Today

March 9th. We should be celebrating. We should be joyous. We should be tired, but wonderfully so. Instead we are grieving, we are heartbroken, and we are tired from the tears we’ve cried. Today would have been my due date. But instead of celebrating, we are remembering the life we lost in August, our first child. This past August, our lives forever changed when we learned that after 5 years of...

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The love in my heart

Mother's Day is a hard day for me. Mostly because I'm not yet recognized by society as a mother. I don't have a baby bump. I don't have kids in my house. I haven't even been matched with a referral. But a friend recently shared this quote with me and it resonated on a very deep level: "A mother's love is not measured by the number of children she has in her arms but by the love in her heart." While I wrote this post several months ago, I feel like it was in anticipation of this...

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Getting up

January 22, 2016 The last month has been really hard for us. Processing what the news of infertility means for our family has not been an easy road to walk. It doesn’t help that there is almost no one here near us that can understand. But we are thankful for our family and friends in the States that have reached out to us, prayed with and for us and carried us through this last month. The only...

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Pursuing

I wrote this on December 30, 2015: For Christmas we decided to make an ornament that summed up our year, whether with a picture or a word. We both came back with the same word…pursuing. 2015 for us was a year of pursuing. We pursued where God would have us work in this vast northern part of Senegal.  When we first arrived in our new city, we felt overwhelmed with the possibilities,...

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The deepest thanks

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions, from extreme joy to doubt and back to joy again. I've cried tears of fear and tears of happiness. I've been nothing but smiles and nothing but worry. Needless to say, I'm kinda tired! First of all, we want to say thank you! Thank you for being so excited for us and our adoption. Thank you for making us feel so loved. Thank you for recognizing...

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What my morning sickness looks like

I wrote this in August 2015: So it was a hard day and I was feeling blue. But my wonderful mom reminded me that every parent has to go through the yuck to get their kiddo. Most women have to go through morning sickness, swollen ankles, weird craving, etc. My yuck just looks different. The more I thought about this, the more comforted I was and my optimism slowly returned. Thanks Mom! My morning sickness, tiredness and swollen ankles looks like this: 1. Finding out that your...

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A bit of our story

I wrote this in July 2015 right before we had our home study: All my life, I thought I never wanted to have kids biologically. Something about the pain of childbirth, gaining weight when I already struggle daily with that issue, and pain (did I already mention that?) caused me never to really have that desire to birth a child. Don’t get me wrong.. I’ve always always wanted kids. But I thought from an early age that my future family would include only adopted kids. Enter my hubby....

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