Lydia Rose

Lydia is the founder of Lydia Rose Fitness and Busy Mom Fit. “I am a fitness coach, professionally trained pastry chef, and certified nutritionist. Most importantly, I’m a mom and wife.” Learn more about Lydia >

Lydia may not be a twin mom, but she’s had two very difficult pregnancies and is here to tell about it in her joys of pregnancy post.

If there is one thing I’ve learned through becoming a twin mom, it’s that no matter what motherhood looks like for you, we all have one thing in common: it’s hard.

Because her story is so relatable, I wanted to share it. She is also certified to help new moms suffering from postpartum issues, like diastasis recti, fall back in love with our bodies again.

She understands mom life, and that sometimes all we have is 10 minutes in a day to ourselves. Lydia is committed to making those 10 minutes count. Her programs are developed with moms in mind. Read her story, below.

Lydia’s Joys of Pregnancy Story:

“Sippy cups are for Chardonnay”, I remember reading it while I was pregnant with my first son. I laughed at the “real” version of pregnancy that the author had comically tried to capture in those pages.

She was right.

Pregnancy wasn’t a blissful feeling of warmth and fuzziness completed by a glow and a permanent smile. I must have gotten the surprise box because nothing I experienced was in any baby book that I read.

Both of my pregnancies rocked my world. I had expected rainbows and butterflies, but fairy tales aren’t real. 

Everything I thought would happen did not.

I planned, prepared, read every book, knew what would happen with my growing baby, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality of pregnancy.

I’ll go through the magic that happened with each of my pregnancies because they were very different.

I knew I was pregnant with both of my kids before my missed period and before a line appeared on a pregnancy test. I knew because I thought I was dying.

I thought I was coming down with the worst flu I would ever experience, but probably cancer. 

Nausea that lasted 24 hours, cold sweats, cramps, bloating, exhaustion, extreme hunger, unquenchable thirst, and my bladder shrunk down to the size of a pea. I was miserable. This was during the first few weeks.

With my first son, my periods were so regular that I decided to take a pregnancy test the moment I was late. It was strange for me to miss a day and have different symptoms. I was still shocked when I saw the double lines. We were stoked! Also terrified. We didn’t think we were ready to have a kid, but here we were.

I worked at a coffee shop at the time and while I tried to hide the fact that I was pregnant, my actions could not. 

I was the most miserable person on the planet. Short tempered, constantly sweating, irritable, and negative. I was just trying to make it to the end of the day without vomiting on a customer.

The Nose of a Bloodhound

No one told me that my sense of smell would become so intense that I would turn into a bloodhound, recognizing customers by the smell of their deodorant when they walked through the front door. Powder fresh deodorant still haunts me to this day. 

Coffee was the worst smell I could possibly imagine and I was surrounded by it all day every day. I felt like I was being tortured every morning when I ground the beans.

I opened the store so that was my job every morning, and it was the worst part of my day. Most days I ended up losing my breakfast in the kitchen garbage can because the smell made me so sick.

Coupled with my newly found sense of smell was the fact that I wanted to throw up every moment of every day for about 20 weeks. 

Morning sickness should be called all day sickness that never goes away because that is more accurate. I went about my day trying not to throw up on every one I had an interaction with. 

I drank so much water that I had to visit the bathroom every 30 minutes and still got so dehydrated that I had to take off work to recover!

I ate organic, whole foods, I drank water, I tried to rest, but I still felt terrible. 

Teeth Trauma

Even my teeth took a hit, I had cavities for the first time in my life when I got pregnant with my first child. My diet was the best it had ever been, but he still needed more! 

My Doc said he stripped the calcium from my teeth because he wasn’t getting what he needed. I had my first root canal shortly after he was born. No amount of nutrient dense foods or vitamins was going to help.

I was pregnant during the hottest summer on record in 40 years. Temperatures soared over 100 degrees and the coffee shop AC decided that would be a great week to die. I was so exhausted by the time I got home from work that I usually landed on the couch and passed out. 

To make things even more fun, my body decided to expand to the size of a small garbage truck. 

The cute basketball baby bump I had imagined was replaced by a shape that closely resembled Jabba the Hut. I was the kind of big that made people’s eyes widen and their jaws hit the floor. 

The jokes about “You’re ready to pop!” started in month four. My stomach was stretched so tight that I couldn’t touch my belly button and the purple stretch marks that covered my abdomen didn’t help either. Even my maternity clothes gave up before I made it nine months.

When my kiddo finally decided to make his debut, it took him 48 hours to make an appearance. 

I pushed for over an hour and finally had to give up and go with an episiotomy. 

The recovery from that was another level of fun. 

I sat on a donut pillow for a month and popped stool softeners like they were candy.

As fun as my pregnancy was, the recovery was something that no one could have prepared me for.

We’ll get to the recovery in another post, but let’s fast forward five years to pregnancy number two.

Five years? That’s a long time.

Yes, it is a long time. 

I was so traumatized by my first pregnancy that I had dropped my dream of having three children down to probably just the one child. I didn’t want to go through another pregnancy from hell and I didn’t know if my body could handle it. 

After years of my son begging for a sibling, and me finally convincing myself that this pregnancy couldn’t possibly be as bad as the first, we decided to try.

We tried, and we tried, and we tried. Five months went by, six, seven, nine, one year, fourteen months. Still no baby.

I was so disappointed.

I gave up.

It was too much stress and disappointment to go through every month and I couldn’t take it.

Pregnancy #2

Two months later, at the sixteen-month mark, it finally happened.

I had taken my son shopping and we’d had a great day together. He was in the bath, and I got a notification from my period tracker that I was five days late. I hadn’t even noticed because my periods were so irregular at that point that I never knew when they were going to come. I took a test and there were the two brightest, boldest pink lines I had ever seen.

I sat there in complete shock. We were going for round two!

That joy quickly dissipated as soon as my body realized that a foreign body would be growing there for the next nine months. 

At the time, I was a personal trainer and woke up every day at 4:30a to make it to the gym to train my clients. I was so sick that I could barely function in the mornings. I had to tell all of my morning clients immediately because I couldn’t stand up long enough to make it through a one-hour training session. 

I knew it was going to be another rough pregnancy.

It came with a whole new box of surprises that rivaled the first one’s hellacious contents. 

More Joys of Pregnancy

This pregnancy came with heartburn that felt like someone lit a fire in my chest. 

At one point I drove myself and my five-year-old son to the emergency room because I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I had traded nausea for a bonfire in my throat, so that was fun.

I carried a jumbo container of TUMS everywhere I went from that moment on and consumed them like it was my full-time job.

I could not drink regular water; it made me throw up. 

I only drank sparkling water, which I despised up until the moment I got pregnant. 

Instead of living on a healthy and balanced organic diet like I had with my first child, I decided to toss that out the window and do the exact opposite.

My diet consisted of pork chop sandwiches with home fries, large chocolate milkshakes from Culver’s, and Little Caesars pepperoni hot and ready pizzas. 

I did not recognize myself nor my eating habits.

I ballooned out to the size of a whale again, this time adding on excruciatingly painful Charlie horses that woke me up during the night. 

Compression socks became my new wardrobe staple and I walked around in those things 24/7.

I took Magnesium by the spoonful and extra multi-vitamins to help with the cramps and swelling. My sciatica was so bad that my left leg would stop working entirely at any moment and I had to prepare for the inevitable fall that would follow.

I couldn’t make it through the day without a nap. 

I remember Oliver sitting next to me watching his iPad while I tried desperately to rest. 

At night, when it was time to rest, I suffered from pregnancy insomnia – which is a fun gift where you are so exhausted that you can’t actually sleep and just lie there in pain waiting until you have to pee so badly that your bladder forces you out of bed anyway.

I trained my clients up until the day my son was born. 

I was in the office talking to my other trainers the day before he arrived. Planning our week, going over sessions and ideas for clients, and letting them know that I would in fact, be on maternity leave at some point. 

He arrived a week early and he came fast.

In stark contrast to his brother’s birth, and everything else they do in life, Luca flew in like a hurricane.

Comin’ in Hot

I woke up at 1a from intense back pain and went downstairs to watch a show on the couch. 

I ordered groceries and worked on client workouts because I felt so weird. I didn’t know if I would make it another week. 

He wasn’t due until the 13^th, so I didn’t expect him to come on the 7^th. 

Either way, I worked the entire time I was in labor. My first son had taken so long to arrive that I thought I had more time.

By 5a I knew that he was coming, and he’d be here quickly. 

I could barely breathe, but I still thought I had more time. 

At that point I could not stand up to walk, and my contractions were so intense that I couldn’t form a sentence. Somehow, I managed to lift my gigantic body up the stairs to wake my husband.

I made it up the stairs to wake my husband at 6a. I have never seen the man move faster than he did that morning.

I told him to take our son to school and then come back and get me.

I came back approximately two minutes later and said we need to go- now.

We had the grandparents come over to watch our kiddo and instructed them to take him to school. We didn’t know we would be calling them in less than an hour to let them know they had a new grandson and they should come to the hospital.

The drive to the hospital was the longest thirty minutes of my life. 

I could not sit down, or breathe, but I was trying to keep it together so my husband would have the mental capacity to deliver this child on the side of the road if he didn’t drive faster.

We arrived with half an hour to spare.

Both pregnancies were very different, neither of them were the blissful fairy tale I would have hoped for.

Were my children worth it? Absolutely.

Will I have more children? Absolutely NOT.

There are some people who have easy pregnancies, and they love it and their bodies love it.

I am not the one. 

I’m tough and I made it through, but don’t sign me up for another round because my body is done.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful because my children are my greatest gifts, but I am telling you that it might not be easy. Just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. Raising children is a wonderful gift and I do not take it for granted.

If you’d like to learn more about Lydia and her training programs, click here.

A little more about Lydia’s approach to health and fitness:

“I am passionate about empowering women to reach their health and fitness goals.

I’ve pursued careers in the gym and restaurant world, and I have trained over 100 1:1 clients before opening my own private studio. It was there that I found my niche helping women create healthy habits that fit their lifestyle and goals.

As a busy mom, I also recognize that there are a lot of options out there when it comes to taking care of your body and it’s sometimes hard to decide which ones are the best choice for you.”