Birthdays

Today I celebrated my 27^th birthday. Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you that I have always made a big deal out of my birthdays. The countdown began on New Year’s Day and there were always weekly updates. These last few years have been quite different for me in terms of birthdays.

We started trying to get pregnant in January of 2011. I remember celebrating that birthday, the same went for New Year’s Eve, with a smile thinking “this time next year, we could have a baby or be pregnant!” There was a lot of excitement to that thought. New Year’s Eve and my birthday of 2012 came around with no baby and I was really sad. That year began with making appointments with a fertility specialist. Though I was feeling a little angry and bitter, there was slight excitement in that this could be our year. We were going to a specialist that had the tools, knowledge and capabilities to make this happen for us. I knew there could be a lot in store for us in 2012, but I had no idea it would be to the extent it was.

When we found out in November we were expecting, I was excited for New Year’s and my birthday because finally I would get to celebrate the year ahead with such excitement. We had planned to announce our pregnancy on New Year’s Eve which marked our 12^th week. We both had our separate way we were going to make it “Facebook official.” We got the CH diagnosis 4 days before, so that plan was put off.  I spent New Year’s emotional and we didn’t celebrate much. Neither one of us were really up to it. We decided to stay home; we had a gourmet meal of cereal and toast and then snuggled up in bed at 7pm to watch a movie.  

My birthday has now come and I am filled with more excitement then before. I put our story out there this last weekend and am overwhelmed with the response and the sense of relief I feel. In less than 24 hours, we had over 1,100 people view our story. It got me thinking that if even half, heck even a quarter of those people actually send up a prayer for us, how amazing that will be. I have gone back to read some of the comments people have posted on Facebook about our story and I cry with every single one. I am so grateful for the commitments of prayer total strangers have for us and our baby. These last few nights when praying for our little one, I have sent up a prayer thanking God for the courage to put our story out there and all of the amazing people who have read our story and given me so much hope. There has been a healing grace merely in the number of people our story has reached.

With this birthday I have made an important decision. Yes, it would be easy to crawl up into a ball and lay in bed, sulking in my pain, but I have decided to celebrate. I have decided to celebrate my journey over the last year (really the last couple of years). It’s been a tough road, but I really feel that it has made me a stronger woman, a stronger wife, and a stronger mother (It’s weird to refer to myself as a mother, but the truth is I became a mother the moment the stick changed colors). I have also decided to celebrate the fight, the fight for our baby’s birthday. I am promising this guy/gal to do everything I possibly can over the next 5 months or so to keep him/her safe and be able to celebrate his/her birthday in July.