I was pregnant! With baby number 10! At age 47!
Back when I was keeping it a secret, I was at Barnes and Noble with Becki, my 16-yr-old and a couple of friends of hers, and surreptitiously looked at the family and child-rearing books. There were 3, count ’em, three, books on having babies after the age of 35, but even they were all about first babies. Had a little talk with the midwife, and she suggested I write a book. Well, I’ll blog about being pregnant over 35 and with multiple pregnancies, okay? Because having more than even 4 children changes the issues of pregnancy, and being over 35 throws some even more creative curves into your curve ball. I realized that I have had more pregnancies over 35 than under. So I’ll be sharing some things that I have learned.
FIRST! Getting pregnant is one thing. Staying pregnant is another. Obviously, for me, getting pregnant wasn’t an issue, though it is for many mothers over 35.
Back when I was on baby number two, I called the head of our home birth practice, Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, with Home First in the Chicago area. He had a Saturday morning radio program on Christian radio. He was wonderful. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who could out-talk my mother. (She claimed it was because he was standing up and he held the microphone.) Anyway, I got pregnant with Mick only 6 months after Ben was born, and I called about whether I should take any supplements or do any particular exercises to ease the wear and tear on my body, since, who knew how many children I would be having. He said that nursing automatically gives you some spacing, so you won’t be cranking them out every year, but also, after the age of 33, your body drops down in its egg production. “It would be surprising if you had more than 7 children.” (He was right, because I could not maintain a pregnancy on my own after number 8. More about that another day.) While, after 33, you will probably continue to have regular periods, you simply aren’t producing that many eggs, which is why so many women who wait to have babies have a challenge getting pregnant.
ON THE OTHER HAND! I talked with a lady at a retirement party who had had two children and gotten remarried at the age of 41. She did a ton of research and discovered that, if you have already been pregnant earlier, getting pregnant at “an advanced maternal age” is not usually a problem. The system has been kicked in already. Which explains all the Amish going strong into their forties and yuppies having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get pregnant the first time at age 34.
I have no advice for getting pregnant. Steve and I gave the bigness of our family to God when we got married and it wasn’t until after Mick was born and 6 months came and went and I wasn’t pregnant, waking up in the middle of the night convinced that I was pregnant and the test was wrong, wondering if something was wrong with the baby, that I realized something. I hadn’t given God the smallness of our family. After I confessed to the Lord that I would be perfectly happy if all we had were our little boys, I got pregnant. While I am a firm believer in giving the Lord the desires of your heart and then He turns around and gives them right back to you, I know that sometimes He causes our desires to change. We might not have gotten pregnant again. Those few weeks of nighttime trauma are my only experience with infertility.
In all fairness, I have never again had two children so close together and I have always figured that it was because we changed our feeding patterns for the babies. We thought we were doing well to wait till 6 months to give Ben solids. We made our own baby food in the blender. But after getting Dr. Rosi’s talk (also from Home First) on how to feed your baby from the table, we never gave liquids except breast milk to the babies until 15 months and instead introduced real food straight from the table. I got pregnant with Mick 3 weeks after Ben started solids. After Mick, the babies were almost exactly two years apart. Out of 10 birthdays, we have three Augusts and three Septembers. Dr. Eisenstein was right! Nursing does space them out!
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