Substack Got Me Pregnant

I’m cuddled up on my favorite chair with my sweet sweet protector pup. He’s already a stage-five clinger, but he stays even closer in these seasons. The kids just went down for naps (that hopefully stick) after a chill morning at home that felt like 100 years long. I found myself antsy and distracted for the bulk of the morning, and usually my impulse when I feel this way is to get all of us out of the house to switch up the energy. But I didn’t have it in me this morning to even get the kids dressed.

I find myself puttering around the house during these long mornings at home. I get frustrated by empty corners in some of our rooms, but I’m quickly reminded that curating a home you love takes time. I’m a big thrifter, and almost everything in our home is from a local shop or marketplace. I love the hunt. I love waiting for the perfect piece to pop up.

And sometimes, the empty space is an invitation. An invitation to let things be open ended for a while. To sit in the uncertainty until clarity arrives.

I rearranged our family room while the kids were playing hide-and-seek—neither of them follows the proper rules, and the sound of their giggles ignites me with the energy I need to move a plant that’s been extremely sad to the back of the house, where it will start to drink up the filtered morning light instead of getting scorched through the west windows all afternoon. I think she’ll be happier here.

The lamp from that room came with her. I just have a thing about making shifts in pairs.

For a while, I thought my pair of children was going to be enough.

Even if in my heart I had always yearned for a third, the pair seemed to put me at my capacity. Having kids fourteen months apart will do that to you.

After I had my second and was wildly overwhelmed by the demands of two, I found myself talking to a lot of moms around me. Because I think I knew in my heart I wanted three, but I couldn’t fathom doing all of it again. The sleepless nights. The hormonal waves. The sore boobs. The feeling like you’re dissolving into the background while the rest of the world is moving forward without you.

And I think because I had gotten pregnant again in the thick of my first postpartum, I just couldn’t imagine putting myself through something like that again.

When I knew I wasn’t certain about expanding our family, I decided to get a copper IUD. This was a big deal for me. 95% of the time, I’m anti-modern medicine. But with my history, I didn’t see any other way to guarantee that it wouldn’t happen. We joke that my husband sneezes on me and I get pregnant.

And I feel so incredibly blessed to be able to say that it’s really hard for me not to get pregnant. My first two pregnancies were unplanned. It was like a thought crossed my mind about being pregnant and then suddenly, there I was, positive test in hand.

When the itch arrived, it started as a low, almost invisible hum. Subtle jokes started to casually slip into my conversations. I would see a baby out and about and feel a twinge in my gut. Should we go again? I would almost immediately shake the question out of my head.

This was around the time my daughter was one and a half and I had just started my Substack.

Writing has unlocked something massive for me. I feel so wildly renewed in my energy. Giving myself an outlet to talk about how my outer experience is impacting my inner world has helped me in ways I’m having a hard time articulating, to be honest. But my gratitude for this platform—and more so, for my commitment to showing up for myself since the beginning of the year—is truly endless.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the desire for another baby started creeping back in the same time I started processing out loud again. The more I started sharing, the more I started hearing myself again. Not the version of me that existed before kids who I was hunting for. But this newly empowered wild woman who was saying, “you’re built for this… learn in.”

At first, I was writing my way out of motherhood. I thought writing was going to be this little escape where I could get away from the overwhelm and the monotony. In the beginning, my Substack publication was this little life raft I that was keeping me afloat. At all other times, I was drowning, but then I’d come back here and let myself be seen and feel that tiny pocket of relief. But to my surprise, as I kept going, the writing stopped becoming a place for me to escape motherhood, and started pulling me more deeply into it. As I was becoming more honest about what exhausted me, what I wanted more of, what wasn’t working, and what made me feel wildly alive.. I realized there was so much of motherhood I was wanting to experience but was holding myself back from truly embracing.

And somewhere in all of that, the idea of another baby stopped feeling like something that would swallow me whole. It started to feel like something I might actually want, and truly be able to handle.

Soon after, I noticed that my husband and I had started toying around with the idea of a third child. We started saying little things like, “I think we’ll have another,” and “I don’t think we’re done.” But still, even in early summer, it felt like a far-future idea. Something we would consider seriously once the kids got a little older.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s much easier now than it was when I had a newborn and a fourteen-month-old, but two toddlers is still very much chaos. It takes a lot out of me daily.

But recently I’ve also adjusted. I’ve become more resilient. And not just because their ages have gotten a little easier to handle. There is major shift in the way I show up for my life that has changed me on a cellular level.

I’ve never felt stronger and more capable as a mom. I just feel so wildly equipped for this role that while it exhausts me, it also energizes me in a way nothing else ever has. And I think that distinction is the key that has unlocked me into this entire next level of existing as a mother.

For a long time, I thought the prerequisite for having another baby would be that motherhood became easier. The kids would need to be more independent. I would need to find a more effective set up. I would need to somehow manipulate my energy. We would have to happen upon some magical set of circumstances where adding another person to our family wouldn’t feel like such a massive undertaking.

But none of those things happened. Two toddlers are still two toddlers. They are always pulling me in two different directions. Someone is usually whining and I’m constantly breaking up a fight. Leaving the house still feels like moving a small traveling circus from one location to another.

What changed was me. What changed is that I know what kind of mother I am, and maybe more importantly, I know what kind of mother I’m not. And I trust, wholeheartedly, that what I have to offer is enough.

I credit my commitment to showing up here consistently for my renewed sense of self. Knowing I have a space to be in my process and share what’s moving through me is the exhale I need in these wild days. Parenting By Design is my little home away from home.

I used to think that taking space in this season of life was in some way shape or form taking away from my children. But I’ve realized, through giving myself permission to express myself creatively again, deep diving into whatever rabbit hole I’m exploring, and sharing my personal stories, I am ignited with the energy that allows me to be the mom my kids need.

I am a better mother. A better wife. And an overall better version of myself when I let myself take up space inside of my own life.

My husband went on a fishing trip back in mid-July, and for the first time, it was just me and the kids riding solo for those five days. I had an intuitive hit to treat that time like an experiment, and it turned out to be the best, most transformative period of time I’ve ever had with my kids.

So much so that I experienced major upgrade symptoms after my husband got home. It was challenging for me to calibrate back to the routine we were doing just five days prior. I truly felt like that time helped me align to a renewed, more aligned version of myself as a mom. I talk about it in detail here.

On July 7th, the day before my husband left for his trip, I had an energy healing session with a woman I’ve been working with locally. At the end of our session, she casually mentioned that a spirit baby was orbiting my energy field.

This wasn’t new information to me. I had felt it too and had been keeping the feeling close to my chest. I guess I was just waiting for someone else to confirm it.

And we had both agreed that it didn’t feel immediate. It felt like this would be a 2027 pregnancy, and that I perhaps needed some time before my body would be ready again.

On July 10th, I was two days into my five-day solo adventure with my kids, and we went on a spontaneous trip to the zoo. Five minutes before we pulled into the parking lot, I received another intuitive hit to call my OB to get my IUD removed.

I honestly had an extremely positive experience with the copper IUD, despite being very skeptical of a foreign object being placed in my body. But in the previous weeks, I had been having this feeling like it was being pushed out of me. Like I was aware of it in there for the first time, and it was really irritating me.

When I called, I requested an appointment with the midwife I had worked with throughout my second pregnancy. She only works one day a week at the clinic and is highly sought after, and the woman at the front desk told me her earliest availability would be in late September. But there were other providers available if I wanted it out sooner.

I agreed to the timing. After all, we weren’t in a rush, right?

I hung up the phone after confirming my September appointment and immediately heard a voice in my head say, Call back. Ask for an earlier appointment.

And so I did.

I took their earliest available appointment just two weeks later, the second-to-last week of July. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I felt like I just needed to get it out.

For those next two weeks, my husband and I joked about the precautions we would have to take not to get pregnant due to my track record, and I was getting pretty excited about feeling into my body without the IUD inside of me. Even though it’s not hormonal, I had a feeling I would experience some shifts.

At one point, we threw out the idea of six months.

Six months for me to feel “normal” again. Six months for us to take our time and enjoy this new season where things feel easier.

The last two weeks of July, I spent my nights before bed communicating with the baby I had felt orbiting me. I have pages and pages of scripting that I did in those nights, but the thing that feels worth mentioning here is that the spirit baby said, My dad will decide the timing.

I thought, Gosh! How unfair. I’m never going to get pregnant if that’s the case.

What I didn’t realize is my husband wouldn’t consciously decide when that time would be.

The week between my husband returning and my IUD removal, I heard myself saying things out loud that gave me a feeling I was seriously moving in the direction of wanting to be pregnant again.

Even though my mind kept telling me to wait. Give myself time. Don’t make things all chaotic again just when they’re feeling manageable.

The day I got my IUD removed, I felt like a wild animal. I mean, seriously. I was feral. I also happened to get it removed during peak ovulation, and I could just FEEEEL my body craving a baby.

Still, my husband wasn’t bought into all of it, and honestly, neither was I.

“I’m just being crazy because I’m ovulating,” I said to him. “I do genuinely want to wait.” I promised, “I’m half joking when I beg for a baby.”

I felt like I would say something and then immediately follow it up with one of the above phrases. Like there were literally two parts of me at odds with one another.

And while I did feel like I needed time to chill, I could also feel it in my heart that I was ready. But still! We took precautions. I seriously tried to be reasonable and practical. I heard my husband out. I agreed with him that we would wait until the fall to “start trying.”

The funny thing is, the first two times I got pregnant, I knew it immediately. There was this feeling in my body like, Hmmm… that’s new.

I especially knew it the second time because I was able to identify that it was the same feeling I had the first time but didn’t have the language or experience to recognize.

And I think because we were so set on this idea of giving ourselves the opportunity to be intentional about conceiving— with this excitement around the idea that we could potentially decide when this baby would come through —I ignored it at the time.

But I look back, and I realize something did shift in me that day.

Another “rule” I had around the potential for a third was that we would wait to see if our daughter would be able to go to school with our son this year. School is a loose term— it’s a two-times-per-week, half-day Waldorf play school. But I had it in my head that I wouldn’t consider getting pregnant unless the kids would be on the same schedule this year.

The day after my IUD removal, we received a message from the kids’ teacher that there was a spot for her, despite her only being two years old. I was so excited and relieved by the news. It was something I felt like I could check off the box for readiness.

Okay, now I can get pregnant!

It makes me laugh looking back because I had created so many little rules around when I would be “ready.” Six months without an IUD. Wait until the fall. Get both kids adapted to the the same schedule. Let things settle down. Enjoy the easier season for a while.

There was always going to be another box I could check.

I think part of me believed readiness would arrive as a perfectly arranged set of external circumstances. Like eventually my life would organize itself into the exact configuration that would make having another baby feel reasonable.

Meanwhile, my body seemed to have a completely different definition of ready.

Still, my husband was not on board. And again, like I said, neither was my mind. So we carried on. And actually, we had to move quickly to get Sienna potty trained for school. Over the next few days, I got everything prepped and decided to do it. By day five, she was potty trained. It felt like magic.

We celebrated Sienna’s second birthday the first weekend of August. I had a massive confrontation that led to me recording this voice note for paid subscribers. In it, I was talking about the strange “symptoms” I was experiencing coming off of that conflict.

That was August 3rd. I laugh now.

On August 8th, my “symptoms” persisted. I was on day 32 of my cycle and woke up with what I can only describe as a “feeling.”

Five days of an extremely elevated heart rate. Feeling like I had been hit by a truck.

Can this somehow be residual nervous system processing from that conflict?

I started connecting the dots. There’s just no way, I thought. Absolutely no way.

I walked upstairs to where my my husband was in our office, and I locked eyes with him and said, “My period still hasn’t arrived.”

“Are you pregnant?” he said.

I looked out the window.

YES YES YES, I heard in my head.

Said that same voice that told me to call the OB, and then who told me to call back and move the appointment up. Not the voice that had been telling me to wait 6 months or let my body relax. The other, quieter one, that had been talking to me all along.

I just replied, “I need you to go get a test.”

A few weeks ago, I was making a list of manifestations. It had been a while since I dipped my toes back into manifestation work (I love TBM), and so I thought it would be fun to revamp my Authentic Code inside motherhood and make a list again.

When I was making that list, I almost wrote down “A third baby,” but I was genuinely afraid of casting that out there because I know how quickly things find me when I put my energy toward them. Apparently, the thought alone did the work.

Actually, I think my son brought the baby forward.

In fact, I think he’s traveled with an entire crew of souls who are in our lives in different capacities. There’s something special about his spirit. There’s a way he’s connected that I’ve never witnessed in another human before.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, before I was showing, he crawled up to me and started kissing my belly. Mind you, he was just shy of six months old when we found out. No one said anything to him. He just did it. For the rest of my pregnancy, he was kissing my belly constantly, pointing and saying, “Baby.”

Kids just know.

In early July, around the time I started feeling a baby orbiting me, he started saying things like, “Mama, I want you to have another baby,” and “I’m ready for my baby brother.”

At the time, these things seemed like they were coming out of left field. But when I look back at the timeline, it’s all so blatantly obvious. Like, how could I have ignored so many signs?

But I don’t think I was ignoring anything. I was just watching them happen without trying to control anything.

And that’s something that feels so cool about all of this unfolding. It was all so obviously happening through me, and I was truly just the witness to it all.

Which is maybe the most surprising part of the story for me. Because I’m very good at trying to make meaning out of things. I love Human Design. I love astrology. I love manifestation. I love looking for the thread and asking what everything means.

But I wasn’t trying to call this baby in. I wasn’t tracking dates trying to land on the perfect birth chart. I wasn’t scripting the exact month I wanted to get pregnant. I wasn’t trying to decode every sign as proof that something was about to happen. If anything, my mind was doing the opposite.

Not yet. Give it six months. Wait until fall. Let things stay easy for a second.

Meanwhile, something deeper in me seemed to already know. And maybe that’s part of what this whole season of writing has been teaching me. The more I come back to myself, the less interested I am in forcing my life into what I think it’s supposed to look like.

Okay, the final WILD thing!!

Last week (the first week of August) I was talking to my son before bed. He was having his “night snack” (his ritual, lol) and he said, “My baby brother is coming soon.”

I said, “Oh really? When?”

He said, “After you see the rainbow… he will be there.”

Now, he’s three, and he says crazy shit all the time. Those of you who also have three-year-olds know that sometimes they are literally just saying insane stuff because their imaginations are running wild 100% of the time.

I was half expecting him to say “He’s in your poop” or something like that. So I took it with a grain of salt and also slipped it into my back pocket.

The next morning, I was making my matcha, and I had already forgotten what he had said to me. Like I said, he’s spitting crazy phrases out constantly, so to me it was seriously just another story. But I looked down at the matcha I had just whisked, and there was literally a rainbow sparkling through the bubbles.

But again, I just see it and think, Okay hi potential future baby!? Maybe?!

I still did not think for a single second that I could’ve been pregnant. I guess I just thought, Hmm, maybe it’s the spirit baby’s way of saying hi. I’m here, but not here yet.

In that same 48 hours, I had another energy healing session—this was post-conflict—where I wanted to release some grief and reset my energy after a huge week, and I had a visual at the end of a baby in my womb.

Again, comical, because at the time I chalked it up to “a future vision.”

It’s funny how easily our minds can immediately steer us away from what our bodies know is happening. Because when I lay it all out here like this, I can see how wildly obvious the timeline is. And at no point did I feel like I was rejecting what I was feeling or seeing, but I certainly wasn’t under the impression that I was being presented with exactly what was happening.

So yes, I’m pregnant!

And yes, it’s early.

I’m okay with sharing about it now.

In fact, I dusted off my old Design of Pregnancy book, and I feel this renewed energy to move through this third pregnancy through the lens of Human Design. Because I didn’t do it my first two pregnancies and this might be my last one. That material is for the OG HD lovers & will be available to paid subscribers.

I’ll continue to share little snippets of my pregnancy journey here. TBH, it will probably become my entire personality for the next nine months. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I love having this space to talk about what’s happening for me. I love feeling like I have a platform where I can be totally wild and free and share THIS version of the story—the one that doesn’t stop at, “We’re totally shocked, but definitely excited!”

There’s always more to the story.

And this is my place to tell it.