When plans don't pan out

Last spring we were excited about the changes that were coming in our family. We were excited to be moving on to a new place, excited to make new friends and excited to welcome a new baby into our family. We have loved being parents and found that our love has grown as we added both Adalyn and William to our family. The thought of a third child scared and excited us. More responsibility and more juggling of Adalyn's appointments, but more love and more fun in our little family.

William didn't find being demoted to middle child very appealing

However, just a couple of weeks after our blog picture was taken, we lost our sweet baby boy at 20 weeks.

Our family at Brother Garen's wedding in mid-August 2015

It was a time of struggle and grief. A time of loss and a deepening of understanding the Lord's plan for us and for our family. We were in a new town, new ward, far from family and coping with losing our precious baby boy. It was heartbreaking. It still is. However, out of the grief was born a new understanding and empathy for many others, a new love for each other and our two beautiful children and a new desire to continue our family.

In November, I met with my specialists, and after a long obligatory opening stating that they feel motherhood is a woman's role and that they always look for positive ways a woman can continue to have babies, they told me that they felt I should look into other options for expanding our family. An initial reaction would be grief, and I felt it, but I felt relief too. I had spent the last 3 months worried that if I was to become pregnant again we would find our hearts broken again and again as the pregnancies wouldn't pan out. We had found out, after William's 8 week premature birth, that I have a very rare Obstetric Disease called, Fetal Obliterative Vasculitis. We chose to get pregnant knowing the outcome could be bad. William was a best case scenario and he was born 8 weeks early. Even Adalyn's birth, brain injury with a Cerebral Palsy and deafness diagnosis, was a live child to love. However, the most likely scenario is fetal death. 

It was devastating at first to find ourselves in this cloud of confusion, sorrow and loss. However, through the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the love and support of family and friends (and a healthy amount of grieving and crying) we found peace in knowing that there were indeed other options to bringing a healthy child into our family. We felt great peace in the knowledge that, although my body could no longer bring a child safely into this world, our family could still be a safe haven, one filled with love and support, for other children who would become ours just as much as our two beautiful kids. 

We have spent the last 6 months discussing the options and looking into adoption agencies. We know that this will be the route to help us grow our family and bring another child into our eternal family.