Our first snow of the season came early Friday morning. Here are some photos of my flower garden in the front yard with our St. Anthony statue. Always pictured with baby Jesus and a handful of lilies, he is the patron saint of lost articles. If you ask him to help you find something, he will ask baby Jesus if you may have it. Many prayers are answered with St. Anthony's assistance.
On the way to work, the St. Jude's Phonathon was on the radio, and pediatric cancer survivors were accepting phone calls.
I had already cried more than once by the time the memories came flooding back.
We are very blessed to be where we are.
When I shared my memories with Dan, he admitted he had been thinking the same things just a few days prior.
It was almost ten years ago already.
Three months pregnant with our first child, we had gotten some scary test results back.
There might be a genetic disorder.
We were being required to go downtown for some further, more advanced, testing.
We were kind of devastated.
Instead of sharing our pregnancy with people, we kept it a secret, except for family.
But people started to find out as I started to show.
"Why didn't you tell us you were pregnant?" people at work would ask.
Well...
it's not exactly easy to share something you are scared and uncertain about. We didn't know about the health of the baby at all.
We certainly didn't want to talk about it with casual acquaintances.
Worse yet, we had to wait a whole month to go for further testing.
With Christmas on the way, it was a terrible burden.
It was hard to be excited about expecting.
It was hard to be excited about Christmas.
And, looking back, I was still going to be a young mom.
I was 26 years old.
When the time arrived, it was a snowy December day.
We took the day off of work.
It was Dan's birthday.
We drove the hour long ride into the city.
Arm in arm we trudged through the piled up snow that had been plowed onto the sidewalks.
It was a long walk from where we had parked.
It was cold.
Four months pregnant, we walked to Rush Medical Center to find out about our baby.
It took a long time.
But,
the results indicated that the tests that had been administered by our ob-gyne
had been innaccurate.
The baby would be healthy!
We were already happy, but now we wanted to bring some news back to our family to help everyone get excited about the upcoming birth again...
...something that would be more tangible and help us put this experience behind us.
We found out we were having a baby boy.
It could have been Christmas morning.
" I am going to have a son," Dan said.
We were lost, and we were found.
Seek, and ye shall find.
God's presence is everywhere.
Yes, we still struggled with this pregnancy.
Our baby would be born just three months later, two months too soon.
But he would survive, and thrive, and grow.
And now we have two more.
And our pregnancies with them were equally as medically difficult.
But it all could have ended terribly and tragically for us during those deliveries.
It didn't.
Yes, we ARE blessed.
