Their Story: More

I want to tell their story. In a few years when we (by God's grace) have more children, and our lives are crazy (crazier?) I don't want to forget a single detail of their precious lives. I want to remember everything about them, every second we had with them. This is their story, our story, His Story.

"I really feel like we are ready to have another baby," Pat said to me one day in late March. 

We were driving to Portland to visit my parents (who had no house of their own) from Pat's parent's house (we also had no house of our own) and it was probably the middle of the week (because Pat didn't have a job). You could have pushed me over with a feather.

When we decided to get pregnant the first time it was completely my idea. I wanted to have a baby so badly. It took us almost a year to get pregnant with Wiggles and Pat has since told me it wasn't until the month I was actually pregnant that he felt like he would have been truly disappointed at not being pregnant. So the fact that he was suggesting that we not only have another baby, but that we have one in the middle of all this... mess... was astonishing. I quickly agreed to the plan for more children (to be completely honest, Pat is going to be the one to say "no mas" 'cause I'd have as many as he'd let me, so this was not a difficult decision on my part).

The idea was that we would start trying now and hopefully we would be pregnant within the year, thinking that by then maybe life would make a little more sense. Ha! God has a sense of humor I guess. We were pregnant by the beginning of May, after less than two cycles of trying. 

I found out we were pregnant the day after my Birthday. I remember stopping at the dollar store on the way home from church more than a week after I was supposed to get "the visit". I remember waiting to see if the lines formed in the window of the test and was shocked that they appeared within seconds (I now know it was because my body was freaking out with double the pregnancy hormones, so the test reacted twice as fast). I remember calling Pat into Wiggles room and ripping the bandaid off. "We're pregnant" I told him. You know, for a man who wanted to have another baby he was pretty shocked. I don't think either one of us was expecting to get pregnant quite so soon.

Man, was I sick those first few weeks. With Wiggles I would wake up, throw up, and the feel (relatively) fine the rest of the day. With this pregnancy I didn't throw up, but I felt like I had a terrible stomach flu all day, peaking in the evening, just in time for me to spend some time with my husband. And by "spend some time with" I mean "pass out next to." I thought we must be having a boy or something. I had no idea we were in for a much bigger surprise than a new gender in our family.

This was taken at the park after the car ride where we decided to start trying again. Two pinecones. Prophetic, no?