Goodness, it’s been 5 months since I last posted. Unless you get paid to blog (which I don’t lol), this is just a when you can or feel compelled kinda thing. I’ve posted same day before in the past and then had long, long stents. However, it is nice to get back behind the keyboard for a minute and post regardless of the time away.
A lot has happened since my last post.
Covid, while still a thing and roller coasters in and out, has subsided (enough) where I live, so it’s nice to get some semblance of normal back in the community.
We’re still loving our house and always doing this or that project to make it more of a home (but isn’t that a lifelong adventure?).
It’s hard to believe in the last post that we were just posting our baby announcement pic with Obi but here we are … realistically any day now baby will be here. We’re hoping it naturally makes its way closer to the June delivery date, but whenever the Lord allows it shall happen.
I hesitated for a while including this but it is well with my soul to post about it for those who do not know. At this point the dates are a blur because I just don’t remember, but I think it was end of Feb we had gone to our normal OB appointments you’d expect, but we had gotten sent to a high-risk OB for additional echo scan and and stuff like that, and that is when we were given some then-very unsettling news: our baby showed several signs (they call markers) of Down Syndrome. After some further tests that were needed to confirm, the baby has a heart defect that can be common in those born with Down Syndrome (by the way it’s Down, not Downs. I learned this later on in some of dr-prescribed material and research.). We were both devastated in the beginning because nothing of this caliber had ever happened in our family or to anyone we knew. Why us? Why would God be so cruel knowing we’d been waiting and praying for 10 years to have a baby, and then our prayers finally get answered with a life-altering twist? Why, since being married, did we constantly wonder why we had not yet become parents like the many couples we knew who metaphorically zoomed by left and right with kids around us?
*Breathe for a moment*
We were both raised in the church and deep-down in our roots knew that’s not His ways, of course not, but we couldn’t help but to feel the feelings of anguish in the early days of the news. Our upbringing helped anchor us to the truth. We had a prayer session with our parents which was very much appreciated in a time of need. Through subsequent OB and Phoenix Children’s visits over that next month we met some wonderful people, learned a lot we never knew, and cleared the air on some preconceived notions on something (DS) that we only remotely knew about! Our baby thankfully has a “lesser of two evils”, if you will, heart defect so it will not need surgery right out the gate (amen!), and it is growing like a champ with no other identified problems (amen again!). As of last week’s appointment, it is a chonker around 5 pounds. (That’s a lot for the situation so we are happy it’s growing).
Side plug: you may be thinking “Why do you keep saying it?” Well, we don’t know the gender and don’t want to know. As you’ve read, we’ve tried for a decade, so what’s a few more weeks? When it pops out we’ll know boy or girl. Pretty simple. hahaha
Let’s fast forward a couple/few months…
Ironically, in the various things I’ve read/researched since going on this journey, one phrase or quote thing stuck out to me. God sometimes makes parents of those who have yearned and are humbled for the experience thus so that they can take on a heavier burden because they have been being prepared for it all along. I butchered the phrase and don’t even remember what resource I read it from, but we will be thankful for this baby no matter what because we are in this together and that’s enough of a start for me.
We are almost here at delivery date (around first week of June if not sooner), and we could not be happier although nervous. We are first-time parents so that is really more of the more driving factor of nervousness over the Down Syndrome. Hmmm… Who knew this mountain would be like a hill and we could surpass it? No, I’m not ignorant to the fact that many mountains will appear for the rest of our lives with this child, but knowing we were given a rare blessing to absorb this news early on and turn it into a positive instead of a negative, we can take joy during the birth knowing God is in control with the wonderful doctors and other medical staff who’ll be helping as we go through this journey.
Until next time (when we share the gender!),
Andrew
My Life. My Story. My World. 
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