Andrew’s Story: Trying to Conceive

Today is Andrew’s due date. After nine months of waiting, the date has finally arrived and boy does it look and feel differently than it was supposed to. I had a feeling that Andrew was getting impatient towards the end and had a gut feeling he’d be born before today. I just had no idea it would all turn out this way.

Since today is Andrew’s due date and a week since his delivery (I’m going to call it his birthday from here on out), I think it’s only fitting that I begin to share how his precious life began. Here goes.

Kevin and I have always wanted children. Kevin always jokes about wanting to have lots of kids – maybe even twins or triplets. He seems to think it would be easier on me to have multiples so I wouldn’t have to go through labor too many times but yet still have lots of kids. The last number he threw out there was 5.

Kevin and I got married in 2003 when I was 22 and he was 27, so I always felt like we had plenty of time to enjoy each other before trying to have a family. The first few years of our marriage were filled with Kevin finishing up school, our move to Richmond, the purchase of our first home (which has been a major fixer upper), and then Kevin getting his teaching credentials.

Although some of these early years were hard, I loved them and we enjoyed making memories together as our 2 person family. After about 3 years of marriage, I was starting to get a little antsy to begin trying for children. I was happy working at Circuit City and just enjoying life, but knew deep down I wanted to be a mom and stay at home to raise them. It was tough because we knew we wanted kids, but there was still some instability with Kevin’s career and we just wanted to make sure we would be able to provide for our kids well once we got started.

In the spring of 2007, Kevin graduated from his teaching program and began looking for full time teaching jobs. I was so proud of him when he landed his first teaching job! We then started trying for the the family we always knew we wanted.

Although I was thrilled to start trying for kids, I was also a tad nervous. It took my mother 9 years to have my sister and her first was a miscarriage. It took my sister about 3 years to get pregnant with my beautiful niece and she and her husband had to go through fertility treatments to even get pregnant. Despite their stories, they kept telling me I’d be the one in the family to get pregnant quickly. My sister thought we’d be the couple to get pregnant on the first “try.”

Needless to say, we didn’t get pregnant right away. After a year and 2 months of trying, my OB/GYN suggested we check out a fertility specialist to see if things were okay. We were frustrated and annoyed. I saw what my sister went through to get pregnant and did NOT want to have to go there. Since we had already waited longer than I would have liked to even begin trying, I did not want to have to go through a dramatic process to get pregnant.

After a couple of weeks, there we were in the office at a fertility specialist. We started out with testing and passed everything with flying colors, so that was an enormous blessing. We were thankful that there was nothing physically preventing us from conceiving.

We just weren’t certain what to do next. We didn’t feel God leading us to jump into any major procedures and we sort of felt like we should give it more time. We knew that God was ultimately our fertility specialist and wanted to make sure He was in all this. Our fertility specialist was great and he suggested we try Clomid. It’s a safe drug and would increase my chances of conceiving by helping my body release more than one egg during ovulation.

After the first round of Clomid, we had to wait things out. Any woman who has tried to have kids knows what I’m talking about. Those 2 weeks of waiting are the longest 2 weeks of your life! I waited and waited, and nothing came. As anxious as I was to know if we were pregnant, I refused to take a pregnancy test. I had been disappointed month after month that I simply could not bring myself to take one.

At this point, we were into December and approaching Christmas time. We had planned to travel to Mississippi to see Kev’s folks so we thought maybe we just better take a test. So, on December 14, 2008 we took the test and found out we were PREGNANT! We were thrilled beyond belief!

Everything was confirmed within a couple of days and we even had our first sonogram on December 19, 2008. We saw Andrew’s heart beating at 7 weeks!  He was the cutest little squirt ever and we knew our lives would never be the same.  Although the doctors all refer to them as embryos at that early stage, that squirt was our BABY.