Baby 3!

I’m not even sure where to begin! I’ll start with we are excited to share we are expecting baby #3! It’s hard to believe after 4 years of trying to conceive, I am pregnant for the third time. There were so many times throughout this infertility journey, I didn’t think it would happen. But I never wanted to look back and regret not trying.

I’ll give the brief history. We started trying for a third about 4 years ago. Because of my past infertility, I went to see my reproductive endocrinologist and did the same tests I had done the last two times. They didn’t find anything wrong so they recommended clomid with timed intercourse. We did that for awhile with no success before moving onto IUIs. The three IUI attempts we tried were also unsuccessful. At that point, my doctor recommended IVF. After all that disappointment and not being ready to jump into IVF, we took a break from trying to conceive. Thankfully I had a good distraction because we were in the middle of moving, buying a house, and renovating it. A few months into being settled at our new house, I started to look into more options. I decided to pursue surgery with my doctor, thinking my endometriosis was the culprit. Well much to my disappointment, my doctor would not do surgery. Again they recommended IVF.

During this time, my younger sister who lives in Virginia was also facing infertility. She was going to a fertility center that does a “shared risk program”. This means if you don’t end up with a baby after six IVF attempts, you get your money back. Since we had already sunk so much money into fertility treatments over the years, I thought this might be a good option. In January of this year, I started all the shots and in February I went to Virginia to have my egg retrieval. After returning to Minnesota, I found out a few days later that I had 4 embryos. They scheduled my embryo transfer for the end of March.

Then GUESS WHAT happened. Covid-19 hit the US. Everything shutdown. I was forced to cancel my embryo transfer appointment and hoped to reschedule it for the summer.

A month later in April, I started feeling nauseous and going to bed early. I remember sitting outside on a sunny day with my boys and feeling so exhausted. I joked to my son Jack, “man, I feel like when I was pregnant with you!” After I said that, I thought maybe I should grab a pregnancy test. Later that day, I took one:

See the barely-there pink line? I saw it too but it was so faint, I googled the test. There were hundreds of reviews of false positives. I threw it in the trash and walked away. But I couldn’t get it out of my head and my nausea was not going away so I texted my husband to buy a different brand on his way home from work. I think he thought I was being silly. The next morning, I took it:

Well that looks like I’m pregnant. I called my doctor and they got me in for a blood test that day. It was positive and my numbers were high! I couldn’t believe it. I somehow conceived naturally during quarantine despite the past 4 years of nothing. My doctor got me in for an ultrasound a few days later and I saw the little baby’s heartbeat flickering. They confirmed I was 6 weeks along.

Truly a miracle. Thank you Lord. We are so thankful and excited to welcome this little guy (yes another boy!) to our family.