MTV’s 16 and Pregnant

MTV recently had a show on called 16 and Pregnant that followed six young girls through their teenage pregnancy and little while after the baby was born. Each story was unique in a way. I watched each episode because I wanted to see how they would portray the subject matter. It wasn’t a must watch show, much of what MTV airs are not must watch shows, but if I happened to catch it on, I would watch it.

Now they are coming out with a new series called Teen Moms which followed four of the moms from the first season thru their first year of motherhood. I’m not sure why it didn’t follow all six of the moms, but don’t really care either. I’m anxious to watch this as well to see how they got along being such young moms.

They also had a special on after the last 16 and Pregnant episode that I recently caught. It was an episode where it brought all of the mom’s together for the first time and they got to sit down with this doctor guy (whom I’m assuming is some sort of psychologist or psychiatrist) and he asked them some pretty tough questions. Out of all of the episodes, I found this one the most intriguing and/or the most beneficial to what MTV was trying to get across… ie: teenage pregnancy is NOT a good thing! This episode was the one where I felt they really got that message across, and yet in this episode I felt myself wanting to defend these girls from some of the questions this ‘host’ was asking.

Because, yes, teenage pregnancy can be avoided, and yes, teenage pregnancy is not glamorous, and yes, teenage pregnancy should not be advocated… but it happens, and the girls who step up during that time should be given credit for what they are doing. Praised no, but get over the fact that yes, they screwed up and were stupid and got pregnant at a young age, revel on the fact that they haven’t let it screw up their lives or discourage them from reaching their dreams.

And, there was on teenage couple on there who put their daughter up for adoption because they knew they didn’t have the resources to give her the life they knew she deserved and when I watched that episode, I bawled. To have the strength to do that is amazing and to know at that age you have to put your child before yourself was wow, at least in my eyes. I don’t know that I could ever have done that (given my child up for adoption, not putting my child before myself because I do that on a daily basis).

In any case, as I was watching some of the recaps, I thought a lot about how it was when Ayden was born. I thought I saw a lot of myself in some of those girls. Obviously, every one’s story is a little different, but yeah… I wish them all the best of luck for the future and hope that they can achieve what they want in life even though they became parents at such a young age.

I look at how much Jay and I have grown in the last five years. Five years gives everyone a chance to grow and change, but when you become a parent, so much grows and changes along with that. Ask any parent… were we ready to become parents at such a young age, heck no! But did we embrace it… you bet! We’re not perfect, we don’t strive to be, but we do strive to be the best we can be for our son. Every first time parent learns on the go what works for them and their family… we did to. And so far… I think we are doing an alright job.

When (if) our next child ever comes along, we’ll embrace that as well. The only thing I ‘regret’ (if you can call it a regret) about becoming pregnant so young is that there will be such a big age gap between Ayden and his next sibling. Of course we could have had more kids before whenever another one comes along, but we know the timing wasn’t right for us. Because despite the fact that Ayden came along earlier than ‘planned’ (and we all know, planning doesn’t happen on our timing), I honestly wouldn’t take back anything about it. You get over the stares, small town talk about pregnant high schooler, the pity looks… you get over it all. Everyone will always have their opinions… too young to have kids, too many kids, too old to have kids, not married and having kids, second marriage and having kids, etc etc etc… none of that matters and it took me a long time to figure that out. And now… I’m happy about life, elated for the future, and currently waiting for my boys to get home so I can give them a big squeeze!

In other ‘Ashley News’… I finally started my Stephen King book this past week. I am almost 300 pages into… only 700 more to go! Yes, it is a long book and honestly, it is kind of dragging on a little bit. I thought that by this far into it, a little more would be happening. I’m hoping that the whole book doesn’t go like this. And there are a lot of characters to keep straight. I find myself stopping every now and then and having to remember who is who and how they are incorporated into the story, but all in all it is pretty good so far. Not utterly boring that I haven’t wanted to read it either.

Yesterday I put the lights on the Christmas tree. I was going to start decorating it as well, but I know that Ayden wants to help too so I just got the boxes out and we will do that after he gets home from school tomorrow. I have decided that I’m just putting up a few small decorations other than the tree and then we will put as many ornaments on the tree as we can. I’m not really in the mood to decorate anything else, just because I’m the one who has to put all of it away after Christmas. So this year, we are going to have an overly decorated Christmas tree that has too few lights on, lol! It probably could use another strand or two of lights, but oh well. I’ll be sure to take some pictures and post them when we are done! Oh, and I already have the perfect set up for our family picture in front of the tree, lol!

I also got our Christmas cards all printed out and put in envelopes for this year. I think I want to write a letter to everyone as well documenting our year… haven’t quite decided yet… I’m a little disappointed in how the cards turned out though. I had them printed at Walmart to conserve my home printer ink (at this moment I have 22 cards to send out and will send out anymore that we get from people not on my list) and they turned out kind of dark. I thought they might because they were printed with the matte/luster finish (one-hour job)… but oh well I guess. I didn’t have to pay too much for them and I created them myself so… they will work and well people don’t put too much stock in Christmas cards anyways, right? Well maybe some people do, I don’t know.

I also got together with Katie and Amy yesterday to work on our powerpoint presentation. We finished that for the most part and found out our paper is now not due until December 16th. I think I might have mentioned that before. This week my plan is, finish up my section of the paper which includes just proof reading it and adding in my citations, doing my non-organic hearing loss lab*, studying for instrumentation, and reading my book, hehe!

*Speaking of my non-organic hearing loss lab… OMG, too much fun! So, non-organic hearing loss means something along the lines of people faking a hearing loss. Yes, it does happen! Sometimes for attention, but mostly for insurance compensation purposes. My classmates and I were to fake a hearing loss for our lab. We thought this would be easy since we knew what tests we would be running and thought we could actually get around the system and it would look legitimate. Well… definitely easier said than done! We don’t know how anyone could fake a hearing loss! It is HARD! The tone testing part of it was pretty easy because we know how its done, and can give pretty consistent results pertaining to that, but when you are asked to repeat back words that you can hear perfectly fine and yet are not supposed to be because you are faking a hearing loss, its HARD! And funny! We had a blast trying to fake our hearing losses! And then we would catch specific things, like wait, even if they did have a loss, because of cross over they would still be able to hear it. Okay, maybe you have to know a little bit about hearing testing and so forth for it to be funny, but we thought it was a riot!

Even thought tomorrow is Monday and that means another day of school… and an 8am presentation for me… I’m looking forward to it! Despite the struggles and busyness of school and homework and projects and clinic, I love what I’m learning, really honestly do… so bring on Monday and Tuesday, and even Wednesday so I can get my Instrumentation test over and done with (since I haven’t even started studying for it and this is like probably 50% of my grade)… because then I’m free until next Monday morning at 8am when I have my Hearing Assessment final. Might even get the rest of my Christmas shopping done this week! Who knows?!

CIAO! LOVE ME!