Becoming the Mother I Want to Be Part 2

You can find Part 1 here.

So, exactly what kind of mom do I want to be this year?  First, let me give you a little history, OUR story.  I’ll try to be brief.

Scott and I met and fell in love our freshman year of college.  We dated for 5 years and even moved to Chicago before ever getting married.  A good friend passed on the “be married a few year before starting a family” advice and we did just that.  So after about 5 years, while living in Kansas, we started trying to have a baby.  My two best friends and I started at the same time.  Kinda like one of those high school girl pacts you hear about.  Not really.

Anyway, five years and 3 (possibly 4) miscarriages later, we finally sought help for infertility.  Our first IVF (in-vitro fertilization) gave us Sam.  Remember his first picture?

It turns out that getting pregnant is actually really, really hard.  And for us, really expensive!  (As an aside, I will never forget the friends episode where Pheobe’s brother says “Just get drunk!  It worked for a bunch of girls in my high school.” LOL!!)  Oh, if is were that easy!  It is a freakin’ miracle anytime life begins and don’t ever think for a moment that it is anything less.

I would never complain about the five years it took for us to get Sam.  God knew exactly what he was doing and we were incredibly accepting of His will and our journey.  And look what patience brought us!  The most incredible child I could ever imagine!

Fast forward to last fall.  Well, rewind with me for just a moment, then we’ll fast forward to last fall.  When we did IVF 6 years ago,  we retrieved about 18 eggs from my grapefruit sized ovaries (I'm not even kidding!) and about 12 of them fertilized.  Five of those embryos/babies survived to be 5 days old.  On day 5, three embryos were transferred back inside and two were frozen for storage.  (Remember how we started with 18 eggs? Isn’t life fragile?) So, last fall, we thawed our sweet angels out and tried to get pregnant again.  All I could think to pray for was that they survived the thaw.  And they did!  Here they are:

We did not, however, get pregnant.  And again, it’s all part of our journey and our faith is unshaken.

More of our story tomorrow…