You should try...

It never ceases to amaze me how much "advice" the knowledge of one's struggle to conceive brings with it. Once people find out you are having trouble conceiving, they immediately have all kinds of advice for you. I seem to be recalling so many that I have heard over the years and I thought it would be fun and eye opening to actually blog what all I've heard so far.

• Does Heath wear sweatpants to bed? He needs to stop.. it's probably too hot for the{hmmm how shall I say this pleasantly} swimmers.
• You should try the mushroom pills, they are supposed to cure PCOS and endometriosis {Magic mushrooms, that sounds like a band name to me}
• Make sure you only use "the missionary style". {REALLY? And who named that anyway?}
• Did you ever think of adopting? {are you kidding? We've thought of buying a baby on the black market... but then we thought better of it}
• Hey, I heard of surrogacy and thought of you. {because everyone knows that the truth is you are flawed and uncapable}
• I got pregnant on birth control... maybe you should try that. {oh yeah, that makes complete sense}
• Try olive oil, it will make your uterine lining really friendly to embryos.
• Lay on your back with your feet in the air for 20 minutes after making love. Gravity will help! {Ha ha!}
• Are your hormones balanced because my doctor tested mine and I got pregnant the very next month?  {uh, no they're not hence the reason I'm having trouble and rarely have a period}
• You should try adopting. It always happens after you adopt. {Always is a pretty strong word, my friend}
• Don't just make love at night... try a different time of day. {As if time of day makes a difference when you are not ovulating! Geesh!}
• Lose weight {AS IF! Yes, I agree, it may help things along, but think about what you are saying... fat people have babies every day!}
• Just relax! It'll happen when you least expect it!
• I went to the chiropractor/acupuncture and got pregnant the next month. Did you check into that? {acupuncture? been there-done that, it's called IVF meds}
• Have you ever had the dye test... I had a blockage and once that was gone, I got pregnant! {yes, multiple times, thank you and OUCH!}
• Why don't you just continue with fertility treatments but get yourself on a adoption list? At least then if you got to the end of the treatments and don't have a baby, things would be on their way. {sorry friend, that's not how it works... you can't just walk in and put your name on an adoption list. Not without money and not when you are still actively pursuiting fertility treatments.}
• A bottle of wine always worked for me {congratulations!}
• (to my husband) Do you want me to come show you how it's done? {that's just down right rude and I'm not even going there!}

Disclaimer: If you shared one of these with me, please understand that I am not angry or upset and likely I don't even remember which ones you shared with me. Instead, I am posting this because I think it's humorous and it brightens my day to laugh over some of the crazy things people suggest.

The bottom line is this, we are not in control of God's plan for our lives. He is and He was no matter what happened leading up to every pregnancy on this earth. If He can make me and this world and everything you see and enjoy and are blessed with, out of nothing and with a simple word, then He can give us a baby whether we take the advice so freely offered or not. So, friends, thanks for the advice, but more importantly today, thank you for the laughs. I do realize that all the advice given (well most of it) was given completely out of a sense of concern and care for us and we do appreciate your love.

It's Been a While!

So many things have been floating around in my head lately, that I fear this post will be very disjointed and un-flowing. Nevertheless (that sounds so formal), I recently talked with one of my good friends and she shared how she's always sneaking by my blog to see if I've posted anything new... so here's to you Kara. A few of the things that are floating around and making there way into my every day life.

God has really been speaking to me lately. Heath and I have had opportunity to talk about our baby journey more in the last few weeks than I think we have in a long time. If there's one thing you learn as you put one step in front of the other on this journey, it is that life outside of fertility treatments, medicine, and baby dreams does go on. I think I learned that after our first failed IVF... while I was grieving the loss of our baby, everything else just seemed to move at it's normal pace. The world as everyone else knew it, didn't stop like mine had. They still ate and slept and had fun and laughed. For others, things were still the same, for us our lives had forever changed. It's nice to realize that even as life outside of baby journey moves swiftly on, we have had a chance to really sit down to talk and pray together about God's will for our journey.

Eventually, after our frist (well, our first IVF) negative pregnancy test, we jumped back on the IVF wagon, and away we rode, faster than ever, towards our 2nd IVF and it seemed like only moments before that cycle was done and we were in our 2 week wait. The feel was completely different on that one than the first. I have yet to pinpoint whether that was because we were still grieving, or because we had faced so many let-downs and disappointments that we were kind of jaded to the whole process. At any rate, when that cycle ended in failure as well, we found ourselves at rock bottom. I remember just feeling completely exhausted from the whole process and the emotions of it all. There were no weekends away and there were no fun things to give us joy. We found that the only source of our joy could be through God. That was a sobering lesson, because in learning that, we were finding out that in the end baby did NOT equal joy just as no baby did NOT equal lack of joy. Baby was not answer to everything, rather God whose plan we wholly desired was THEE answer to everything.

Our sermon series at church recently is entitled "Come And Die". It's basically an in depth study of what it means to be a true follower of Christ. I truly believe God brought this series to our church at just this time for me and me alone. Of course, there are numerous people in our church who would say the same thing, which is really cool, because it means that God is working in our church and that can only produce GOOD! I continue to go back to one of the points in this series... Surrender. When you are on the baby journey, fighting so long and so hard for your dream, it's hard to come to a point of surrender. I think that I truly believed that I had surrendered my desire for a child long before now, but as I learned through our series at church what true surrender was, I realize that I was probably surrendering in my head, but not in my heart. My head wanted to give it all up to Him, the one who had the power to change things, but my heart was still thinking that I had some control of it. Not so. It doesn't matter what I do or don't do, what I want or don't want, God's got it all figured out. Which when you first think that is kinda scary, but when you really understand it, you realize that God can do so much better than I ever could dream of doing. Something else I've learned is that Surrender is a DAILY battle, taking up your cross and following Christ, is a DAILY choice. It's not something you do once and then everything comes together, it's something that I will always work at, because there will always be something else to surrender. Long after the baby journey, some other thing will be there to let go of and let God take care of.

It's funny the stages you go through after a failed IVF. At first, you want nothing to do with doctors, needles, medicines, or ultrasounds. You simply want to crawl in bed and cry the tears away to cleanse your soul of the pain that you are feeling at the loss of your baby. And after that, you want nothing more than to jump back up and try again. Yet, financially you can't just jump back into it. And it's during that time, while you wait for money to come along, that you realize God was blessing you with those moments so that you could begin to heal.

To those of you wondering, we are moving on to our 3rd round of IVF. We have not shared that with many and do not plan on sharing any specific dates, but your prayers are so appreciated. We have had opportunity to gather a couple of times over the past couple months with a group of people from church simply to pray for our church. We are firm believers in the power of prayer. Prayer changes things, my friends, so please continue to pray for us as we seek God's ultimate plan for our lives. Please also pray for our families. Unfortunately, as personal as infertility is, it affects many more than just the couple going through it. Our families are very invested in the outcome of our journey and it is painful for them just as it is for us. We are unsure just how much longer our journey might be, and the end of it may be painful for our family as well.

As we anticipate our next round of IVF, we are so thankful and blessed to be a part of a church family who surrounds us with prayer and encouragement. Even when they do nothing more than listen, that is HUGE to us as we grieve. To all those who have found the time to pray for us and to listen to us, from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU!