I’m 28 weeks pregnant! (That’s a little over 6 months.) So officially into the third trimester, woohoo!

I’m feeling pretty good about it at this point, and I finally feel ready to share with people that I’m pregnant, although I started showing super early, as usual, so people who see me regularly have known for a while. If anything, when people see my belly, they expect that I’ll be having the baby anytime now. “Nope,” I say. “Another 3 months to go, almost.” “Phew,” they say, “good luck!”

The first trimester was tough for me, as it usually is. It came with the typical nausea, food cravings and aversions, poor blood sugar regulation, and fatigue. This time around, this phase was also a bit longer than usual: from week 5 until week 16. Wow, was I happy when it was finished!

Then, the second trimester came around, I had more energy, and I could eat my usual foods which made me feel good. I had stable energy and generally felt like myself again. What a difference that made!

While I was glad and grateful to be pregnant, this pregnancy was accompanied by many fears. I’ve spoken at length about how we lost our baby at 21 weeks of pregnancy in December 2021, so this fear was real until at least 24 weeks or so. What I haven’t mentioned is that we had another loss in June 2022: at 7 weeks, so much earlier but still sad.

These two losses meant that I went into this pregnancy with apprehension as well as hope. I didn’t know what would happen this time around, but I was also happy to be pregnant.

I still have 3 months to go, and there are no guarantees about how things will go, even though all indications are good. The tricky thing is that now we’re much more informed, and we know about many more things that can happen at any stage of pregnancy or birth. This means that the feeling of security (“Oh, things will go just fine for us”) is no longer there.

But I have a great deal of hope, and I have lots of gratitude. All I can do is wait; in the meantime, I can have hope and appreciate the moments when everything is going well.