Book Feature - Then Comes Baby by Eric and Ashley Hasty

HBL Note: If it wasn’t clear, this is actually a pregnancy announcement. I want to get that right out in the open in case you were really intrigued by the synopsis and were hoping to pre-order the book immediately. Ha! My husband Eric and I are expecting our first child on December 18, 2022. After 14 years of marriage, it was a plot twist that our families thought might never come. A slow burn, if you will.

The most common question I get is how I’m feeling. Honestly, I can’t complain. I feel nauseous most days, especially after I eat or before I eat, so pretty much all the time. But I haven’t had morning sickness, which I’m so grateful for. My energy level has been super low. I feel like I need to take a nap after completing any minor task like taking a shower.

But now that I’m into the second trimester I hope to be past most of that and I’m looking forward to the bump growing! Scroll down to read more about THEN COMES BABY by Eric and Ashley Hasty.

Book Feature - Then Comes Baby by Eric and Ashley Hasty

I was never one who felt destined to be a mother. If anyone asked about my plans to have kids my answer was always, “maybe someday,” said with a shrug and then a quick change of subject to a topic I found more interesting. Then, I met and married my husband Eric. We were young. Just twenty-two. When we recount that story now, we say if we were to do it over again we’d probably wait. We certainly wouldn’t encourage others to get married so young. What’s the rush? But it worked for us. He put me through grad school, then followed my career which took us to Bloomington, IN. While there, I put him through the rest of his undergrad and graduate school then followed his career to Chicago. Our closest friends like to point out how we’ve supported each other in our dreams and careers over the years and it is one of the things we are most proud of.

We had the normal couple talk about having children. Do you want them? How many? What would their names be? For the longest time it was always “Maybe someday,” and then we’d change the subject to planning our next vacation or trying to snag reservations at the hot new restaurant. We saw our lives taking one of two directions: one with kids and one without. We liked both visions, if I’m being honest. We were never compelled one way or the other. So for the time being, we continued on path one. We rushed into marriage, we were not going to rush having a kid. There was so much we wanted to do and see before that.

Over the years, Eric and I certainly had our ups and downs. While Eric’s career took us to Chicago, I was desperately holding onto a career I loved in Indiana. It was my dream job, just not in my dream location. Eventually I had to stop clinging on to my old dream that was no longer serving me in order to let new dreams take shape. It was a tough transition, for years I’d put my entire identity on my career, just to let it all go. I floundered for awhile. Then, shortly after we purchased our first home, the unit below ours had an oven fire that spread through the rest of our building, destroying our home. I went from floundering to drowning.

It’s been over fourteen years since we got married, almost three years since the fire, and we are back on our feet. For the first time in our lives we looked at each other and said, it’s now or never. We’ve been on path one for awhile, we can continue on this path or we can give path two a try. So we decided to give it a year. If I got pregnant, then great! Path two it would be. If I didn’t, then path one was meant for us. Three months in, I was convinced we’d waited too long. I was asking doctors about fertility testing (fertility treatments, IVF, etc. were never a consideration. It was either going to happen naturally or it wasn’t going to happen) because I wanted to know our odds. I am SUCH a planner, so I was frustrated when the doctor’s replied with “give it time.”

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I have Crohn’s Disease. Did you know that about me? So when I told my GI doctor that my husband and I were trying to conceive, he suggested that I have a colonoscopy just to make sure the disease was still in remission so that I could go into the pregnancy knowing my disease was under control. He also slipped in, as an aside, that he has an interesting track record of women finding out they’re pregnant when they test before the procedure. So he said, and I quote, “Scheduling an appointment could help your odds.” Imagine my disappointment when I showed up on procedure day and I tested negative. (Truthfully, I was both disappointed I wasn’t pregnant and relieved that I could still have the procedure because that prep is a bitch!)

Joke’s on me. Turns out I was actually pregnant, it was just too soon to show up on the test! I found out two weeks later when I was a couple days late and about to visit my family for the weekend. I was convinced I wasn’t pregnant, the doctor had JUST tested me! And surely doctor’s tests are better than these at-home tests. I was so convinced, in fact, that I opened a new box of tests, the kind that has one or two lines, went through the steps of taking the test and then when I came back to read the results I realized I didn’t know if two lines meant I was pregnant or not pregnant. So I opened the booklet and had to read through the directions to find out what it meant: pregnant. Then I Googled the likelihood of a home pregnancy test giving a false positive (again, I was CONVINCED I wasn’t pregnant) and learned that false positives were highly unlikely, unless there was user error. Well, that explains it. Clearly I didn’t do the test correctly, so I tested again. Same result. But this is a brand new box of pregnancy tests that I haven’t used before so maybe I should go buy one of those tests that clearly says “Pregnant” or “Not pregnant.” I took one of those and it said, you guessed it, Pregnant.

As an only child, I knew I only ever wanted one kid. Honestly, sibling relationships baffle me. I’ve seen great sibling relationships and really strained ones as well. But usually they fall somewhere in-between and I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it. My mom used to joke I’d have twins, so I let out a long-held breath when the OBGYN confirmed there was just one. There are pros and cons to having one child or multiple children, but for me, and this is a highly personal decision for parents to make, one is plenty. I like the idea of giving that one child our all while still maintaining our identities as individuals outside of parenthood.

So yeah, now we are on path two and we are feeling all the feels. We are both mourning our departure from path one while also joyfully looking forward to the adventures ahead on path two. They say the timing is never right to have a kid, at least that is what parents told me when I said we weren’t ready, but this feels like the perfect time for us. I have high anxiety, which was made worse by the fire. But I haven’t felt this at peace in a long time. We are ready for this highly-anticipated debut and we are excited to go on this great, adventurous path two.

Hi.

Jun 7 Then Comes Baby