Katie

 Little Bit About Me

To sum it up, I’m a 33-year-old teacher living in Madrid, Spain.  I’m married to a Spanish military pilot which makes life a lot more interesting, but also complicated.  I’m a bit more cynical than my sister, less eloquent and a lot more rebellious.  I’m pretty much flying by the seat of my pants through motherhood as I did through pregnancy.

What’s my angle?

I look to share my Southern European baby raising experience with expats and non-expats alike.

My Pregnancy

I wouldn’t call it unplanned, but it was certainly unexpected.  Before my boyfriend of five years got sent away to Afghanistan we knew that we were ready for the next step in our relationship, marriage and kids, but not necessarily in that order.  He came home at the end of December 2009 and I found out almost one month later that we were expecting.  It was a shock at first.  We were super excited and a little overwhelmed.  However, I only really had two worries on my mind at the time.  The first was how I was going to tell my oldest sister Alison, who was undergoing fertility treatments after several years of trying to get pregnant.  For anyone who is in the situation you’ll understand the bitter sweetness of sharing the news with anyone who is going through fertility treatments.  I felt an enormous amount of guilt.  However, my sister was beyond happy for us and never showed an ounce of resentment towards my pregnancy.

The second reason for worry was that Miguel and I weren’t married.  Unbeknownst to me he had asked my father for his blessing months ago, but wasn’t planning on proposing until he was back from Afghanistan.  I know my father loves me and respects my life decisions, nevertheless he is a man of tradition and marriage before baby carriage is the way it goes in our family.  Out of my extremely large Irish Catholic family, I believe that I am the only person who has gotten pregnant out-of-wedlock.  As it was my father was overjoyed with the news of a grandchild, but obviously would have preferred us to be married first.

We did get married.  We had our shotgun wedding in my hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, and it turned out great.  Of course I wish I had been able to celebrate properly (i.e. drink alcohol), but I have very good memories from that day.  It was quirky and casual and an overall good time.My pregnancy was cake.  I don’t want to brag or make anyone feel bad who is having a less than ideal time of it right now, but I was really fortunate throughout the entire nine months.  I never had morning sickness, my swelling was never too bad, and I didn’t ever really experience anything worse than back aches.  I do credit a lot of this to the fact that I was extremely active, taking daily walks and getting up and out as much as possible.

All this being said, my delivery didn’t go quite exactly to my plan and my hospital stay was a bit stressful, but that’s another story.