It is finally the month of May and I am so excited! Why? Because in this month we will celebrate Mother’s Day and it will be my very first Mother’s Day celebration with my little one. Being a new mommy is quite challenging but indeed a very rewarding experience, to witness one developing soul grow each and every single day is such a great joy.

I did celebrate Mother’s day last year when I was still pregnant but my baby was just few months in my tummy before so I didn’t really feel the spirit of motherhood yet. But I could say when I am at my final stage of pregnancy where I felt a lot of changes in my body, the hardship and the pain of labor, I started to realize that being a mommy is truly a gift and a blessing that should be celebrated once in a mother’s life.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
Let me share with you my journey to the final milestone of pregnancy as this month will be dedicated to all the mothers in the world. It is such a sweet memory to remember the time when we conquered all the challenges that pregnancy brought to us for that special gift of new life and a new blessing of our family.

Third Trimester: The Journey to Final Milestone of Pregnancy

Little baby in my belly started to be mature and rapidly growing as I’ve gone through the final months of pregnancy, starting from 28 weeks until the final week. My pregnancy has been a tough start with all the sickness I’ve felt before but as I’ve gone through my final weeks I’ve felt many changes from my body to my growing baby in my belly bump and it was quite a challenging shift. As I’ve felt more of baby’s lively movements such as kicking and stretching, I knew that that was the most fun stage of pregnancy despite all the uneasiness I’ve experienced physically. My excitement boosted up each day especially when I observed some changes in my belly bump.

There was a common saying that every pregnancy is unique but there are quite common symptoms that can easily be noticed among preggy moms. I could say that when I’m in the final trimester of pregnancy, I got a little over with exhaustion from being sick but the feeling of pain from my bones got more and more intense as my belly had grown even bigger.

The progress of pregnancy and the changes I experienced on my third trimester to my final weeks.

• Peeing much more than I peed before during my 1st and 2nd trimester. Specially during night and in the middle of my sleep 3x at least.

• Insomnia. Difficulty of sleeping. It was very difficult to even twist my body from one position to the other side, I felt like my back bones were cracking and my body organs inside my stomach were twisting too.

• Very itchy belly, it’s definitely true that once you scratch to feel relief, it would be an instant scar. As much as I’ve hold myself from scratching I still got myself some scar like they called as stretch marks.

• Cramps and pain especially when lying. I felt leg cramps sometimes when I wake up in the morning.

• Baby’s movements were already visible even without touching my belly, just by observing my belly bump in my fitted dress.

• Baby’s movements got more painful especially her big skeletal movements pushing in my flesh and bones.

• Baby was more active with a lot of movements during the day now, no matter what activity I’m doing.

• Feeling hungry most of the time, probably every 2 hours. I used to eat small snacks more often to satisfy my hunger for me not to feel nauseated and dizzy.

• Got tired fast and easily gets exhausted when picking up stuff or just by standing from a long time sitting.

• Getting off the car was very difficult I felt some pain on my pelvic bone like baby is pushing unto my bones when I push myself out and without any outside support.

• Less constipation but experienced diarrhea sometimes.

• More exposed belly button,yay!

This was also the time for certain laboratory tests like diabetes screening (OGTT) and dental check.up appointments.

Progression through the final stage of pregnancy means preparation of things for baby delivery as well. From the hospital bag, baby’s necessities and everything about being a true mother of a newborn. The joy of excitement was real when we started buying baby’s stuff and arranging them one by one so neatly in her own space in our cabinet. Despite all the discomforts from the pains and the exhaustion from all the difficulties I’ve experienced, the happiness we felt when we first saw baby was truly genuine.

I hope to relate this special pregnancy journey of mine to some other moms who are experiencing this right now and to all moms all around the world. Dear moms, I congratulate you for being strong with all the sacrifices you’ve gone through from pregnancy to raising your kids to the best that you can.

Truly, mothers are all kinds of amazing!

I would love to hear your story and share some great experiences on how you handled it from the very beginning to the final stage until you finally had your cute little one.

My First Pregnancy

Being married was already a life turning point for me, the change in my way of life had been very different and after just a few months we were blessed with our first baby. For a new mommy-to-be like me, pregnancy gave a big impact of change in my body and in my life. Going through the stages of pregnancy was not easy especially that it is my first and I’m new to all of these adjustments.

I’ve gone through my first trimester and I believe it was my toughest months so far though in the first month I didn’t really feel different but on the second and third months, I experienced morning sickness and I felt sick everyday like there was a sudden transformation of feelings, my mood varied fast from cheerful to feeling sick, I felt nauseous most of the time that resulted to a lot of throwing up, I’ve been picky with my food and craved for a certain kind, my skin gets so dry and I got tired very easily. I didn’t have the bump yet during those times but already felt weird with my tummy. I could still wear my casual clothes but my undies got more fitted, I believe my breasts had grown a little and began to gain weight which of course was normal.

In my second trimester, I felt more relieved with my morning sickness, less nauseated and throwing up but headaches were often. I also experienced some difficulty with my balance which made me very cautious with every step I made when walking. I started to realized that from the beginning of my 4th month of pregnancy, I started to pee a lot that I couldn’t hold it even with just a sneeze. With a single sneeze comes the drop of urine even before I reached the toilet, it would continue to its very last drop.There was an increased urine output than my usual daily urination no matter how much fluid I take everyday. I tried to consume fluid as much as I can to be hydrated and also to avoid any dizziness or headaches. With my eating habits, I tend to eat more food than what I consumed in the first 3 months and I always felt bloated after, it felt like there was no space left inside my tummy that it could explode anytime and this has caused a difficulty in sleeping at night. During these months, I also started to have some back pain but it was not a constant pain, it comes and goes away fast.

Though I know that this was just the beginning and that there will be a lot more ahead of me being a new mom, I know for sure that nurturing this special new life inside my womb is worth all the sacrifices and as parents-to-be, my husband and I are very eager to meet our little one soon. I would like to know your experience and any tips for new mom-to-be like, I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

Baby’s Name

For a lot of parents-to-be like us, being parents for the first time made us very excited to choose what name should we give for our first baby. It is wonderful to read a lot of beautiful names from different resources and like many others we’ve had a difficult time choosing the right one amongst all that’s on the list.

At the beginning, we started to look for a lot of different names from short to the longest can be, but then we decided to think about the length, we had to answer the question, should her name be short or long? Once we had the answer to this question our list drastically narrowed. But still we had hard time choosing the one we love and our daughter would love to have.

A lot of name suggestions came up from friends and relatives but none of them really sounded well to our ears. What my husband and I did was to pretend that our baby was already walking on her own and call her using all the possible names that we had picked because eventually the name that we will choose will identify her for the rest of her life. We had a lot of debates about the sound and every time I picked a name my husband would be like “That does not sound right” or “It doesn’t go with our last name” and many more expressions from him.

We wanted a more unique name for our baby, so we started constructing names in different ways. Many of those names turned out to be hard to pronounce or easy to be mispronounced and that had to stop us choose some of these unique ones because we don’t want our daughter to be correcting people throughout her whole life when people start to call her name and be recognized.

At this point, coming up with a name was very difficult and that really overwhelmed us a bit but we had to keep looking and looking for that special name that our daughter would use when she finally gets here, then in the middle of nowhere we came across the name Mia, which means “mine”. The meaning of the name somehow touched our hearts and that’s when we officially decided that’s how we were going to call our most wished child.

After choosing the name Mia for our baby, we knew that there was something that we still needed to do, and that was to make sure that our baby’s initials would stand out when it comes to the time for her to just use her initials. We would never want it to turn out like M.A.D or M.A.N. you know what I mean. So once we made sure that her initials were okay, we were at long last ready to have the name of our daughter that will age well with her.

Here are some of the tips we considered throughout our special experience:

1. Be unique as possible?.
You don’t have to be unique, you just need to love the name. The name Mia that we picked is not unique but the meaning and the simplicity of the name made us fall in love with it. However, we still believe that it is a good idea to go with a unique name as long as it is not long or hard to pronounce because ultimately the one that will get stuck with the name is our baby. Each of us have our own identity and of course babies will have theirs therefore it can be a good idea to go with a unique name so that he/she can stand out among all other kids or people in the community just by having a name that is only owned by a few and not that popular like the other names.

2. Be short and simply spelled.
This is the other reason we chose the name Mia, we thought it would be an advantage for our baby to learn her name as soon as she learns to babble words and write the letters of her name at her very young age. Baby would be able to say and and even write her name without any difficulties or confusion as she learns all the basics. We can now tell that in the future most people won’t get confused on spelling her name.

3. Search names with special meaning.
Most people believe that every single name should have a meaning or at least have a reason behind that name of their child especially unique ones. I believe they are right, Why? My husband has kinda a unique name, and every time he tells his name to new people he meets, he always gets asked about where his name comes from, does it have a meaning and so many more. So having the answer to those questions is great and that is why we encouraged ourselves to go with a very special name that represents the meaning of having this beautiful gift that God has blessed us with.

4. Agreed and loved by both parents.
My husband and I had a baby name battle, both of us had the veto power but no matter what, we knew one thing; we were on the same side. So to keep things in a calming way we had to carefully listen to each other by naming names by turns and that helped us agree on names we both like. I’m so glad that both of us got the final say because that made it more meaningful for the both of us.