Waiting, conception, and the first 23 weeks.

It seems a bit odd that I am posting about the beginnings of our pregnancy now, at 24 weeks along. I know that I am extremely far behind on this, but I have always wanted to have some sort of blog to write about my pregnancy. It's easier said than done, but hey, here I am, finally ready to start talking! This'll be a long story, so either sit back and relax or skim fast!

OUR plan (note: not God's!) was to try to get pregnant around September 2010. We figured that if we were able to conceive during that month, we'd be done with school just in time for the baby to come. Needless to say, that is not exactly how it happened. Due to medical problems and issues that are probably best left out of a public blog, getting pregnant ended up being quite a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. Indeed, it seemed almost impossible. Naturally, I was frustrated. I knew that I was called to be a mom and wanted to begin that role as soon as school was behind me. Royce and I wanted kids all along, but by the time we were finally ready to start trying for them, we were wanting children more than ever! And while I know Royce never harbored any ill feelings towards me, I began to be frustrated with myself for not being able to give him children, when he had been wanting them for much longer than I had. It seems like the Lord has tried to teach me patience and trust in Him a lot during my life, and I began to get angry at myself for not having gotten the lesson He was trying to teach me earlier, so that I wouldn't have to learn the same lesson again with something I wanted so desperately. I felt silly for thinking that getting pregnant would be so easy.

Royce and I began to see an OB-GYN who was affiliated with our school. He was such a blessing to us, month after month giving me medicine and tracking what was going on with me through ultrasounds and bloodwork. He was very encouraging, but it was even more disheartening to still not get pregnant after so many medical interventions. He was able to show us what my problem was, though, and give us an understanding of how to deal with it. I began to consider, however, that I might be infertile.

Our May 2011 graduations came and went. Still no little Hall baby to look forward to. During the summer, we vacationed in Montréal to celebrate our graduations (something we never would have been able to do if we had been pregnant as we had hoped to be!). I began to go back to my old eating and drinking habits- throughout the whole year, I had been avoiding caffeine and foods that are not good for pregnant women. Now, I figured, what was the harm? I questioned even stopping the prenatals, feeling like I was wasting our money on them. Being so far behind the "deadline" I had set for myself, I guess I stopped feeling any urgency to get pregnant and just decided to live life happily, albeit childless for now. And, I began to trust again that the Lord's timing for my pregnancy, if He blessed me with pregnancy at all, would be perfect. I never really doubted the Lord's goodness during the whole process, and I knew that my life would still be whole without children, but I had been very frustrated with His timing. I wanted Him to bless me as soon as I was ready for the blessing! But finally, I began to see that things would be okay. I have salvation, my life was happy, I have the best husband ever, and God has already been faithful to me above and beyond what I deserve. If His plan was for Royce and I to stay the same sized family, that was okay. I would still try to get pregnant, but I wasn't going to let it consume me like it had been.

After our vacation to Montréal, I realized that between the graduation and our celebrations afterwards, it had been a couple of months since I had last been in touch with my OB-GYN and used any medications/testing. I contacted him for more pills start a new process of trying for children. He requested, as always, that I take a pregnancy test before he gave me the new medicines. I took my test, got a negative, received my new pills, and... nothing happened. This was extremely unusual, as these first pills had never failed me before. I emailed my OB-GYN, wondering what went wrong. The situation was almost funny- had my body gone so completely insane that things that had previously worked were already starting to fail me as well? My OB-GYN very calmly informed me that it wasn't a big deal, I just needed to take another pregnancy test and give him another negative and he would gladly give me the pills again to see if things would work this time. Royce and I went to Dayton, Ohio for the weekend to see a June 24 showing of 'The Lion King,' something I had wanted to see on stage for years. That night after we went to bed, I prayed what was quite possibly my most earnest and pleading prayer for a child yet. Unbeknownst to me, the Lord had answered my prayer two weekends prior by opening my womb and allowing a little child to begin growing there. This was the reason that my new pills had not "worked."

So now here we are, on the morning of June 27. The weekend was over, and I was planning to take my new pregnancy test as soon as I woke up to show my OB-GYN for my newer pills. It was 5:58 in the morning, and I really had to use the restroom, but I did not want to get out of bed- you are supposed to take the pregnancy test with the "first morning urine," and I did not want to have to wake up and sit there waiting for the stupid test to give me a negative before being able to go back to bed. Alas, I decided to get up and use the restroom and take the test. I put the test on the bathroom counter and sat on the edge of the bathtub and closed my eyes, pretending I was still in bed. I counted to 180 seconds (you are supposed to give tests three minutes to give you results). Then I opened my eyes and stood up to look and head back to my cozy bed. But... what was this? An extremely-faint-barely-there-but-definitely-there-second-line? Amazing, but, it was in fact there. I was fully awake at this point. I could NOT believe my eyes. Understand that I had taken an exorbitant amount of pregnancy tests in the past year and had never seen anything show up but the one line that shows that the test worked. But now, there was a faint line saying that I was pregnant. I did not scream or cry or anything like that. All I did was give a slight smile. I really, genuinely, was not sure if I believed it. After all, the pills I had just took were not supposed to allow me to get pregnant, they were just to set the stage for future pills to do that. And the round of pills I had taken previously had long since been out of my system with all of the graduation festivities.

So I walked back to the bedroom and woke up Royce. "Royce, can you come in the bathroom and see something?" I really, truly have a wonderful husband, because he thought I was waking him up to kill a spider in the bathroom (admittedly, this would not have been the first time I would have done something like this!). Yet he came anyways, without grumbling. So there we both stood, looking down at the pregnancy test. My eyes had already opened fully, but Royce was still in his half-asleep state. He looked up at me and said, "So?" I said, "Royce... there's two lines there!" NOW Royce's eyes got wide as well. He looked down and responded with, "Oh dang!" Again, just like my response, he didn't scream or cry, he just smiled, hugged, and kissed me. He wasn't about to put his full belief in the pregnancy test either. So we just decided to go back to sleep and think about it some more later. Ha! Go back to sleep... no way did I sleep at all! I just layed there in bed with a huge smile on my face, putting more faith in that test with every minute.

Our first test- see that second line?

The next morning I emailed my OB-GYN and told him the reason the pills hadn't worked, and asked him what he thought about the test. He responded with an email that was full of excitement and well wishes. "Holy cow," I thought to myself. "He believes the test is right? Does this mean we should, too?" He encouraged me to take one more test, just to be sure. So on the morning of June 29, we took a second test. The first test was with a dollar store pregnancy test, and the second test we went all out and got the best test we could find- one that reads specifically, "Pregnant" or "Not Pregnant." To our great shock and amazement, it read to us less than a minute later, "Pregnant!" One would think that that would settle the matter (it certainly seemed to for our OB-GYN!). But no, we still had our doubts. I wasn't having any pregnancy symptoms whatsoever, and I couldn't believe that pregnancy had actually happened for us. We requested an ultrasound to be positive, but our OB-GYN told us that we should wait a bit, since nothing would show up at such an early point in the pregnancy. So we waited... but not too long!

Our second test. There was much rejoicing!

The weekend of July 8, we were going to visit Royce's family in Franklin, Kentucky. We really wanted to share our news, but were hesitant to pass on the news without having seen an ultrasound. How awful would it be to tell our parents that they were to become grandparents and then have to later say, "Oh... oops... our bad"? So we explained the situation, and again requested an ultrasound. Our OB-GYN graciously agreed to perform an ultrasound, but explained to us to not get our hopes up to see anything too exciting. Hey, as long as we got a confirmation of pregnancy, though, we were bound to be excited! So we met him at his office on July 6, a Wednesday morning. He pulled up the ultrasound and- sure enough!- I was pregnant! The ultrasound was showing just a small black sack (the gestational sac) in my stomach, it was too early to see our microscopic baby at all. But the sac being there confirmed that I was in fact pregnant. Our doctor figured out that I was five and a half weeks pregnant, meaning that I had been exactly four weeks pregnant when I took my first pregnancy test (since pregnancy tests don't show anything until four weeks, if I had taken the test just a day earlier, I probably wouldn't have known I was pregnant even still!). He gave us the due date of March 5. Words cannot possibly begin to describe how amazed Royce and I were. We became even more amazed when he did the calculations to determine when our little one had been conceived, and we discovered that our baby was conceived EXACTLY when I was taking the pills that he had prescribed me! While these pills should have cleaned out my system and prepared my body to accept future pills to allow me to get pregnant, they instead somehow created a hospitable environment for baby inside of my womb. And somehow, my body had allowed itself to get pregnant without any prompting from medicine. We were amazed. My OB-GYN stated, "That's... impossible!" We could all only grin. It did seem pretty impossible. But not for our kind and loving God!

Royce and I purchased little gifts for our parents and siblings to break the news to them. That night, we got on Skype with my little sister, Callie, who was in Paris, France during the month of July doing some studying. We figured we would let her know first since she was so far away. We told her that we had gotten a gift for her and held up a onesie that said, "My aunt rocks!" Callie laughed at us and proceeded to tell us that we were stupid and we should stop buying stuff for a baby until we are actually pregnant. Ha! So then we got to tell her that we WERE pregnant. Callie's eyes got as big as saucers and then she started sobbing. It was great! It was sad to not physically be with her, but her reaction was so sweet and wonderful.

Two days later, we headed to Franklin to visit Royce's family as planned. We asked his parents to meet us at Rafferty's Steak House for dinner, our treat. Once there, we gave them their gifts- a onesie for Royce's mom and a bib for Royce's dad- and caught their reactions on camera. It was great! Then on Sunday (the 10th), when we arrived back in Louisville, we took my parents and Callie's fiancé, Scott, out to dinner at Buca di Beppo and gave them their presents (bibs for Papa and Scott and a onesie for Mom), again catching their reactions on camera. It was funny to see how my Mom reacted EXACTLY the same as my sister had- instant sobbing. Royce asked me later in amazement, "How do girls start crying that quickly?" As soon as Monday came around, I sent gifts of a onesie and bib to Lori and Patrick (Royce's sister and her husband) and they received them on Wednesday and called us excitedly. It was so much fun to be able to share the news of our miracle baby with our closest loved ones.

Royce's parents (top) and my parents and Scott (above).

After that, we kept the news of our pregnancy a secret from the rest of the world until I was twelve weeks pregnant. They say that the odds of struggling with conceiving are 1 in 6 and the odds of miscarriage are 1 in 4. I knew that if I had hit the odds of struggling to conceive, there was a good chance of miscarriage as well. I didn't want to have to deal with telling everyone about a miscarriage, so we decided that keeping the pregnancy a secret for now was the best option. It ended up being fairly easy to do, because the Lord REALLY blessed me with a tremendously easy first trimester. No morning sickness or anything like that. If anything, my worst symptom was that my face broke out pretty often during that first trimester. But besides that, I was completely normal, and I did not gain any weight at all either. So there was no suspicion from others that I might be pregnant since I wasn't getting fat or constantly running to the bathroom.

We found a new doctor to deliver our child- unfortunately, our beloved OB-GYN does not deliver babies anymore, otherwise we certainly would have had him deliver ours- and began to see our new OB-GYN at eight weeks. At week twelve (on August 24), we got to see our precious one for the first time on an ultrasound and hear the heartbeat- 160 beats per minute (since then, it has been 150 bpm at week sixteen, 153 bpm at week twenty, and 150 bpm at week twenty-four)! It was so fun to see him on the ultrasound- he was sucking his thumb, crossing his legs, and bouncing all about. The ultrasound tech would poke and prod at him to get him to move around a lot, and he seemed quite annoyed. It was adorable. It was so amazing to us to see such a tiny little human, already sucking his thumb and looking quite "normal!" After that appointment and seeing our baby looking so healthy, we decided to inform the rest of the world about our pregnancy. It was so much fun! We spread the news slowly, making sure to tell our grandparents and closest friends first. On August 31, we posted the pregnancy news on Facebook, thus ensuring that everybody knew.

Our baby at twelve weeks- sucking his thumb, tugging his ear, and crossing his legs!

If my first trimester was easy, the second has been even easier (no more face breakouts!). I bought my maternity clothes very early on, because I wanted to be ready as soon as I started popping out. Unfortunately for me, I didn't start popping out nearly as soon as I had hoped, which was kind of a bummer. I am being completely serious when I say that women are at their most beautiful when they are fully pregnant, and I was hoping to get that uber-big belly as soon as possible. It didn't quite happen that way, but I still put on my pregnancy clothes a bit earlier than needed... for those of you who have not been pregnant, let me just tell you that pregnancy clothes are the most comfortable things EVER. It is like wearing pajamas all day long but still looking nice. Wonderful, wonderful invention.

We went ahead and registered for baby necessities before finding out the gender. We wanted to keep the gender a surprise from everyone besides ourselves, parents, and siblings, so we figured if we went ahead and built the registries nobody would be able to get any hints from them. We are registered at Babies 'R Us, Pottery Barn Kids, and Target- the links to the registries are on the side of the page. It is our hope to receive gifts from the registries instead of other things, since we registered for the things that we thought we would really need, and we spent a lot of time investigating each product to see if it would be the best out of all the options (so they are also the items that we really like). So hopefully that works out for us. I had SO much fun registering for stuff. It was a pregnancy highlight- ha! It is funny, too, since I hated making the wedding registry way back when. I guess baby stuff is just so much cuter!

In the middle of September, Royce got a very good job working for a tree care company here in Louisville. They are wanting to start an organic lawn care company and hired him to help start that. Royce is loving his job and the people he works with, and we are both loving the fact that God has provided this opportunity for him to be able to support our family. I am going to be a stay at home mom when the time comes, and this new job will take care of us. We are so excited about it.

I started to feel our little one moving on September 25 (just a day before I hit seventeen weeks). We were at church, and I noticed that I was feeling something that felt like stomach growling whenever I would sit down after singing a song. How surreal that was! Since then, our baby has continued to get stronger, even letting Royce feel him for the first time on November 5.

Our twenty week appointment came on October 19. This was the big gender reveal. What a blessing to know the gender of our child and be able to refer to him by his name now! Since we are keeping the gender a secret from others, it has been difficult to make sure that we never use the name around others! We are just referring to him as "him." It was a Wednesday, which is the day that we always get together with my family to watch Survivor and eat pizza. When they came over, we had the apartment decorated with balloons and streamers (ah, but were they blue or pink? We'll never tell...) and we had ordered a special pizza that said "It's a ____!" Unfortunately, the pizza company did not do a good job with the pizza at all and you couldn't make out what it said to save your life. But other than that, it was a perfect gender reveal.

Our baby at 20 weeks- boy or girl?

Since then, we have been going to classes and home shopping. We are going to six hospital classes (two in October, two in November, and two in December) and two Lamaze classes (in January), and we have already knocked out three of the hospital classes. House shopping has been fun, but hectic. It is scary to not know yet where we are going to live when I am over halfway through with my pregnancy (we have to move, since we are currently in a one-bedroom apartment). But if the Lord gave us this miracle child, I'd be silly to think that He will not also provide for us a home. We will find something. It's just going to be according to God's timing, and not my own... just like our pregnancy. :)

Please pray for us:
1. That our little one would continue to be safe and healthy inside my womb, and during my eventual labor.
2. That I would continue to be safe and healthy while carrying our little one, and during my eventual labor.
3. That Royce would continue to grow accustomed to his new job to provide for his little family.
4. That the Lord would prepare us to be good parents who teach our child all about Him from an early age, and that our little one would come to a saving knowledge of Him.
5. That the Lord would lead us to His perfect home for us and that we would be able to move into it without any issues.

Thank you for reading, friends. :) Having written all this, it seems almost like I've been oversharing, but how can I not tell the whole story of the Lord's goodness to us in giving us our miracle baby and pregnancy?

Me at the start of my pregnancy and me now (holding an ear of corn to show baby's size!).