I don’t know exactly where to start so I think the beginning would be a good place. My husband, Ryan, and I did not plan on getting pregnant when we did. To say that my getting pregnant was a miracle is an understatement. We were living in Minnesota at the time and, man, was life good! We had bought a house a year earlier in the friendliest neighborhood you could think of, right on the lake. We would regularly go kayaking on our days off and spent most of our evenings drinking wine on our deck while watching the sunset over the glassy lake. We had an amazing community of church friends who quickly became like family to us. We were blessed and we knew it. We always knew that MN wouldn’t be our forever home, though. The winters were too long and cold and we were far away from family. So when the opportunity came for Ryan to get a needed promotion to make our way towards family, he took it. We celebrated when he got the call that he had been promoted with a relocation to South Bend, IN. We had never been to Indiana or anywhere around there really, but we looked forward to the move with excitement and anticipation like we had for every other move (this would be our third move in 3 years). We knew we’d be okay. We knew we’d make friends and start over again just like we had when we moved to Minnesota. We began to prepare for the move by putting our house on the market and praying for a quick sale. We had approximately 5 weeks to sell our house, pack up our things and move to IN.  And then I started feeling weird….

We had just returned from a weekend vacation in Minneapolis to celebrate Ryan’s promotion and our upcoming move. We hit several breweries over the course of the weekend and I just wasn’t interested in drinking the brewery beer or anything for that matter (very unlike me). When we got home I thought that maybe I should take a pregnancy test to be sure but I “knew” I wasn’t pregnant. That was highly improbable. The next day, I stopped by the store and picked up a pregnancy test after I went shopping. I didn’t think much of it and wasn’t really nervous to take the test because I just knew that I wasn’t pregnant. So I took the test and sat the stick down on the bathroom counter and walked away for a few seconds. When I came back (less than 30 seconds later), the stick said “Pregnant”. I stood staring at it, unable to move or comprehend what it said. That’s when I started yelling… at the stick….”Where’s the NOT?!? Where’s the NOT?!?!” I thought that the “NOT” part must come after the “Pregnant” part showed up so I waited awhile yelling for the “Not” to appear and reveal that I was indeed, not pregnant.  The “NOT” never appeared. Only the “Pregnant” part remained.

That’s when I freaked out. Every sort of emotion possible flooded through me- shock, excitement, fear, joy, sadness…etc. I didn’t know what to do with myself so I just started running around my living room screaming. Seriously. I did. Then I sat down on the couch and cried. Happy tears. Sad tears. It was the worst possible time to get pregnant! We would be moving to a new place, into a one bedroom apartment, where we had zero friends or family. This was not how or where or when I would’ve planned to have my first baby. How could God allow this to happen now??