I’m so happy to finally be able to share our wonderful news: WE’RE PREGNANT! Schyler and I have been wanting this for quite awhile now and I have wanted to be a mom since I was a little girl, so I’m thrilled to finally be starting this journey into motherhood. It has been so hard keeping this a secret but I’m so excited to be sharing more about my pregnancy with you guys moving forward. I am a little over 16 weeks pregnant and the bump is definitely showing now, I finally broke into the maternity clothes last week! I had a relatively easy 1st trimester with some nausea and headaches (only about a week with vomiting right at the end). Schyler and I have done a little bit of baby shopping and my mom did some with me when she was in town visiting last month! What was really special was getting to see and hear the baby in our 1st ultrasound.

Schyler and I have been together for almost 10 years now but decided to start trying to have a baby this year. I started blogging and doing social media about 8 years ago, full time for about 6 years. Before that I was working in the interior design industry but after being let go from my job under unfair circumstances, Schyler encouraged me to pursue social media full time with his help. We wanted to make sure my blog and social media platforms were well established before starting a family. One of the things that really attracted me to blogging and social media was the freedom it allowed me. Working in interior design was a 9-5 job, 5 days a week, sometimes more. The one time I took a 2 week vacation after 2 years without one, I came back to no job. If I had stayed in that industry, I would have had to have my children in child care all day and that’s not what I wanted. I knew that when I had babies, I wanted to be able to be with them all the time during those special years that go by so fast. Blogging always me to do that because I am my own boss and I make my own hours.

About 2 1/2 years of blogging full time, we started moving around the country from Portland (Oregon) to Nashville and then Pittsburgh while living in apartments. This allowed me to be able to create a ton of travel content in these cities, content that drives the most traffic to my blog and social media platforms. But living in apartments wasn’t the greatest for starting a family and moving is very expensive. I always wanted to own a house before starting a family which we tried to do in Pittsburgh. That ended up in a nightmare situation where we lost money due to us being naive and trusting a lender that didn’t have our best interest in mind. We moved back to our hometown of Tri-Cities, WA, with the intention of moving to Las Vegas a few months later, until we realized we would be able to save a lot more money for a house by staying with Schyler’s dad.

After 3 years of being engaged, we still haven’t been able to tie the knot in our dream destination wedding either. I turned 30 this year and my biological clock has already been ticking since I was in my early 20’s. I also decided to stop caring so much about what other people thought or judgments they might have about our decision to have a baby before getting married. That is definitely the beauty of getting older, you realize your happiness matters more. Although nothing has quite turned out the way I planned as a little girl, I finally realized that it’s never the right time or situation and we shouldn’t just keep waiting for everything to line up “perfectly” to start a family.

I’m so glad that we made the decision to make starting our family the priority and I know everything will fall in line with the wedding and the house when it is meant to (were shooting for next summer hopefully!). For now, Schyler and I are focusing on a healthy baby/pregnancy so we don’t want to be stressed out trying to move into a rental home or buy a house until the baby is born. That is the plan for now but as we have already established, plans never seem to go quite the way you want them to so we’ll see what happens! Baby Cook is expected to make their arrival next January and we can’t wait to meet him/her.

I really wanted to share our happy news but also give you guys an update on where I am in my life at the moment, so I hope you guys enjoyed this blog post. I’ve linked our pregnancy announcement video and another video where we found out and told my family too. I am planning on sharing more about my pregnancy in future posts, so be sure to check back!

XOXO