Pregnancy

Get The OR Ready! {An Unlikely Birth Story} I loooove to plan! I thrive on knowing when things are going to happen and try to be prepared for them as much as possible. It's irony at it's finest when we know from experience that real life works in the exact opposite way.  Well, I couldn’t have learned a greater lesson on this until this past October. Here’s a little background about one of my first lessons about "expecting the unexpected." When I was 16, I quit dancing to become one of the world’s worst basketball players. Truth. I was 5’3, playing a post position and I ended up taking a nasty fall and rupturing two discs in my spine. Fast-forward to...

  I'm a hater. I drink the hater-ade. I eat the hater-tots. Shower-hating goes way back for me, and maybe it does for you, as well.  I can't remember the first shower I ever attended. I'm sure no woman can. I'd be willing to bet that a man can boast that his first "shower" was also his last, and it was probably a couple's shower (they probably didn't even call it a "shower") I'm sure it was awesome--there were probably beers, and friends, and some sporting event on in the background, and some no-fuss meal. IF he ever attended another shower than the one celebrating him, it was probably just like this one. Honestly? If every shower I ever attended looked like...

While 2016 wasn't without some challenges, we are looking forward to a bright future in 2017 with Red Stick Moms Blog! We truly appreciate each and every one of you and the community we’ve built together. Over the course of 2016, in addition to launching our community neighborhood groups, Red Stick Moms Blog had over 760,000 page views, reached 470,000+ unique readers and hosted six successful events. To cap off 2016, we wanted to share our 10 most popular blog posts from the past year. They are stories of faith, humor, loss, marriage, motherhood and so much more. We hope you enjoy re-visiting them as much as we did.  Top 10 Blog Posts on Red Stick Moms Blog in 2016 1. 10 Things NOT to Say to...

I am one in four women who has lost a pregnancy. I have unfortunately gone through this five times. Five. My first pregnancy in 2009 I was expecting twins and my water broke at 20 weeks. I gave birth to my stillborn babies two weeks later. I was fortunate to have my son a little over a year later. Fast forward to 2015. After getting remarried, my husband and I immediately wanted to start a family. In the course of ten months, I had three first-trimester losses. All of these ordeals were heartbreaking and traumatic to say the least. Going through these losses was extremely challenging. Physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally challenging. It’s so unbelievably isolating in ways I never thought...

My pregnancy started like most pregnancies do: with a positive home pregnancy test. As we stared at the little plus sign on the stick in my hand, my husband and I were overjoyed with the idea of adding to our brood. What name will we give this new little one? Do you remember where we stored the bouncy seat? How should we tell everyone? We decided to wait until the proverbial 12 weeks had passed before telling our children the good news. After all, we had already seen our little bean’s heartbeat on ultrasound and knew the odds of a miscarriage were greatly reduced by that time. So, the day we completed Week 12, we announced our pregnancy by handing...