As you’re reading this, we’re both on maternity leave, enjoying and adjusting to our new family of four (including our cat) and trying to take in all the snuggles we can before we return to work. We wrote this and many of the posts you’ll see the next few months ahead of our baby’s birth because we wanted to make sure that we spend maternity leave, spending uninterrupted time with our baby. However, I also wanted to explain why we kept this news from the blog and also share what you can expect from us going forward now that, as you’re reading this, we’re parents, praise the Lord!!
WHY WE KEPT THIS FROM THE BLOG
The reason behind this is this was not our first pregnancy. In September of 2021, we found out that we were pregnant. I had already scheduled out when and how we’d announce on the blog using photographs we intended to take around the time that I would have been 12 weeks pregnant with that pregnancy. That pregnancy unexpectedly ended in miscarriage. It was a very traumatic and difficult experience for us. Following that loss, we experienced another loss in December of 2021. Other things happened in our journey that would take too long to share right now, but in short, our journey to Baby Kim was not an easy one.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be to the point where I want to share the explicit details of what that experience of these losses were was for us, but I will say that it’s a darkness and a deep grief that we pray that we never, ever experience again. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t think of our first two babies in heaven, but we’re so, so thankful to have our baby, our rainbow, who we have prayed for, for so long.
As a result, we both decided that if we were blessed enough to conceive again we wanted to wait to publicly announce until after our baby was born. We both also agreed that we didn’t want to announce the birth publicly right away either and God-willing wanted to wait until after our baby was safely in our arms for a little while. In fact, if you’re reading this that likely means that we’ve gotten birth quite a while ago but finally felt comfortable sharing publicly!
I may write a separate post or newsletter on this, but pregnancy after loss is uniquely difficult as your view of pregnancy has completely changed. For quite a number of us, pregnancy after loss is holding your breath before every appointment until you give birth to your healthy baby.
Our losses made me realize even more just how much of a miracle and blessing pregnancy is. Pregnancy is not only not guaranteed, but if you do conceive, it’s truly a miracle to birth a healthy, living child at the end of it all. So many things have to work out in order for life to be fully formed into a living baby after nine months. It’s amazing that any babies are born when you think about all of the things that have to come together so perfectly.
It’s hard to fully put into words why, but it’s because miscarriage really changes you. It changed the way I viewed the world around me and certainly the way I viewed pregnancy. It resulted in me no longer having the innocent view I originally had of pregnancy. I don’t say this to scare anyone, but to let you know that every pregnancy that results in a healthy baby is a blessing as that’s not the case for as many as 1 in 4 pregnancies. For us, it went from wanting to announce after 12 weeks to feeling like until we could actually hold our baby in our arms, we would keep it between family, close friends, and people who see us regularly. But I digress.
Another reason was we both felt like we wanted to try to enjoy the pregnancy and have a peaceful experience. We talked about it and the idea of sharing the news of our pregnancy publicly while pregnant after what we previously experienced, wasn’t something either of us felt comfortable with and made us nervous. So we decided we’d wait and keep the news between our family and close friends, who knew would be supportive to try to make it as joyful as possible. I think I can speak for us both when I say that we’re both glad that we made that decision because I think in many ways it made for a great experience.
Now that you know why we kept it from the blog, here’s what you can expect going forward and for the next few months.
CONTENT ON THE BLOG:
As of right now, this will still be primarily a travel and lifestyle-based blog. I only say “as of right now” because I’ve learned to never say never (I used to say I’d never teach). However, I honestly can’t see us sharing a lot of baby-related content with the exception of the next few months since we’ll be posting some content that we couldn’t publicly post throughout our pregnancy. There will be a lot at pregnancy-related posts the next few months, but outside of that, I don’t see us posting a whole lot about that. A lot of you who read our blog, read it for travel, photography, and budget-friendly lifestyle posts, so I don’t think it would be something that we see ourselves transitioning into. We’re also hoping to keep our child’s life separate from the blog as much as possible as we do try to do with the rest of our family and refrain from posting any identifying images online with their face in it.
However, now that we are parents, it would be naive of me to assume that we’ll never post anything baby-related at all or that there won’t be references to our little one here and there. We may every now and then link some items we’ve found to be pretty cool in our monthly Fresh Pressed Edit roundups and/or share baby-related posts if it’s relevant to the travel and lifestyle posts we typically feature on our blog. As parents, there will be some pregnancy and baby-related content, but not much. In fact, I think the bulk of those posts you’ll see will be during our maternity leave because we still wanted to share some things even though we announced later.
You’ll be able to find full versions of these posts on our Substack, but I will post excerpts here with direct links to those full posts for your convenience. These have also been scheduled in advance, so it may be out of order or posted earlier than they are posted here (or solely posted over there) because Substack only lets you schedule so many months in advance. There will also be a few pregnancy-related posts that end up being posted in its entirety on here, but for the most part the large majority of them will be posted there. Once those scheduled posts are up, you shouldn’t see nearly as many pregnancy or baby-related posts in our content.These are scheduled in advanced, so feel free to subscribe there as well!
A SHIFT IN THE FREQUENCY OF POSTS:
We decided that rather than post weekly on the blog, we’re going to try to post bi-weekly, as of right now. We’ve already started shifting to this before and some months we’ve only posted once a month, so it won’t be a huge change, but I don’t think we’ve explicitly mentioned that we will be doing this before. This will likely mean two regular posts a month. We’re hoping to do this so that we can continue to prioritize time with our little one and with each other first, but being that we have so many pregnancy-related posts scheduled, it’ll be nearly every week for a couple of months and then it’ll be bi-weekly unless it’s more feasible for us to do one post a month. This may also shift as we continue to adjust to parenthood. We’re remaining flexible during this time to what works best, but it may mean cutting back in some other areas (such as newsletters once a month or once every few months).
WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH THE NEWSLETTER?
During maternity leave, we won’t be actively posting any newsletters as well. We’re not sure what will happen after our maternity leave is over as we likely won’t have the same amount of time that we had before to write newsletters as iin-depth as we previously have. There are a couple of newsletters that have been scheduled ahead of time, but outside of that we will not be actively posting. We do have an RSS newsletter set up however where you can subscribe to get new posts automatically sent to your inbox, so you never miss a post. I highly recommend that if you haven’t already, so that you don’t miss any of our posts, if you are currently subscribed to other newsletters, but want to stay up to date on the posts. You can do that in the sidebar of our blog. Newsletters may be shorter or not as frequent. We’re not sure at the moment, but if a decision is reached about that, we’ll definitely share them with you.
WILL YOU CONTINUE BLOGGING?
This is something we haven’t explicitly talked about yet, but we will definitely share if we decide that we want to stop blogging altogether. If I am being realistic, I know eventually we will likely stop blogging, but right now it’s a creative outlet and we enjoy writing here when we can. I will say that we probably will not be posting on our blog as often as we typically do now that our baby is here because I know we’ll want to use the time that we aren’t working, with them. We also want to use the time that they’re sleeping or resting with each other or other loved ones, so we will scale back, but I think the decision to stop blogging will likely be determined by whether we feel like we’re able to be engaged parents, full-time employees at our day jobs, and manage a blog while not skimming on time with each other and with loved ones.
TIME AWAY FROM THE BLOG FOR MATERNITY LEAVE
As you read in the disclaimer above, we are taking some time away from the blog to adjust to being a family, and just enjoying the time we spend together. We both work full-time, so we plan to use our maternity leave to spend with our baby, soak in all of the snuggles, and adjust as a family. As a result, we will not be actively posting on the blog during that time. In fact, as you’re reading this, we’re on maternity leave as shared in the disclaimer earlier in this post.
That being said, we have pre-scheduled quite a number of posts (including this one) that we’ve written ahead of time that will go live during this time, so all won’t be completely quiet here. You may also occasionally see posts on our blog’s social media accounts that we have pre-scheduled, but I don’t post much on Instagram as it is honestly. We just will not be actively posting here, on Substack or on our blog’s social media accounts.
There will be a lot of pregnancy and baby-related posts being shared throughout maternity leave that we thought would be cool or relevant to share, but there are some of our travel posts that we’ll have sprinkled in there too. As mentioned above, the full versions of the larger majority of our pregnancy-related content will be posted on our Substack instead of directly on our blog to respect those of you who may not want to read a ton of pregnancy-related content at this time and to also save blog space for posts that relate directly to the topics we typically post. Forgive me if I forget to do this on some posts though. I tried to do them for all of them.
At some point, the scheduled posts may stop sharing before we return back from leave, but we tried to schedule as many as we could so that it won’t be completely quiet here and so you’ll still receive some content.
The newsletter might be a little quiet, but our “Never Miss a Post” newsletter that you can subscribe to in our sidebar, will still be actively sharing any new posts posted here to your inbox.
When we return from maternity leave, we’ll post a Fresh Pressed Edit, since we compose those posts month to month, so you’ll know we’re back to actively posting. You can subscribe to our Substack below.
FOR THOSE OF YOU STILL TRYING:
If you’re currently struggling to conceive or grieving, know that I empathize with you. It’s such a difficult, difficult thing to go through and can feel really lonely and isolating – especially if you don’t really know of anyone who’s gone through such a thing. I am not sure if you can mute posts, but if you want to engage with our content, but our pregnancy or baby-related content is too much at this time, we plan to tag all of our posts under related categories, so you can filter it, if there’s an option to do so. We’ll also do the same to any references we make on social media by using the hashtag #BabyK so you can mute it. Also, the bulk of our pregnancy-related content will be posted in it’s fullness here, so that you don’t have to read the full posts on this blog. I’m hoping for you and I completely understand if you’ll need to take some time away from our content during our maternity leave where we’ll be sharing about our pregnancy experiences.
I know this post was likely very rambly, wordy, and all over the place, but we hope that answers some of what you can expect from our content at this time. We’re so excited to be parents and this has been such an answered prayer for us. I can’t even put into words how grateful we are for our baby and how excited we are to raise and watch our baby grow together. We’re looking forward to all of the new memories, moments, and experiences we’ll share as a family and we thank you all for your support!
If you’re reading this, we’ll see you on the other side of maternity leave!
