2 years old

Today, this little corner of the web is turning two years old!

It is hard to believe that I have been writing "that long" and also how different our journey has been compared to what I thought it would be in my first post.

And as I said last year on this occasion, I have grown alot on this journey. We have prayerfully considered each step we took and only moved forward when we felt like it was the right thing for us. Compared to my opinions in April 2009, many of our steps (IUI, IVF) were ones I never thought we'd consider, much less try multiple times each. But that is what infertility does to you- it makes you step out in faith that God is going to lead you. You might be going in a direction you never thought you would, and that is okay. That is why we pride ourselves on being resilient and passionate and educated and strong. That is why we can, at the same time, handle being broken and sad and weary and alone.

The last sentence of last year's post is "Time to dream big!!". We'd just had our first IVF cycle cancelled, and I somehow had the gall to say that in April 2011 I'd like to be shopping for baby outfits. Little did I know that God would bless us with one embryo in our next IVF cycle, but that that embryo would not stay with us.

I think last April I was only dreaming big about what I could see in that near future. A new shot at IVF. I had no idea how big the dream was that God was going to fulfill. Because really, after you have an IVF cycle cancelled or failed, you pretty tell yourself that you are screwed as far as natural conception. You just paid a team of highly-educated people an extraordinary amount of money to undertake extremely technical steps so that your chance of becoming pregnant is twice what the normal person's would be. And while I believe that GOD is the one who allows embryos to be CREATED and allows those embryos to GROW, if your $15k payment to modern science doesn't bring you two pink lines, your hope level just took a plunge.

I could have never dreamed last April that, after deciding two months later to forego any more medication or treatments and just focus on eating organic/healthy and taking a holistic approach to improving natural fertility, we would conceive a baby on our own in early 2011.

God's plan for our family was bigger than what I could have dreamed. And when everyone used to tell me that, I would sort of brush it off- did they know what a great imagination I had and how long I'd been cooking up my perfect vision of how our family would grow? I had some pretty amazing dreams.

So I know you have a great imagination, but trust me, how God expands your family will blow you away. Let Him work good from whatever bad is trying to eat at your heart today.

So while I'm not shopping for spring outfits for our baby as I so boldly predicted I'd be, I am shopping for spring outfits in the maternity section. I really can't believe it some days, but those days I feel God saying to me, "Believe it, sister!". ;-)

So here is my message for this blogoversary: BELIEVE IT. God's plan for your family might not be exactly how you thought it would be, but BELIEVE that it is going to be awesome!!