An Announcement...!!

Oh, hayy December!  I didn't see you sneaking up there!  Did any of you guys notice that?!  I feel like it was just summer, and then suddenly Thanksgiving happened, and now there are only five days left to study for my accounting final!!! Yikes!  Needless to say I've been meaning to finish my 5 Days of Thanksgiving for a few weeks now, and I'm telling you right now, it's ending with a bang.

Day 5: Today I am thankful for about a hundred things, but above all, I am thankful that our sorrows don't last forever.

If you're surprised by this news--join the club!!!!!!!!  After 2+ years of trying without even a glimmer of a positive pregnancy test, fertility treatments, and a very sad loss just two months prior, this happened to us completely out of the blue!!

After we lost our baby in September, we felt so lost and like we had many options but none of them was right for us.  I wanted to jump in with both feet and adopt a child as soon as possible.  My heart was aching from the loss of what we almost had, and yet I was pretty dead set against undergoing more fertility treatments, because I felt like the pregnancy was forced and that may have been why it didn't continue.  About a week after our miscarriage, we were accepted into a very exclusive program with a domestic infant adoption agency in Illinois, but it just didn't feel right to start the proceedings.  Phil and I both prayed separately, and it was a huge relief when we came together and discovered that God had told us both the same thing: wait six months before you do anything.  Doing nothing for six months seemed like the worst torture in the world, but what choice did we have?  We were and are determined to follow and trust God because only He knows what the right thing is going to be.  In order to keep from going crazy while we waited, we made a plan to save our money so that we would be able to send our deposit to the agency in March (six months from the date of our miscarriage), but the plan had us on a very strained budget, so we told ourselves we would do our best and let God take care of the rest.  Two months later we had more than half of the money that we needed for the adoption.  That in itself was a mini-miracle--we have NO IDEA how we were able to save so much money in such a short period of time!  We were excited and encouraged and thought to ourselves, this is definitely what God wants for us!  He is showering us with monetary blessings as a sign that He wants us to be able to adopt!  We started doing our homework and our research and planning out what we could without actually doing anything.

In the meantime, just a week or so after the miscarriage, we had a followup meeting with Dr. Armisen at the fertility clinic.  He scheduled my hysteroscopy and biopsy for about a month out, and told us to use protection until after hearing back about the results from the procedure.  (Let me tell you--as unbelievable as it sounds, that may have been the most awkward moment of this entire process!!  After he said "use protection", Phil and I both blushed and looked at each other and tried not to laugh like we were two thirteen year olds in sex education class.  Seriously!!  I mean, the man has poked my ovaries with an ultrasound wand and shown Phil to the "deposit" room, but we were unbelievably embarrassed to be told to use protection!!!)

After the results from the hysteroscopy and biopsy came back normal, the nurse team at the clinic called me to schedule our next medicated cycle.  I was at school and missed the call.  It took every ounce of self control and trust that I had in me to call the nurse back and tell her that I wouldn't be coming in and that we were "taking a break".  By this point it was about a month and a half after the miscarriage, and I was beginning to forget how traumatic it was for me.  I was starting to entertain the thought of trying again, but I knew that I wasn't supposed to be doing anything.  It took many long discussions with Phil to agree once again not to do anything until March, but once March rolled around, we decided to try three more months of fertility treatments before sending in our deposit to the adoption agency and forgetting about the whole TTC thing.

Of course, we won't have to wait until March, because we got pregnant--without trying--the first month that we weren't "using protection" (oh God so awkward)!

There were two kind of strange things that happened in the month leading up to our surprise positive pregnancy test.  For one thing, right at the beginning of my cycle, I found an unopened bottle of Clomid in one of our kitchen cabinets.  This was really bizarre for a number of reasons.  The first is that I've never used Clomid (we used Femara) and I can't remember ever being prescribed this bottle or where it could have come from.  The second weird thing is that it was in the kitchen cabinet with the paper plates instead of in the medicine cabinet.  I sat there and looked at that full bottle of Clomid with my name on it, and I very seriously contemplated taking it.  But I didn't.  How's that for a test of trust?!

The second weird thing that happened was that I had an exceptionally strange dream--a dream that I knew was God trying to tell me something.  I has just fallen asleep and Phil was still awake playing video games when I had the dream, and I nudged him and asked him to look up the dream meaning before falling back to sleep.  I woke up to Phil's voice reading the meaning of my dream from some online dream dictionary, and I realized how big a deal it was that I was able to wake up and ask him to look up the meaning, because I had fallen back to sleep again instantly and would never have remembered it the next day.

In my dream, I was walking up stairs and I saw a creature that was half frog and half catfish, and it scared the crap out of me.  That was it.  But who the heck dreams about stuff like that?  I mean, other than someone who lives in a radioactive swamp and might actually step on a creature that's half frog half catfish when they're walking up stairs?  It turns out that a frog in a dream symbolizes fertility.  The dream dictionary said that "if you're a pregnant woman, it's likely you're seeing the frog in your dreams because frogs in dreams are often associated with babies...if you're seeing a frog in your dream while you're pregnant or contemplating having children, relax.  It is considered a good omen."  However, to dream of a catfish "represents a situation that isn't really what you hoped it would be.  You are feeling good settling for less or having to accept an alternative."  I knew that the dream meant something!!!  It seemed pretty obvious to me that it was God reassuring me that I would have children, but that we had never expected that they would all be adopted.  But that I should relax, because it was going to all work out ok.

Apparently the dream was actually God trying to tell us that we were going to have a surprise pregnancy--something I thought would never happen to me in a million years.  Of course, we are over the moon, but we are also very nervous.  Fortunately for us, we have a church family of a few thousand people, and thanks to Phil's announcement at Thanksgiving service, they are all praying for us!!  If you would pray for us too, it would mean the world to us!

So far we have received nothing but good news.  The HCG (pregnancy hormone) levels are more than doubling every 48 hours, which is excellent.  They are twice as high as they were in my last pregnancy.  Last time, I had my progesterone tested when I found out I was pregnant, and it came back at a 6.  I had already been on progesterone supplements for two weeks when I was tested, and I was told not to worry, that the supplements don't absorb into your blood stream well but that they were working and things were normal.  What I didn't know until later was that the normal progesterone range in early pregnancy is 6-29, so although I was technically "normal"...it didn't look great.  This time, when they tested my progesterone levels after not having taken any supplements at all, they came back at 32!!  What a huge relief.  It seems like, for whatever reason, my body suddenly knows what it's supposed to be doing.

During the Advent season this year at Grace, we are talking about miracles.  There couldn't be a more fitting topic for us right now.  We have learned so much from our struggle to become parents, but above all, we have come to understand just how miraculous life is.  It may be an every day miracle, but it is a miracle, none the less.  For us, this pregnancy is definitely not an everyday miracle, and we can really appreciate that.  We are not without apprehension, but we are trying our best to accept what the Lord has given us with gratitude and thanksgiving instead of with fear and worry.  We are learning this month that the purpose of a miracle is not to meet our physical needs.  The purpose of  miracle is to reveal to us that God is with us.  It is a sign that He is continuing to work in our world, and a reminder to turn our eyes and hearts to Him for everything and in everything.

Today, I am thankful that miracles happen, and I am thankful for the one I am carrying right now.  Stick around, little miracle bean.  We'd really like to meet you.