Even before the birth of my first child, I knew I wanted to be a mom of two or more kids, it just felt like it would be a natural part of my life. Little did I know how hard it would be to have this dream! Since 2002, I've been through so much just trying to get pregnant and stay pregnant! We've had a lot of challenges in our path - waiting, trying, hoping, miscarrying, and then picking ourselves back up and trying again. Two of our three miscarriages were late in the first trimester and we had dared to hope that these babies would survive, only to find out they failed to thrive just as our first baby together had. We almost gave up trying after our third miscarriage, which led to my losing consciousness at work from severe blood loss, being ambulanced to the ER, and recovering from a D&C and extreme anemia... not to mention the emotional pain that came with having yet another loss after so much waiting, hoping, and praying to have just one baby actually survive.

But I am so glad we didn't give up, even at our lowest point, our darkest hour. We decided to give it one more try... We sacrificed a lot to try again - I left my stressful full-time job and started working from home. I took Robitussin to help my cervical fluid, progesterone hormones to try to help a baby to implant and to thrive. I gave up coffee completely, took up meditation, and even saw a hypotherapist teach me through positive visualization techniques to make sure my body did not reject the embryo. It took three months of trying with all these (and other!) tricks and interventions, until we finally became pregnant. Then came a stressful first trimester of continuing to do everything I could to hang on to that baby! I took the progesterone every 12 hours and continued to live the no-coffee, no-stress, no-physical-strain lifestyle as much as possible. And finally, finally, we made it. Our little baby survived past the first trimester and then past the point of viability in the 2nd trimester...

In December 2004, we will be welcoming our little miracle into the world. We found out in August that we are having a healthy baby boy, and we'll be calling him Avery. Someday our little miracle baby will find out how difficult a path we had to travel to bring him into this world, but then he will understand why we love him so much!