9 Months Pregnant! Here’s What I’ve Learned

I can’t believe that I’m 36 weeks pregnant (9 months!). The time seemed to pass by so slowly during the first trimester when I wasn’t feeling too well but now, as my due date is right around the corner, I can’t believe it’s almost here! Eekkk!

This pregnancy journey has been a wild ride and has taught me so much. I wanted to share some important lessons and reminders:

Listen to what your body is telling you. Whether you’re pregnant or not, when your body changes, it can be frustrating. I know throughout my pregnancy this is something I struggled with. I can honestly say that it wasn’t until I was 6 months pregnant that I finally accepted the change and began to really view my body as beautiful. The body is an incredible thing. It changes, adapts, and grows as we need it to. Instead of putting it down and trying to control the way it changes, it’s important to ask ourselves, why are these changes occurring? What are our bodies telling us? Are you growing a baby in your body? Are you stressed and overwhelmed and need to make changes in your life? Do you need more time for self care? All these changes start within ourselves and they will never stop happening. Instead of judging what’s on the outside, we need to assess what’s happening on the inside.

Even if you love it, if it’s not serving you, let it go. This is been a tough lesson for me to learn during my pregnancy. As you all know, I love running. It connects me to not only myself but to my community. I love nothing more than running with my RunYoga crew on Monday nights and my Marathon Sports Boston peeps on Wednesday nights. It was incredibly hard to let go. Around month 7 or so, I started to get inner groin pain while running. I decreased my mileage and frequency of runs but even running 1 mile per week was causing me pain. I heard so many stories of people running up until they went into labor and didn’t understand why this was so different for me. But it was time to say goodbye. Running was not serving my physical body and it was causing me so much frustration. I finally let it go. I looked at it as an opportunity to switch things up. I started swimming, upped my walking game (which Rudy was very happy about!) and kept my yoga game on point and felt so much better. Will I run again? Yes! Will it be a while? Yes! Is that OK? Yes! I’ll start to run again when it serves me both physically and mentally.

People love to help you. Let them! I take incredible pride in being independent. I love owning my business, managing my schedule, and taking it all on myself. Well, when you’re pregnant you can’t do it all anymore. This took me until months 8 of my pregnancy to realize. I can’t carry large speakers for events. I can’t do all the errands and manage a full time teaching schedule 6 days a week. I can’t carry my harmonium up and down flights of stairs. When people want to help you, let them! My husband has been trying to teach me this lesson throughout my whole pregnancy and I’m finally listening (sorry Jon! love you!). It’s hard to accept help. There’s something really empowering of being able to take charge and do everything yourself but I’ve learned first hand of how beautiful it is to let others in and to accept that vulnerability. People love to help and feel good helping you. Let them!

People judge you. Ignore it. Embrace your journey. Especially at this point in my pregnancy, there’s no hiding that I will be having a baby in the next couple of weeks. Because of this, I get comments regarding how I look all the time. I have found it so interesting that people I don’t even know have something to say about how I look (I get at least 1 comment every day from a passing stranger). I’m totally fine with these comments and I even add to the conversation but I know for others it’s tough. It’s important to remember, that pregnancy is an incredibly fascinating experience and it’s a beautiful thing to see. Just like our lives. Things change. Things shift. Things transform. Don’t get caught up in the comments and opinions of others. Let your journey and path be true to you. Just like every pregnancy is different, everyone’s life journey is unique.

Lastly, I finally know what’s it like to have boobs and to actually have cleavage! This might not be an important life lesson but it’s something worth mentioning and I thought I would end this blog post on a light, humorous note 😉

Can’t wait for you all to meet you our baby girl!
Sending love!
Cara