Name: Rachel
Due Date: June 14, 2008
Expecting: A Girl!
Like many other women, it’s been a long road just to get to 23 weeks pregnant (which I am as of February 17th). After 5 previous pregnancies and 5 devastating miscarriages, I’d be lying if I said I thought I’d ever feel a child move inside me or see a baby bump when I tried to see my toes.
I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but somewhere in the past 4.5 years of trying to become a mother, I’d almost lost hope that it could happen to us.
I started researching surrogates and adoption after pregnancy number 3. I think the visions of Christmas morning with little feet running down the stairs faded after pregnancy number 4.
By pregnancy number 5, in April 2007, instead of feeling elation when the pregnancy test showed two lines, I burst into terrified tears and felt only dread.
When I found out I was pregnant this time (number 6 if you’re counting), our doctors had us on everything: Clomid, progesterone pills, heparin shots. My husband was away on Air Force duty at the time. He returned home just after a 6-week visit that showed no heartbeat. I fully believed we were headed for another disaster.
However, a follow-up ultrasound a week later, with Hubby by my side, showed a heartbeat. (The docs were off by a week on their calculations). I cried.
Two weeks later, we saw a definite bean-shaped baby with the heart still going strong. Two more weeks went by and we saw arms and leg buds and even a very encouraging wiggle from our baby. I cried every time.
My hubby is a man of great faith. He’d rather believe 100% and have his hopes dashed than to live in the cautiously optimistic haze that I walk through. At our 17-week scanning ultrasound, I fully believed that we’d be devastated, but seeing arms and legs and a beautiful head and heart convinced me that this just might work.
The next week, my husband left for 4 months in Afghanistan and I started another semester in graduate school.
We agreed that we’d shop for our baby girl when he gets home, since I still have the fear that if I do anything to presume that the pregnancy will go well, I will jinx it. If it were up to my hubby, we’d have bought out all the local baby stores weeks ago.
On what winning the Baby Shower gift package would mean to her…
The real answer to your question is that having a healthy baby would be the greatest gift to me. I think that event alone would be able to travel back in time and erase all the previous heartache we’ve felt. It would definitely make the thrice daily shots and the time away from my husband seem like a distant memory.
The gift package would be some serious icing on a cake that’s been baking for over 4 years. Those gifts would help bring to reality something that I’ve only been able to dream about until now.
