34 days

Today marks 34 day until we mail the agency our application!  It is coming up so fast, and we are starting to get both excited and nervous.

This month we have spent a lot of time around little ones, and it fills me with joy!  It is so amazing to see how God has transformed my mind and heart in this regard - infertility so often robbed me of joy in the types of situations we've experienced lately, and I am so happy to be moving on in my journey and beginning to heal.  A couple close to us had their first baby at the end of October, and they have been so amazing about letting us come over to visit and hold the baby.  We also got to babysit her when she was 4 weeks old, which was so fun.

Since then, Tyler's cousin and her husband have been blessed with their first child.  They are also adopting, and there was a lot of drama with the birth mother for several weeks after the baby was born, but the situation has been resolved and they have a precious baby boy.  Holding him on Thanksgiving gave me hope that next year we'll have our own baby to show off to the family.

Thanksgiving weekend was spent in Roswell, NM, where we got to hang out with Tyler's family, including 6 kids under the age of 5.  We had a great time.  Everyone spent some time asking us about our adoption plans and learning about that process, and the support we've received from everyone is just amazing.  Also, watching Tyler play with the kids is priceless.  He is so patient with them, and he is great at going along with their games.  I know he'll be an amazing dad, and that he loves getting to 'practice' with our niece, nephew, and cousin's kiddos.

I can finally reveal some of the news I mentioned in our last post!  We met with the woman in charge of support groups at our church this week, and we will be launching an infertility support group in January.  We feel called to lead out in this ministry, because we know there are so many couples out there struggling with infertility who could use some support and somewhere to vent.  We're hoping to call it "For Those Who Wait" after the Fireflight song.  This song has a lot of significance for the two of us throughout this infertility journey, and we feel the name will give our group members a feeling of hope rather than despair.

Another realization that I had this week was the fact that our future birth mother could be getting pregnant with the child that will someday be ours any day now.  This is rather optimistic, since we have no idea how long it will take us to get through our home study process and onto the wait list at our agency, but I'm trying to bring more positivity into our journey.  Women who are becoming pregnant right now have due dates in August.  It would be amazing if we were placed that quickly after completing our home study, which we hope will happen in the late spring, around the time that I'm set to graduate.  How crazy is that?

That's pretty much all the updating I have for today, but I'm hoping to get Tyler to write a post soon, so keep your eyes open for that!  In the meantime, please be praying for our family, and for the woman that will be blessing us with a child someday.  We really appreciate your support!

How we decided to adopt

If you've been following this blog for a while, you probably know that we've been trying to conceive for a long time.  In fact, October will mark four years since we began actively trying to build our family.  We had one small break in that time where we were not trying (while I was in massage therapy school).

It became apparent after a full year post-break that things weren't really happening.  According to my charts, I was ovulating regularly and had a normal LP.  I scheduled an appointment with my OB/GYN to talk about infertility testing.  She ran some bloodwork, which came back normal, and then sent me to have an HSG (basically an x-ray of your uterus and fallopian tubes, to check for blockages and other abnormalities).  That was clear, too.  Tyler got sent for a semen analysis at the same time, and that's where we ran into some problems.  His count, motility, and morphology were all low, so he was referred to a urologist who specializes in infertility.

At his appointment, Tyler learned that he had bilateral varicoceles, which are varicose veins leading away from the testicles which cause them to overheat and therefore produce sub-par sperm.  The doctor recommended microsurgery to repair the veins, so Tyler had surgery on Valentine's Day, 2011.  After a week off from work, he was back to normal.  We had several follow-up semen analyses over the next nine months to check if the surgery helped sperm production, but the news was less than stellar.  While there was some improvement, we would likely be unable to conceive without the help of IVF and ICSI (a procedure where sperm are individually implanted within eggs to assist fertilization).

At this point, in November of 2011, we decided to take some time to think.  I had discussed the possibility of adoption with Tyler in the past, but he was unsure if that was something he would be willing to look into.  As we were on the road back to our hometown for Thanksgiving, I asked Tyler to consider adoption again.  I had begun to feel like the Lord was leading me down that path, but I wanted us both to think and pray about it before we had another discussion.  God had other plans, though, and as soon as we finished our initial discussion, we both began to feel an immense sense of peace and calm.  We decided then that we would be using adoption to expand our family, and told Tyler's parents that weekend.

Ever since that moment in the car, we have felt God's presence in our research and decisions regarding our adoption journey.  Our families and friends have been incredibly supportive and are so excited for us to become parents.  We attended an informational session at an adoption agency in February, and we decided shortly thereafter that we will be moving forward with them.

Now we are in the process of saving the money we will need to complete our application, education seminars, and homestudy.  We hope to submit our application materials at the beginning of 2013 and to complete our homestudy around the time that I graduate with my master's in the spring.

Stay tuned for more!!

An Uplifting Message

I have this book from Max Lucado called Everyday Blessings. I was reading today's entry (note that I only read the entry every once in a while, usually this book is very neglected), and I found it very comforting. It is based on Hebrews 2:1, which reads We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard. Lucado follows with the following:

"Stability in the storm comes not from seeking a new message but from understanding an old one. The most reliable anchor points are not recent discoveries, but are time-tested truths that have held their ground against the winds of change. Truths like:
My life is not futile. My failures are not fatal. My death is not final."

I think this is an awesome thing to think about. It is so comforting to remember that just because I'm a failure, doesn't mean that I'm condemned. In a society consumed with the pursuit of perfection, it's so calming to know that it doesn't matter, because you can never really achieve perfection. Who you are is OK with God, and it should be OK with you, too.