The beginning of pregnancy #2

Mark and I debated for quite a while as to when we wanted to start trying for baby #2. (Which, by the way, we are calling PP for now, which stands for potential pips.) Originally I wanted our kids to be close together, as in under 2 years apart, until Abbie came out and didn’t sleep for the first 7 months of her life unless I was holding her.  Then we talked about maybe having them 4 years apart, but decided that might be a little too far apart.  Then with as busy as he’s been here with work it turned more into a ‘well when are we even going to have to opportunity to try’ situation.  It eventually came down to us wanting to try either before or after his deployment.  We finally decided to try before he left.  However, since he was gone for 6-7 weeks before his deployment, that left us with two cycles to try before he left.  We were hopeful, but not holding our breath.  (It took us 7 months of actively charting and taking my temperature to get pregnant with Abbie.)
So Mark left on a Monday.  I took tests on Sunday and Monday morning, which was a few days early, but I was hoping to have an answer for us before he left.  I knew since I was testing a couple days early there was a possibility that I could be pregnant even if they were negative, but when we saw both negatives on those tests, we just assumed I wasn’t.  I was letting the fact that I wasn’t pregnant sink in and I was kind of excited about not being pregnant during my six months at home.  I was looking at all the positives of it, being able to buy a new wardrobe, having energy, getting into better shape, losing weight, riding horses with friends, etc, even though I was a little disappointed we weren’t pregnant.  For some reason on Wednesday, I decided to take another test at 3pm.  I was just feeling a little off, so I wanted to make sure I wasn’t pregnant.  The problem was I only had 2 old pregnancy tests left from when I was testing with Abbie and they’d expired in June of 2010.  But it was all I had so I used one of them, and after looking at it after a couple minutes, it was negative so, again, I thought I wasn’t pregnant.  However, when I looked at it before I went to bed, around 9pm, there was a slight positive line on it. 
So Thursday morning, I took the last expired test I had, just to see what it said, and it immediately was positive also.  I dropped Abbie off at her sitter’s, and headed to the hospital on base to do the pee test.  I waited an hour for those results, and it came back negative, so I had to call flight med and get a referral for a blood test.  I went back a few hours later and got the blood drawn and was told it’d take an hour to get the results.  Since I had to pick Abbie up at the sitter’s, I called flight med after we got home to find out the results.  I told whoever answered the phone that I was calling for results, she asked my name, and then told me they were negative.  I confirmed with her TWICE that she was talking about my blood test and not the pee test results and she acknowledged TWICE that yes, she was talking about the blood test.  So I got off the phone and was kind of disappointed.  Over the course of the night I was adjusting to the thought of being pregnant and had gotten kind of excited about it, and now I started switching gears again, which was frustrating and exhausting.  (And that was an emotionally exhausting week already with Mark having just left.) I just had some weird feeling that she was wrong, so I called our flight doc (the squadron is assigned a doctor and we all have his personal cell phone number) about 5 minutes after I’d gotten off the phone with the lady.  The flight doc looked in the computer and told me the blood test results were still pending and that he’d called me in an hour.  He called me almost exactly an hour later and told me I was indeed pregnant.
I am sort of emotionally exhausted after this rollercoaster of a week with Mark leaving and thinking I wasn’t pregnant and then I was pregnant and then I wasn’t pregnant and now I am pregnant.  I feel like I’ve been too busy to even process it at this point and I still have SO much to do before we leave in a few days that I probably won’t have time to process it for a while.  The flight doc was a little worried about it sticking since when I was tested I was BARELY pregnant, as in, probably not even 2 weeks pregnant by that point.  So hopefully this baby sticks and we’ll have another potential pips (our nickname for Abbie) due December 13.
Mark was really excited when I told him I was pregnant.  He was disappointed when we thought we weren’t pregnant, more so than I was, so he’s very happy that we are.  It was weird telling my husband over the phone that we’re pregnant, but oh well.  I’m bummed he’s not going to be here for the majority of it, but at least he was around for all of my pregnancy with Abbie.  And he’ll be back just in time for me to be really miserably pregnant.  =)
Written 4/8/11