pregnancy – Katherine Kuzma-Beck

The Hart Home │Thrice is Coming!

I meant to share our news over a month ago, but life has just had a way recently of going faster than I would like it to. It doesn’t help that I feel like everyday I am fighting a battle for my kids and trying to keep my own sanity together as I am faced with growing uncertainty over being able to teach in this state…a PhD in education and I am wondering if my teaching career will go beyond the next couple of years because of state politics.

Despite of that, the sunshine of this year will be getting to welcome out third baby this summer. We are beyond excited.

January 26, 2022

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The Hart Home │It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times…It Was the Stove-less Times

We went through the ringer in getting into our forever home during the insanity of this pandemic and for that, I say a prayer to God every night because it really was through divine intervention that everything fell into place and we got our house. We had crazy buyers for our beach house that just caused all kinds of drama and delays on top of everyone else being so overwhelmed in this market in trying to get our own new house to closing, that by the end I was surprised that I hadn’t drank more wine during the entire ordeal.

Ultimately, we closed on the sale of our house by the ocean on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and moved into our forever house on Black Friday and rented it until we closed the following Tuesday. The house needed work. I wouldn’t say it was anywhere near our beach house when we bought it– no heat or hot water, brown walls everywhere, dirty, gross– on and on I could go about that place, but our new house needs love more than total rehab like our first house did– it needs to be decorated, painted and updated. Unlike our little house by the ocean, I am taking my time with our forever house and picking things I really like and working hard not to take on debt while I do it. In this pandemic life, I fear debt because I saw how quickly our income was impacted by all of this. I lost out on some and my husband lost his job completely. It definitely was an eye-opener on how quickly life could change last March. I started with the kitchen because there were renters in here for awhile and renters don’t clean and care for a house the way an owner would, so I made sure we got a new microwave and refrigerator to start.

Then, on Christmas Day, as I was cooking my family our small feast, the stove decided that it too was ready to be replaced. It takes twice as long to cook anything in the oven and we are down to one burner that too does not heat up completely after the knobs starting popping off in my hand. Since it was a rather cheap electric stove, we have been pretty beat as we waited to get money together to buy a new one and then wait forever for it to be delivered.

This will be my last appliance that I ever buy from Home Depot. Our fridge delivery was stressful, the microwave had to be delivered twice and the guy that put in the one that stayed broke our cabinet. We had a plumber come out to tell us how it would be over $4,000 TO START, to pipe gas into our kitchen. We already have it in the house and I was floored by that because, I was thinking maybe $600? He gave us this elaborate story about how there is not ENOUGH gas to power all of our stuff and then the stove so they would have to re-do it with larger piping, but since we live in the Pine Barrens with very sandy soil, digging could start and then re-start as the trenches gave in. It was very believable.

So, I ordered an electric stove and was really bummed out about it. I love cooking and I love to bake so an electric stove just sucks, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford thousands of dollars to redo gas piping plus lose all of our landscaping only to eventually replace that as well. Home Depot then pushes our delivery out for another three weeks. In the middle of the wait, I was telling one of our friends about our gas saga and he’s looking at me like, that guy was just trying to swindle you out of a lot of money because none of this makes sense and he clearly saw you as a woman who just bought a new house and would go for it. Which annoyed me greatly because he seemed very trustworthy and we had already been through it with moving companies trying to get us to pay thousands of dollars to move, because they all were trying to make money on this crazy housing market too. Can’t anyone just be honest anymore?

He looks at it. We don’t need to re-pipe a gas line and surprise! There was already gas to the kitchen, but it was nubbed off because they moved the stove to the other wall. Awesome. Easy fix! I cancel the electric stove and order the gas stove that I had really wanted. Only that too took two weeks to get my money back for before I could get my order through on the gas stove because “it needed to be sent back to the warehouse.” In the age of Amazon Prime when things are delivered in hours if you order it at the right time, where the hell is that warehouse that it will take that long to get back to? I digress…

We are now 3 months out from the start of all of this. I had to get up an hour early today, excited for the delivery of my new stove. I was working and waiting for the arrival of it between 7AM and 11AM, checking every so often to see where I was in line. It started off with only three ahead of me, then we got to two and we stopped moving. At 11:15, I called to check and was told they were still coming but delayed. 11:30 they call me and tell me some BS story about the truck breaking down which by that point had to be hours ago, so glad I was kept up and waiting around for a stove for four and a half hours. They can’t deliver it until next week.

So somewhere in this fine state, my stove was jostled around to be put on a truck. Left on a broken down truck. Jostled around back to a warehouse to only be pulled out again next week. To add to my petty frustrations, our couches did not fit in our family room so I had to buy a new set. We have not been able to watch TV since we moved in because we have no place to sit other than kid chairs and we did do that on NYE with the kids because we wanted to watch the ball drop on the weirdest ball drop ever. I ordered a set back in December. When are they coming? Mid-April, because there is a furniture shortage.

I am tired, couch-less and stove-less. In the grand scheme of everything we all have lived through, it is also a petty inconvenience, but compiled with everything this year brought from a pregnancy that my husband was shut out of midway through because he couldn’t come to appointments anymore, to laboring in a hospital with a dumb nurse that was more worried about a mask than me, to selling and buying and having people trying to rip you off as you go…it’s just been enough big and petty stuff to last me years.

I don’t know about you all, but I am tired and I would just like to cook a meal for my family in a timely manner on multiple burners while they get to watch TV in our family room on comfortable couches.

Don’t mind me…today, I am just frustrated with petty inconveniences and needed to vent. This year has been hard and we have survived it, but I just miss life when it was easier to get things done and didn’t require masks, and wait times and so much red tape for something as simple as buying a couch or a stove.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

March 8, 2021March 8, 2021

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The Hart Home│Are you fearful of another pregnancy?

My husband and I do not hide the fact that if God allows it, we would like to have four kids. I would like two of each because I think the idea of everyone having a brother and a sister. However, I really don’t care either way as long as I get one of each in this mix.

I was very blessed to conceive our son easily. I had been convinced that it would take us a while and that I would probably have fertility issues. After we visited our doctor, we were told to go home and try for a year before they intervened. I immediately hit the books and from there ordered my pre-natal vitamins and ovulation kits and downloaded a log to keep track of my cycles. I was determined. I also followed every forum and app on TTC I could find and read daily how and when in cycles women were actually conceiving.

meandlogan — One of our first pictures together. August 2018.

I was a bit obsessed, but deep within myself, I had always wanted to be a mother. However, I have also always been very career and academically driven and for years that was my sole focus. I laugh at myself now for thinking that I would go back to work a month after having delivered our son. I also laugh at a conversation that I had with my husband when we first started dating. I flat out told him that I would never give up my career or my dreams for any man nor would I move for one. Which is funny because, in the end, I moved for my husband so that he could finish school and now, I am constantly applying to jobs that I can do closer to home or even remotely so that I can be home with our son. My husband constantly likes to remind me about that conversation and how it’s so funny that this little man entered my life and I am just wrapped around his finger. And it’s true, Logan is the boss of my life now and if it doesn’t benefit him, I don’t do it. Everyone was floored when I took an actual spring break this year and have planned to do the same for summer. I haven’t actually had a true summer since I graduated from Rutgers. I can’t count my first summer with Phil because while backpacking through Europe was definitely a summer, it too was a lot of work. This will be the first summer where I will have no work, no deadlines just an endless amount of time with my baby.

Which has led us to the serious questions of when we want to expand our family again. Since we did not start our family when I was in my 20’s, I know that I do not have much time to finish building our family either. I think by 36, you’re already considered geriatric when it comes to pregnancy. It made me realize how scared I was to get pregnant again. With Logan, my pregnancy was uncomplicated other than being sick every day with him and in the end, I only gained 10 pounds and after deilvery, I wound up losing almost 50 within the first months of being home. My delivery was complicated. I was 42 weeks pregnant and induced for two days. We developed an infection on the morning of the 3rd day and I was rushed in for an emergency c-section where I got to meet the most perfect little boy.

We had 3 days together in the hospital and just as they were about to discharge me, my blood pressure shot through the roof and I was diagnosed with postpartum pre-eclampsia which affects 1 in 600 pregnancies. I had never even heard of that. I spent the next day being infused with magnesium sulfite and dealing with the craziest bunch of nurses I had ever dealt with. They had me on hefty drugs for the c-section, but when I developed a headache from lack of sleep, the magnesium and I am sure the overall stress, I had a nurse get into a fight with me over it. It was just such a whacky experience and we had driven 45 minutes to deliver at that hospital because in New Jersey it is known as THE baby hospital. I was so unimpressed. And the real kicker, the epidural? Didn’t even work! I felt it ALL.

I have been scared of and distant from my husband for months because I was terrified of going through all of that again. It’s taken me a while to even think that at some point I would like to have another baby to grow our family. I think this time though, I would find a midwife that specializes in VBAC and home birth because I never want to go through a c-section again nor do I want to deal with that hospital or any hospital for that matter unless I absolutely have to. I think all of the medical interventions that I believed in for my first pregnancy contributed to my difficult delivery and if God does bless us with another (or three more children), I definitely will not be repeating my first birth experience.

May 3, 2019May 3, 2019

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Is it really April?

I don’t know where this year has gone. I remember spending much of it being very stressed out about my wedding and then more recently, being hyper-focused on my pregnancy and dissertation. And then BAM, somehow it’s April.

29496921_10100582922312797_8068842696326948046_n

Speaking of my pregnancy, he’s getting so big and he’s measuring tall which makes me happy because that means he hopefully got his dad’s tall genes. From the blurry images that we do have, he does look like he got my pug nose and his dad’s button chin. I really can’t wait for him to get here just so I can stare at him for hours and smell his baby head.

I’m almost all ready for him. I would be further prepared had people not started yelling at me to stop buying things because they wanted to buy them, we do have a good family and friends that is for sure. My baby BBQ is the next big event and then after that, I am looking forward to a low-key summer of not working other than my dissertation and you know, pushing out a baby and taking care of him.

Even that though, sounds like an amazing summer as opposed to what my life has been like since we moved to the shore several years ago. I was always working and traveling and now, it looks like Logan is forcing me to slow down for a little bit and enjoy being his mom.

And I strangely, don’t mind at all.

April 18, 2018April 18, 2018

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The Week That Was: Oh Baby & Doctoral Comps

My week started off with a trip to the ultrasound place. We both were looking forward to it for a week because we would have gotten the envelope that had the sex of our baby in it.

Only, baby had other plans. The moment that she put the wand on to my stomach, we looked up and saw that our baby is very much, in fact, a boy. Phil’s heart had been set on a gender reveal party next weekend, but after that, we pretty much called and told everyone our news.

BABY BOY_17

I knew he was a boy from the moment I found out that I was pregnant. Sometime in my late teens/early 20’s I had a dream that I was in a room with all of these babies. They all looked too small to even walk, so I was shocked to see them running around. I followed them up a flight of stairs until one fell backward and into my arms. I was amazed by how beautiful he was with his soft blond hair and huge blue eyes. A voice from behind me told me that his name was Dylan and that he “wasn’t ready for me yet.” Then I woke up.

I knew I had met my future son, and I knew eventually he would be ready for me. I just knew that this was him when my 5 pregnancy tests all turned positive. Only, Dylan never really fit him and for the longest time, I wanted to name my son John Dylan, John for my grandfather and Dylan for the dream. Phil is on this Phil the third thing, but I really feel that it’s too much to put on a kid and kids need their own names and their own identities.

We’ve been kicking around John Philip which I really love because it honors both grandfathers who are no longer with us and it gives our son his own identity. We have time to decide, but I’m really rooting for the latter choice. I was very close to my grandfather when he was alive and I know that I was his favorite. I took his death really hard in high school and in a lot of ways, I think losing him really put me on the path I took as an adult. He would be nearly 100 years old today. I wonder what he would think of all of this and how he must be up there smiling thinking about becoming a great-grandfather.

I thought this was going to be my big news for the week, but it seems that life also had other plans. Yesterday as I checked my phone for the time, I saw a gmail notification from my university. I didn’t breath the entire time the e-mail loaded. Coming in a whole FIVE DAYS before I was supposed to receive my results, it was the email containing my pass/fail notice on my doctoral comprehensive exam.

And…I PASSED!!! I am officially a doctoral candidate and am now only waiting for my university to assign my doctoral mentor and committee before I plunge into dissertation. If I follow my plan, I will be done in a year and a half. I really can’t wait. I even hope I get there sooner because I am ready to be done and moving on with my life and career.

Pretty crazy week, eh?

February 13, 2018

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Martian Child

It’s icky and cold here in New Jersey today. It was very hard to get up with that 6AM alarm. By me, it was just beginning to rain, but by the time I got into the capital city to teach today, the roads were slick and the rain had become the ever so lovely mix of snow and freezing rain.

It is definitely one of those days where you wish you could just stay home with your animals and watch Netflix.

BUT! I was just sick and I have a team to coach and a college class to teach tonight, so that wasn’t going to be in the cards today.

I did lay in bed thinking about it for a good 5 minutes. I am just so tired….all the time. It’s got me to think about what I’m going to do once our baby is here. It’s scary to even be thinking about deciding to stay home and cut down on work. I worked so hard to get here. Within 10 years, I completed a double bachelor’s degree, a double post-bac certificate, a master’s degree and almost a PhD. I always thought I would just work forever, but lately, my body doesn’t go like it used to. I can’t work 7 days a week anymore and my nights physically end for me around 9pm, and that’s after my after-dinner nap around 5PM.

I know this is pregnancy tired, but I worry about baby tired too. Will I really be able to come back to work in September/October like I plan? If I can, will I feel guilty leaving my baby even though he or she will have days with her dad since we work opposite schedules right now?

college — Douglas College graduation at Rutgers University, May 2008

I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. This pregnancy has gotten very real recently, with the belly that has sprung up. It feels like it happened overnight. I went from this little bump to a stomach that you can’t deny has a baby growing in it. And while I have not felt a real kick yet, I do feel, especially when I am standing or walking, these fluttering movements that feel like I have an alien living in my stomach.

in some ways, it is an alien if you think about it. A baby starts to grow in your belly with its own little heart and soul, coming from seemingly nowhere and then you have the baby and you need to teach him or her everything because they have no knowledge of where they just came out into after you push them out of your hoo-ha.

Having kids is weird and stressful, but so worth it. I do love feeling my little baby fluttering around. I also love when I’m working at my desk and I get to rub my growing belly. I’m enjoying every moment of it, but, I’m just wondering how long I will be able to work and how emotionally prepared I’ll be to come back to work. Or if this is one of life’s forks in the road: do I continue on like I have been since I graduated from Rutgers or, is this the time where I choose something more than work and see where a new adventure takes me?

February 7, 2018February 7, 2018

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What if we’re all just a little bit Peggy?

Anyone else love the show Mad Men? I have watched it in its entirety at least twice. I loved the clothes, the attitudes, the smoking even in doctor’s offices and of course, just how broken Don Draper is and how he affected everyone around him. And then, of course, there was my lady love, Peggy. I always felt like I was Peggy.

peggy-cigarette

One of my favorite Don moments was when he visits Peggy in the hospital after she gives birth to her surprise baby. She’s beaten and broken, but then Don gives her the best kind of advice when he says:

“Get out of here and move forward,” Don says. “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

The first time I saw that scene, it hit me right to my core because it made me remember that time in my life where I employed the same kind of logic. I was in my early 20’s and fresh out of college. I had my first “real-world” boyfriend and was hopelessly infatuated with him. I was also ridiculously responsible the majority of the time, but with him, I found it easy to let go a little bit and explore life…and love.

So, on a weekend away together things got a little crazy and it also didn’t go the way of responsibility, even though we both very much were. I didn’t know it then, but in making those choices, I came to a fork in the road. One of those decisions that you don’t know at the time, but will, either way, lead you down a different path.

I could have made the choice to take a huge risk and find myself in an unplanned pregnancy and kiss my graduate school acceptance and life in New York City goodbye, or I could take a pill and pretend like nothing ever happened.

I took the pill.

It surprised me how easy it was to do it. I thought to myself, I will never know so why think about this anymore? After that, I didn’t.

For years. It was the easiest thing to just forget. I never thought about it. It just slipped into the vast nothingness of my subconscious and there it stayed, for years.

Until one rainy April day after I broke up with my next “real-world” boyfriend who I pretty much only dated because he reminded me of the first real-world boyfriend. I never said that I made very healthy choices in my 20’s, now did I? It brought up a lot of unresolved issues I needed to work through and in that moment of seeing this, this became one of them. The guilt didn’t hit yet though, and it wouldn’t for some time.

Not until, the months leading up to my wedding which was the biggest transition and commitment of my life, I began to think about so many things that had led me to the man of my dreams and the new life that lay before me. We had discussed starting a family and since we are both over 30, that it was time to do it sooner rather than later. Just like that my overwhelming desire to be a mom kicked into hyperdrive. It was overwhelming, very close to the time a couple years ago where I became obsessed with the idea of being a foster mom until I realized how hopelessly screwed up our child protective system actually is. However, this was different. This was a desire to be a mom that almost burned.

And so did that long buried decision I made at 22 years old and all the guilt that came with it. How could I now want something that before I was so quick to dismiss because the timing wasn’t right? And how easy that choice was and how easy it was to ignore for so many years?

I was reminded of Peggy again when she tells Pete the truth about where she went in the earlier season and says:

“I could have had you in my life forever if I wanted to,” she says almost dreamily. “I could have had you. I could have shamed you into being with me. But I didn’t want to… I wanted other things.”

Yes, I knew it was my choice because I wanted other things. I wanted to make something of myself and see the world and write books and study art. I didn’t want to be burdened with a man that I, though very into, wasn’t really committed to and who lived 6 hours from me.

I wanted other things.

Until I met my husband and then, I really did want those things with him. And so, I prayed. A lot. I prayed for forgiveness for possibly destroying another life, for the callousness of being 22 and thinking it was just something that never happened and was so easy to be shocked by how it never happened. To God for breaking all kinds of rules and not being considerate of myself or anyone else.

I had a long list.

Within a month, I was…at last…very much pregnant.

January 18, 2018January 17, 2018

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Seasons of Your Life

Women are different then men. We think differently, we respond to the world differently, we approach life differently and more even more noticeably, we age differently.

For men, I think life is a long continuous line of experiences and outcomes. They are born, they grow, they become old and they pass on. Women, of course, do the same, but it’s so much different for a woman.

Women age in seasons.

And each season is compartmentalized with old wants and desires, dreams and achievements that you know you will only have a chance to hit at certain points in your life. Women are much more aware of the limits of time and how time takes all.

Looking back at my own life, which I have been doing a lot lately as I prepare to become a wife, I can categorize big chunks of time. There was of course my childhood, my adolescence, my first real boyfriend, college…

Seasons-of-life1

My first real love.

Not that I didn’t love my first boyfriend, but there the first time you fall in real love as an adult it is very different from the high school/college boyfriend that was probably most if not all of your firsts.

There’s the inevitable heart break from that first real love.

Then there’s your wine-fueled 20’s where you are working on your career, but not really settled and since you’re not over your first real love, you’re just dating idiot after idiot because the only time they can ever really hurt you is when they do something that reminds you of that great big let down that was your first real love.

Out of nowhere your life will begin to settle. You’ll finish graduate school maybe. You’ll find a stable job, you’ll eventually get to ditch the room mates and take on a cat or two. You’ll get so busy with your own life that the drama of your 20’s seems to die down and you’re no longer spending Thursdays at the bar with your girlfriends drinking too much wine and going to dark scary places of thoughts borrowed from TV shows.

You’re so busy in fact that you don’t even see the real, big love coming. You’re not really dating jerks anymore or any really because your life has become your job and the life you’re building for yourself. You kind of like it that way too, it’s easier to just worry about yourself and your fur-babies.

Then it happens, the blind date that you reluctantly agree to go on because your new work friend is just so excited to be introducing you to her friend. You had talked to him for a little bit on Facebook and it flowed well enough, he seemed to like your jokes and had some of his own. Before you know it though, there’s that instant spark and without either of you really planning it, you’re together from that moment forward.

He’s the only guy that will bring flowers to your mom when he meets her for the first time. And as he’s courting you he brings flowers to you whenever he’s thinking of you which is often. He holds doors for you and since it’s the winter when you meet he starts carrying a blanket around in his car because he knows how cold you get, you find it absolutely endearing when he tucks you into your seat each time even if it’s only a 5 minute car ride. It’s easy to love him and it’s even easier to be yourself, the good and the bad around him.

You blink again and suddenly you’re a tenure teacher and becoming a leader in your field. You buy a house and for the first and only time in your life, you agree to live with someone and it’s the best decision that you ever made because you slowly watched as your love for each other grew and changed until he asked you to marry him and you accept without hesitation.

You plan a beautiful wedding at the venue you fell in love with long before you ever met him. You enjoy your year long engagement but before you know it, you’ve blinked again and it’s fall, the season of your wedding.

Your shower comes and goes, you’ve cleaned your house out of most of the old stuff that came from apartments and past lives, making way for an entirely new life with your husband. Suddenly, you’re home from your best friend’s house where you held her baby all day and you’re cleaning out your guest room for wedding guests, eagerly selling and throwing out artifacts of former dreams and suddenly a new one really begins to take hold…

When your guest room starts to look empty and you label a few more pieces of apartment furniture for Facebook marketplace and begin to think about your best friend’s baby and how suddenly ready you are to turn your guest room into a baby’s room.

And just like that, you’re into your 30’s, ready to become a wife and mother, and for the first time in many years, that sounds just exactly like what you want to do even if it means you have to slow down in other parts of your life and not work 80 hour weeks.

September 25, 2017September 25, 2017

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