God has completely shocked us and blessed us beyond belief and it couldn’t have come at a better time. We desperately needed something encouraging to happen to us after losing Lucy, Jude, Pax and “Scarlet” in less than two years. I was steeling myself for yet another difficult Thanksgiving and Christmas without a baby in our arms or hope in our hearts. When I look at our Christmas tree I can’t help but imagine Lucy toddling over and pulling ornaments off, but it remains mostly untouched. I had envisioned this Christmas with our newborn Scarlet brightening up our family and had even thought through what I would buy her for Christmas, but once again there is no baby girl in our house to buy presents for. I was dreading this holiday season so much.

As many of you know, I had induced lactation to breastfeed Scarlet and had been pumping milk for a few months before October. Most women don’t ovulate when breastfeeding so I had not ovulated or had a period since May, right before I started the process of inducing lactation. Well, after the adoption fell through, I immediately started tapering off the pumping and eventually stopped altogether. I was waiting anxiously for my period to show up (sorry if it’s TMI for some of you guys) but it just wasn’t happening. One day I went to Target to stock up on tampons, thinking I would need them soon. While I was standing in the aisle, looking through the feminine products, my eyes wandered over and landed on the pregnancy tests. “NO” I thought, “surely not.” But I left the store with pregnancy tests and no tampons and quite a lot of guilt for wasting yet MORE money on pregnancy tests that would surely end up being negative. We tried to conceive for a whole year last year before pursuing adoption, so I have spent a lot of money on pregnancy tests. Well, I was completely SHOCKED when my pregnancy test was very positive.

My tests with Jude and Pax never got that dark, the line on the left was much lighter with them, so that was a good sign right from the start. The best way to describe how we felt after seeing the test was straight adrenaline. I felt like there was an emergency, I literally ran around the house holding the pregnancy test, not sure what to do (saying words that I will not repeat on this blog.) I felt like my baby needed saving immediately. I felt like someone should be calling 911. I was also overwhelmed with thankfulness. I thanked God over and over again. For days afterward I would stop randomly, close my eyes and imagine myself running up to Jesus in the flesh and embracing him, tears flowing down onto his shirt. Thank you, Jesus. What a wonderful gift from God, and right before the holidays too.

I had blood work drawn and on Thanksgiving day I got the results that the hcg hormone was rising perfectly, showing that the baby was growing just like he should be. That was our first hurdle in this long journey of obstacles to overcome, and we cleared it without a problem. Right now I am a little over 8 weeks pregnant and we have had 3 ultrasounds already to monitor baby. He (I just know it’s a boy) is looking great so far. We first saw his little heartbeat at 6 weeks and Josh and I both wept. I COULD NOT believe I was looking at my own baby’s heart beating, and oh how I want it to keep beating. I so desperately want my heart to stop beating before that little heart does one day many years from now. I am tired of out living my children.

We know that this baby has been given a 50% chance of surviving the pregnancy because of my extremely aggressive anti-kell antibodies. They will attack the baby if he has his Daddy’s blood type (a 50% chance) and possibly kill the baby in the 2nd or 3rd trimester. If the baby is kell negative, like me, it will be a normal pregnancy. The baby cannot be affected by the antibodies until around 15/16 weeks at the earliest, so if we lost him before that it would be because of a normal first trimester miscarriage that many women (unfortunately) experience. Right now we are working with my MFMs (high risk OBs) to  finish up all the details on my treatment plan that I will share in a future post. We are doing things a bit differently than we did with Lucy in hopes that even if the baby is kell positive like Lucy, he can still have a chance of survival.

Today we are praising God for this beautiful new life so healthy and strong. We are praising Him for the perfect heartbeat we saw on the ultrasound yesterday. We are begging God to let us raise this baby on earth. Please pray for our baby. Pray that he is kell negative and that the pregnancy will be normal. Please pray for our doctors, that they would have wisdom to know exactly how to treat the baby and me. Pray that Josh and I would be courageous and hopeful and that we would be able to trust God to take care of our baby. Thank you all for your continued support. We are so grateful to have so many wonderful people on this new, scary journey with us.

Here is our ultrasound picture from yesterday. Our beautiful little sea creature 🙂