It's Comical, Really

By the time I open access to this blog, the word will be out.  The words I waited my whole life to say....then was told I never COULD say....the words I prayed would leave my heart so I wasn't heartbroken every time another dear friend said them.  The words that took serious work to emotionally truly be okay NEVER saying...2 simple words that broke my heart for years...and now have made us hit our knees....

We're PREGNANT!!!

Yup.  My thoughts exactly LOL.  If you've followed our journey at ALL (I know SO many of you have, but I know even more are new), I'm sure you had the same "WTF, wipe my tears, hysterical laughter, God what did you DO?" response we did.  I'll start from the so called, beginning to catch everyone up.....after I wipe my eyes (literally) from actually being able to WRITE those 2 words.  

So to those of you that are new to our story...WELCOME!!  We're SO glad you're here!!  To those that have been here and prayed us through so far, we're SO very thankful for all of the continued prayers over the years (but seriously, who DIDN'T stop praying, cause we need to have a chat...LOL).  Chris and I are coming up on 10 years of marriage in August.  (WHAT?!?!)  We knew from the start we wanted kids.  In fact, when we met online on a local dating site here in Phoenix, one of the first things we talked about before we even talked on the phone was what we wanted our future families to look like.  We BOTH wanted a big family.  We both grew up in small immediate families, but he grew up with a close, giant, extended family, and I was always envious of that, so I knew I wanted ALLLLLL the kids.  We also were immediately on the same page: have 1-2 of our own, then adopt.  Older kids.  Kids that were aging out of foster care with no family to call their own.  I don't know about your dating experiences, but most of mine weren't this spot on, especially without a few dates and usually some drinks lol.

We decided very early on in our relationship that once we were married we'd start trying.  We weren't old, but we wanted several kids so we didn't want to wait.  We put our faith in God that He'd give us kids when He was ready.  About a year into our marriage we became more concerned that my periods were never regular; this wasn't new, it'd been this way my entire adult life.  But now, facing the hope of pregnancy, it became an issue.  Tracking ovulation when you can't even track a period wasn't going to help.  We weren't CONCERNED, but we knew we needed help.  We found a great dr, he said "oh ya, I can help" and we started on Clomid & Metformin.  I became regular but a pregnancy never came.  We were referred about 6-8 months in to a specialist, where we discovered I had PCOS.  The dr indicated that the amount of cysts I had on my ovaries were blocking my healthy eggs from dropping in a time frame necessary to arrange a meet up lol.  My eggs were healthy but couldn't get where they needed to go.  It's all a blur now, to be totally honest with you, but I believe we removed the cysts 2 different times.  Nothing worked.

We started looking at artificial insemination, which the doctor thought would do the trick.  We'd also, of course, looked at IVF, but that was something in our head we weren't quite sure about.  NOTHING wrong with it, we just knew that if we wanted to adopt, we probably could put the money needed for IVF into more than 1 foster adoption.  We knew that decision was down the road, so we didn't stress TOO much about that, and started the paperwork necessary to go with AI.  Now, if you followed our original story, this is where THAT starts.  If you're interested, you can go back and read that here in A Moment of Sad...A Moment of Hope.

For those of you that are new to my style of blogging, you'll quickly learn I probably bounce back and forth way too much.  I started blogging our adoption story because I needed a place to get out all the feelings that were in my heart and thoughts in my head.  As a person with bi-polar you can only IMAGINE the amount of thoughts at one time LOL, so it became necessary to type not write, as much as I love old fashioned pen & paper.  As we journeyed on, we quickly learned that people wanted to hear our story.  Not just friends and family, but people were excited by it, touched by it, intrigued by it....I've never lived my life in the shadows, much to my private husband's dismay lol.  But I think we both found that it helped US knowing we had SO many on our side, praying for us, cheering for us, and waiting just as anxiously for the day we got to bring a child into our home.  It was an amazing feeling and as the many years have passed since that day (read it here, if you dare, but get tissues....I still need them!!  Not Flesh of my Flesh) that we became parents for the first time, and we were picked as the family for OUR Raiden, we've been blessed with the opportunity to open a lot of people's eyes & hearts to the kids in our foster system.  I was adopted as a newborn baby....believe me, there is NOTHING wrong with that...each family is called for their OWN path.  We were never called to adopt an infant...we were called to adopt the older kids.  And while my arms yearned for an infant, God gave me my Raiden...who, at the age of 7, still needed to be held by a mama...HIS mama....one that would NEVER let him go.  So I still had full arms, and a full heart...and that boy was loved by HUNDREDS the second he became ours and we proclaimed to the world that we were parents.

So when we started telling our family and friends about our hilariously miraculous pregnancy (that post will come, you'll laugh too LOL), questions immediately came if I was going to blog.  Now I'm not gonna lie, at first I was like "why do I need to blog this, people do this all the time??"  But a friend of mine told me something that touched my heart...and maybe it's true and maybe it's not, but it was true to her....she said "you let us in on Chapter 1, 2, & 3.  When you told me you weren't going to have a baby EVER and you were done having kids, I felt like that ended the book.  But now you're growing the sequel.  How do you NOT share the story that STARTED the book people were dying to read?"  It seemed a little extreme but I was pretty excited when I really thought about it.  

So, thanks to her, and thanks to my ever-racing emotional mind (do I still have to blame it on bi-polar or NOW do I get to use the pregnancy excuse???? LOL), we're back!!  I'm assuming this will be like every other pregnancy BUT, with the always emotional Jessica twist LOL.

Thanks for coming along, friends.  It's been 10 long years but WOW are we excited for this one!!  (Unlike our adoption blog which had to be private and invite only because of privacy laws within the foster system, this blog will be public.)

xo ~ Jess