of extra weight to carry around and being pregnant just adds more stress. My goal is to be somewhere between 105 and 125 or wherever in between that i look good but not like a stick. Luckily with my current weight I had no complications with Riley and over my entire pregnancy i had a net weight gain of only 10lbs. When we checked into the hospital when i was in labor i was 219lbs. I dropped to 190 a few months after delievery probably due to breast feeding and then slowly gained it back but have maintained between 205-210 for a year. I've been very good at maintaining but not very good at loosing. I think from 7th or 8th grade until my Senior year of Highschool I gained about 20lbs every year even though i was active in gym class and made myself participate in activities. we always had to jog for warm up in gym class which was every other day and i would make myself jog the whole lap or 2 or the 5 minute time period depending on whether we indoors or out. then it just kind of topped off there. So i'm not inherently lazy i just have an easier time of gaining weight that loosing it
My biggest vice is soda and and i need to cut it out, i did pretty good going over a month with no soda and then once i had one, i started having more. We don't eat fastfood alot but more than we should, I would probably say 2-3 times a week some weeks, most on the 2x a week side. If we cut that out not only do we save calories but money as well. My brain knows that it's just that trying to sell my stomach on that idea isn't working. I swear sometimes i have no willpower.
another big portion of our journey is going to be getting financially fit. I'm not going to go into explicit details and give figures but by the end of January i'll have paid off about 1/4 of my debt, not including my student loans but i'm not going to worry about paying those yet as they won't be "payable" until after i graduate and I want to go on to get my bachelors which can be done online through the University of Nebraska Med. Center and takes about 1.5-2 years so i may not have payments due on my loans until 2015 at the latest and even by then my student loan balance will only be around 15k for 6 years of schooling(my 2 year wait while i'm doing my gen eds, 2 years for my actual nursing classes, and 2 years to get my bachelors) not bad. and if i can make payments while they are in defferment i certainly will but it's not something that i'm immediately concerned about. Hubby's debt is probably equal to mine. His is mainly his truck loan and student loans. We're paying off his truck with our income tax return that we get in 2011 so that will be eliminated and then he'll apply the money that was going to his truck towards his student loans. His student loans proably won't be paid off until sometime in 2012 but it is what it is. With our tax return this year after his truck is paid off we're going to see if we can't get me a newer car with what's left. I currently drive an '85 buick and it needs a lot of money dumped into it whiin the next year, just in general maintenance and i really don't want to keep throwing money into it as old as it is. A family friend owns a car lot and can purchase vehicles from the local auto auctions so once we have our tax return he's going to be lookin for a vehicle for us and told us that he'd sell it to us for auction cost. Woohoo! we're looking at getting Durango and he said it would be totally doable in our price range. JJ and I have talked about getting just a sedan but we've reached the conclusion that whether we get an SUV or sedan it's going to cost about the same from the auction and if we get the sedan by the time we have #2 we will already have outgrown the car because we're always taking my dad or my newphew or someone else with us when we go places. So 2 adults in the front, 2 carseats in the back leaves little room for an adult. So we decided to bite the bullet and just go for an SUV when the time comes. JJ keeps suggesting a minivan and seriously one of these days he's going to drop dead from my glare
i HATE minivans with a passion...no offense to anyone who has one but they are NOT for me! We're hoping that we'll have most everything paid off by the end of next year if not before and some savings built up and when we get our tax return in 2012 we can use that as a downpayment on a house. I told JJ that by the time I graduate with my RN license i want to be as nearly debt free as possible with the exception of our student loans, have his vehicle paid of and have a newer paid off vehicle for me, either have a second child or have the second child on the way and own our own house in 2013. Not an unreasonable goal at all. He thinks that he needs to get a "new" truck as soon as his is paid off and i said "NO WAY!" i'm getting a vehicle since his is only a 2001 and we're getting a house before he can take on another truck payment.
And two smaller things in our journey that will play a big part in acheiving baby number 2, JJ and I definitely have to improve our bedroom relationship. It's been pretty much nonexistent since the end of my pregnancy. The end and immediately after delivery is a given as to why we were lacking in that department and since then I was breastfeeding up until a month ago so I don't know if that cut out some of the "romance" in our room or if pregnancy really changed my moods that much. I started out on a breastfeeding safe BC pill after delivery and when i got my period back four months after delivery they were horrendous!! Long, heavy, and painful. My prepregnancy cycles were always anywhere between 21-23 days long and my period lasted 4.5-5 days. It was like clockwork. After delivery on the BC they were usually 7-8 days long, heavy the whole time, and i cramped like i did when i first got my period as a teenager...double over in pain cramps and have to keep a steady stream of tylenol in my system to function. I figured out what it was about 3 periods on the pill and quit taking it to see if it would help. My next cycle after that was 6 days long with minor cramping. So i haven't been on BC since but we do use condoms everytime so we don't have an "Oops" along the way- which i wouldn't mind we're just not ready for it. So since this is my first "clean" cycle i've had since pre-pregnancy with no breastfeeding and no BC pill i've started charting again to i can figure out what my new cycle length and ovulation points are. I used to ovulate late around day 15/16/17 but i have no idea anymore and the last few cycles where i've watched the lenght have been all over the place from 23 days to 30 to 26 and 28 this cycle. I'm hoping that it was because the breastfeeding was throwing them off but we'll see.
so if you ladies have read my novel this far i thank you and hope you'll follow me on this journey and if you have any words of encouragement or advice, feel free to offer!
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