Ultimate First Trimester Survival Care Package

My sister is the most thoughtful person I’ve even known. Luckily for ME, she has been in my life since day ONE so I have had to her to guide me throughout my entire life. When we were young, she kept me safe on the playground by making sure my feet didn’t touch the “lava ground”, she led the path for me through grade school ensuring all of my teachers knew who I was because of her stellar reputation, and she warned me of the ins and outs of understanding boys – cooties and all. In our later teenage/adult years, she set the standard by going to college, finding a great job, and getting married to the love of her life. Being the copycat younger sister that I am, I followed suite and did all of these things too (so much so that I even work for the same company that she did)! Her latest remarkable life event was entering motherhood. In November 2013 my niece was born and this past May my nephew was born. Seeing my sister embrace the journey of being a parent is inspiring and the way her children look up to her is endearing. As I now am in the preliminary stages of entering parenthood, I can only hope and pray to be as amazing of a mother as my sister is to my niece and nephew.

I tell my sister EVERYTHING. Bryan and I were going to try to keep our news of being pregnant a secret for a bit until we were at a lower risk stage. That secret lasted one day. I spilled the beans to my sister in the parking lot at work during my lunch break the next day. Even though I was crying tears of nervousness and self-doubt, she was ecstatic and crying tears of joy and completely reassured me that I was ready for this new chapter.

Now back to my first statement. My sister’s thoughtfulness.

Within a week or two of telling her the news, I received a box in the mail with perfect handwriting on the box. That could only be from one person!

Along with the sweet card, enclosed in this box was everything I needed to survive my first trimester. The Ultimate First Trimester Survival Care Package!

At the point I received this box, I was nauseous all day every day and had done little to no research about how to get through all of the symptoms I was experiencing. The items enclosed as well as the customized hand-written notes comforted me and helped me feel like I could get through it! Here is the full list of all of the items (as well as the links on where to find them) that were inside of the box:

Her Survival Care Package helped me through that first trimester, and I am happy to say that now at 15 weeks I am now in my second trimester and have regained energy and am starting to feel like myself again…myself with an ever growing baby bump that is. Updates on that to come!

Two weeks ago, at our 13 week mark, Bryan and I were able to travel to go visit my sister and her family. During this visit my sister had me model all of her maternity wear and pick the pieces that fit to bring home with me, we celebrated her and her husband’s 3 year anniversary, and of course, the absolute highlight of our trip was spending time with my precious niece and nephew. I will leave you with a couple pictures of me with those two cutie pies: