The Beginnings of Felix

A major part of our lives for the past few years is that we have been waiting patiently (and at times impatiently) for another baby to join our family. Altogether, our infertility journey was close to two years. We tried to get pregnant for 7 months before having a brief pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage at 12 weeks along back in September 2022. When we still weren't pregnant several months after that, I went on a medication to stimulate ovulation. A few months later, we were referred to a specialist named Dr. Gelety. We really loved working with him. I don't even know how many blood draws and tests we went through, and they never actually found a solid reason why we weren't getting pregnant. 

This was a hard time for me. I was very blessed to have three healthy children, a wonderful husband, and good friends who filled my life with a lot of good times- but I would start to do the dishes and realize that I was staring blankly out the window feeling so SAD. I was haunted by this feeling of yearning for another baby. I could outrun it, but it would always catch back up to me. It didn't help that most of my good friends at the time had babies that were born close to the same time as my miscarriage, so I was visibly reminded of my gap pretty much constantly. 

We finally got pregnant the month before we were scheduled to start having more intense interventions. Aaron will say that what possibly did the trick is that he started taking vitamin C and D. I think that it was the first month that I was convinced I wasn't pregnant since I had pinned my hopes on the interventions the following month. 

Here we are outside of Dr. Gelety's office on the day that we officially confirmed that I was pregnant, and that things looked viable this time around!

We found out about the pregnancy shortly after Thanksgiving. I was feeling pretty miserably nauseous by Christmas. We ended up telling the whole family (minus the kids) about the pregnancy on the cruise because I wanted an explanation for why I was completely unable to stay up late and opted out of ziplining. 

I had my first appointment at 12 weeks after getting home from the cruise. My doctor wasn't able to find the heartbeat with his doppler heartbeat monitor, which led to an agonizing few hours before they found the heartbeat on the full ultrasound machine up in the main Tucson office. All was well, and I was absolutely sobbing with relief. 

We opted to do the blood test that is an early screen for birth defects that day to try to get ahead of future surprises. This meant that we found out the gender a few weeks earlier than we did with the earlier pregnancies.

We decided to do a gender reveal with our kids. Annie was so hoping for a sister, but we prepped her a lot by reminding her how much she loves Isaac and that baby brothers are pretty awesome. She didn't cry when she found out we were having a boy... barely. She has already assigned us the task of making sure the next baby is a girl. We will see about that one!

This is an unrelated picture, but it's the best one I have of my baby bump. 

I'd say that this was my hardest pregnancy by every measure, but also definitely the most appreciated one!