"what if you just stopped taking your birth control altogether?"

This is my husband and I back when we were babyless.

Disclaimer: There may be posts that include talk about periods, pregnancy, and birth. Read at your own risk.

In January of 2016 my husband and I had begun a new semester at BYU-Idaho, our last semester before we would graduate. We had just got done with Christmas break and I wasn't taking my birth control (my OB had me taking it constantly before that so I never got a period). I just figured it was time my body needed to have a period. I stopped taking it in late December and had only had light spotting, no sign of a period yet. January started and still no period. I didn't think much of it because I wasn't exactly excited to have a period again.

One day, Damon and I were talking about this and he said "what if you just stopped taking your birth control altogether?" I said "what do you mean? like you want to start trying to have a baby?!" He said "well yeah I mean if you do." I started freaking out a little bit and got extremely excited. I didn't know if I was just excited about the idea of having a baby or if this was something we needed to do. I suggested we say a prayer together so we did. After praying, I felt the same way, just extremely excited. In the past when this subject had been brought up I never got excited to have a baby. We were almost married two years before this and I just had never had the desire. I definitely had the desire now. The next day I woke up still just so excited. I remember saying "I can't believe we are going to start trying to have a baby!"

From then on, I got pretty into it. I had a doctors appointment and we discussed me trying to get pregnant (I had a seizure the month before and wanted to get the okay, just in case). I got the go ahead from the doctor, picked up some prenatal vitamins, and even got ovulation sticks. 

Now the fact that I hadn't had a period was weighing on me a little bit. Its a lot easier for this whole "getting pregnant thing" to happen when you know when your last period was and mine was months and months ago. I was so anxious. Damon and I had already started trying but I also hadn't had a period so I thought either I'm already pregnant or my body is just taking forever to have a period. I was hoping for the first one but didn't think I would get that lucky. Pregnancy test usually only work around two weeks after you 'create the baby' so taking a test was not going to help to tell if I was pregnant or not. This period of time for me was like a little child counting down the days until Christmas. Except Christmas would have to be an unknown date, so it was even harder to wait. January 22nd came along and I got my period. I was so bummed. "We had been trying for a whole two weeks, I had sex when I was ovulating, why wasn't I pregnant yet?" Thought my naive self. I felt so stupid for being bummed for only trying for that long. People try to get pregnant for years! I needed to calm down. I continued to use the ovulation sticks and purchased a TON of them and a TON of pregnancy tests because I just knew that it was going to take me a long time to get pregnant. It took my sister a while for her first pregnancy, I'm sure it would be the same for me.

February rolled around and my family took Damon and I to Hawaii. It was there that we found out we were pregnant. You probably want to slap me in the face if it takes you longer than one month to get pregnant like 99.99% of the world. Yeah I felt pretty stupid for being so sad when I got my period last month and for assuming that it would take me forever to get pregnant. I also felt ecstatic! I was so hard to hide my joy on that trip. Damon and I were in a condo with my whole family and I so badly wanted to shout it to the world.

At first I thought pregnancy sticks worked like
ovulation sticks and a faint line meant that you
weren't pregnant. Damon corrected me.
"I think any line means yes" he said.

We decided to keep it a secret until we knew we weren't going to miscarry early on like so many women do. Of course the same day my mom started talking about how she had a cruise planned for November (about 9 months from then). I was like oh really? Hmm.. maybe you shouldn't book your ticket just yet. Yeah she picked up on the hint and got almost as excited as I was. So at this point just me Damon and my mom knew.

It stayed that way until week 9. We visited Washington and told our families. Damon said the prayer at a family dinner at my sisters house and blessed "Jamie and the baby" and he shared a photo of the ultrasound hidden in a church magazine at his house. Everyone was really excited for us. We loved how much support we felt from our families and couldn't wait to find out the gender in just a couple weeks from then.