71 results for tag: Infant Loss
After three years of tearful prayers and longing, my husband and I were ecstatic when we learned we were expecting our first child. This baby, a little boy we named Ethan, was a long-awaited answer to many prayers and we praised God for this precious gift. “God is so faithful,” we heard again and again, as we shared the news with the countless friends and family who had been praying for us over the years. God’s faithfulness felt so evident in our lives and our hearts overflowed with gratitude.
At our 20-week anatomy scan, we learned that Ethan displayed a variety of concerning markers. We were later told our sweet baby boy had Full ...
I’ve had a deep desire to do work that has an impact and a wide reach for as long as I can remember. While I had heard people say that “raising children can be your greatest ministry,” I believed I could control my efforts more outside of motherhood. It seemed that those beliefs were validated when my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Few people knew I was pregnant, let alone that I had miscarried. Going right back to work and climbing the proverbial ladder, six months later I became pregnant and then delivered a healthy baby girl. I then began to experience the dance between building a career I loved and being an intentional mother to this ...
Luke Charles Hawthorne was a miracle. We had been trying, unsuccessfully, for four years to conceive a child. In November 2019, I had an appointment with my doctor to discuss a possible referral to a fertility specialist. As I was praying, I felt God saying, “Trust Me.” In January 2020, we found out we were pregnant. I was ecstatic! I was finally going to be a mama. I started researching all the baby things and was in a state of bliss. My husband and I even began reading a book on God-centered parenting. Then on May 13, 2020, the unthinkable happened. My water broke when I was only 21 weeks pregnant. The prognosis was poor. My doctor prepared me ...
January 23, 2019 started with a mix of pure excitement and a little bit of fear. My husband and I had taken the day off work and he brought me strawberries and cream for breakfast in bed. Afterwards, we got up to go to the anatomy ultrasound for our first baby. We sat together in the exam room, so excited to see our little one moving and to find out if we were having a girl or a boy.
“It’s a girl!” the tech announced, and we knew she was our Adelynn Claire. We moved to the waiting room and studied the scans, imagining the excitement our family would feel when they heard the news, and dreaming, even then, of what life would be like with ...
"I remember looking out my hospital window and gazing at all the cars going by and the people walking in the parking lot and thinking that the world should not be moving right now—because my world just came to a screeching halt. How could our happily ever after turn into our worst nightmare in the blink of an eye?
My water broke on Saturday, July 24, 2010. I was shocked and a little overwhelmed because Landry was going to be two weeks early, but I was overly excited about finally seeing that precious face I had been dreaming about. I think the best part was that Landry and our older son, Tyler, would have birthdays only two days apart. I was ...
David and I have been married for almost 18 years, and our story of trying to grow our family began when we realized that infertility would be a road we would walk down in our marriage. I don’t think I ever imagined the difficulty and heartache we would face as we tried to grow our family over the span of more than five years and through multiple fertility treatments.
In 2010, we became pregnant with identical twins. This news brought with it emotions intertwined with excitement, joy, fear, anxiety, and stress, as we began our journey as first time parents. I remember sitting in the doctor’s office hearing their heartbeats for the first ...
We do not always get to choose the roles we must play in life, but we do get to choose how we will play the role we have been given. Our youngest daughter, Ellianna Grace, was born on March 2, 2011. It was a Wednesday; my husband Mark was at work and I was home with our 3-year-old daughter when the contractions started. I did all the usual things to try to make them stop—rested, hydrated, soaked in a warm bath—yet the rhythmic tensing of my belly continued and grew in strength. Our previous daughter had been born at 30 weeks, so being just 29 weeks and a few days I was feeling anxious, but I also did not want to overreact if it was just Braxton ...
When my husband, Joe, and I got married, we started trying right away to get pregnant. I already had an older daughter, and we wanted to have time as a family with the new baby at home before she left for college in a few years. So we started trying—tracking ovulation, taking temperatures, standing on my head, whatever we thought might work.
After trying for awhile, we realized something wasn’t right and decided to seek help from a specialist. We went to the amazing doctors at South Jersey Fertility Center, and after months of testing and procedures we had our diagnosis—unexplained secondary infertility, a diagnosis that really isn’t ...
My husband, Josh, and I started trying to get pregnant in January of 2017, and it took us almost two years to get pregnant with our first baby. We found out at 12 weeks that our sweet baby girl didn’t have a heartbeat anymore. We were completely devastated. While attempting to heal from our first loss, we decided to start trying again right away because we didn’t know if it would take a while again. To our great surprise and delight, I was pregnant again after our first month of trying.
The first 34 weeks of pregnancy were so smooth. My husband is the youth pastor at our church, and we felt the Lord telling us early on to be very open ...
My husband and I have an inside joke whenever we hear somewhere say I love you, or even sometimes when we say I love you to each other. We say, “Love, love, love, love.” It’s as if we are asking what love really means. I think we often use the word “love” too casually, not really having a true understanding of the meaning of unconditional love. God’s unconditional and comforting love is a revelation of His true nature. And His healing can be understood more fully within the context of His love.
On December 18, 2016, my baby boy, Ethan, was born. I loved him from the day I knew he was in my womb. I delivered him three and a ...
