Zzaj And Keenan's Journey To Baby

In May 2011, after only 3 short months of marriage my husband and I found out we were expecting our first child. THIS WAS NOT THE PLAN! 

We vowed to each other that since we got married at such a young age (I was only 21 when we got married) that children were a minimum of 3 years out. God has a funny way about him... we made it 3 months. We both had very interesting ways of processing this news. 

How it all started. I noticed for a couple of weeks that my breast were extremely sore and the pain was increasing everyday. I'd never had this feeling before so of course I looked on Web MD and came to the conclusion that I probably had breast cancer. After complaining to my husband for a few days, his response was, "babe, maybe you should take a pregnancy test." 

I was baffled. Pregnancy. You're nuts. A few more days passed and I found myself indulging in my favorite steak banh mi sandwich along with an iced Vietnamese coffee for lunch. On my drive home I was so nauseous (again, never felt like this before) However, I knew for sure that the condensed milk in my coffee just didn't sit right that day. As I told my husband about lunch he insisted again, "please, would you just take a pregnancy test, like a normal woman?" So finally I gave in. I picked up a test on my way home and of course... we were pregnant. Let's just say this evening ended with a trip to Urgent Care to verify that the store bought test was wrong... because how was I supposed to sleep that night if I didn't speak with a real doctor?

When we arrived at Urgent Care the nurse asked what my symptoms were... Let's just say there was absolutely no mention of the test we took at home. I didn't want to give the doctors any crazy ideas. After about 36 seconds of expressing my symptoms the doctor requested we take a pregnancy test and you would never believe it... YES, WE WERE PREGNANT! In all of my crazy I looked over at my extremely confused husband with a huge smile on my face and tears in my eyes and said "babe, we're going to have a baby!!" His response... "Zzaj, you're nuts, you knew this before we got here..."

So that's how our journey began. We would spend the next 9 months in what felt like hell. I was sick all 9 months of my pregnancy... literally throwing up about 10 times a day, a torn esophagus, sciatic nerve issues, weekly IV treatments, hundreds of dollars wasted on ER trips and continuous melt downs to name a few. We decided that our beautiful Kennedy Grace would be our only child because there was no way we would ever sign up for 9 months of hard time again. 

These crazy memories finally were far enough in the past by Summer 2015. We decided this time, WE'RE READY for baby #2. It didn't take long for us to get pregnant again, we were so excited. We couldn't wait to tell our family the news. There was no way we were waiting 13 weeks to share the news. We were happy and healthy and everyone needed to know. We found out mid August and around 7/8 weeks things got strange. We went in ready to hear a heartbeat and instead we were faced with the news that there wasn't one. We remained hopeful for another 2 weeks. Maybe we were just earlier than we thought, that's all... right? After the longest 2 weeks of our lives we were told that we had a miscarriage. We were left with this feeling of extreme confusion because "we were ready this time..." 

The medical procedure to remove the baby consisted of me holding my husbands hand, playing worship music and trying to make sense of why God didn't realize how ready we were for this. What just happened to us? We didn't talk much to each other about it. We prayed a lot. We decided that it was well with our souls even though it wasn't how we pictured this all playing out. Then we also decided that we were definitely done having children because we would never go through that experience again. 

After a few months of grieving in our own ways our beautiful baby girl begin to ask the question... "why do we only have 3 people in our family?" and slowly but surely we were "ready" again. 

Today, we're 35 weeks pregnant. We're doing 9 months of hard time. I've been extremely blessed to have another pregnancy full of extreme vomiting from start and we couldn't be more thrilled to meet our rainbow baby this January.