Catch up

I realized I had written a few posts as drafts last year and never published. They're all up now but the order may be confusing. 

We left reach pregnant with our 4th child in December of 2015. With a July due date, we were so excited to finally be done with infertility and ready to complete our family and move on to our next chapter.

On Friday February 5th, at 17 weeks pregnant, Jay and I went in for a routine ob appointment and learned that our baby no longer had a heartbeat. It was the worst day of my life. We checked into the hospital to start the traumatic process of giving birth to our sweet baby. Thankfully before things got too far, the doctor on call suggested that we might meet with a local ob that does late term DNCs. We checked out of the hospital and spent the weekend at home trying to process the day's events. The following Tuesday, we met with the new Ob and immediately felt comforted. She scheduled us for surgery that evening. 

Because this was going to be our last baby, we had decided that we were not going to learn the sex. I think this was the hardest part of all because I didn't have that same connection at 17 weeks that I had with my other children. We later learned through genetic testing that our baby was a sweet little girl.

 I knew for me and my recovery that the best way for me to move forward was to get pregnant again. We met with our RE and discussed plans for another round of IVF since we had used our final embryo. 6 weeks later we started our 2nd round of IVF. By day six we had 6 good looking embryos still in the game and were absolutely shocked to find out that of those embryos only 2 tested genetically normal. Our doctor suggested we do another round of IVF to better our chances. Granted, we were only going to transfer one embryo but if the two normal embryos did not take, I would be older and another round of IVF may not lead to promising results. We did our 3rd round of IVF and were able to send 4 embryos to the lab for genetic testing. 3 of the 4 embryos tested normal and we learned that the highest quality embryo of the bunch was female. We were beyond excited!

I'll let it be known that Emma Cate has been praying for a sister. She tells us dusky that God knows she has too many brothers and is going to bring her a sister.  I'm happy for the chance to make this a reality for her!

So here we are, almost 6 months later and 1 day (actually 2 weeks and 6 days) pregnant with a little girl. We won't know for 2 weeks if this transfer really worked but we're praying hard and trusting in God that embryo 18 snuggles in. After the heartache we've experienced, I'm just so thankful for each day and attempt we get at creating a new life 💗.