How our story begins...

*This post was written in 2007 from a previous blog. 

In October of 2002, I came home to a message on my answering machine from Matt. My friend Kim and I met up later that week with Matt and some of his friends.  Matt and I had a great time and began dating shortly after that. In June of 2003, the weekend of my 25^th birthday, Matt proposed. I had no hesitations and we decided to get married that summer instead of waiting a whole year until the next summer. We were married on August 23^rd, 2003.

Like our quick engagement and wedding, we were ready to get started on a family soon after we were married. I was able to get pregnant 2 months after we started "trying" and unfortunately had a miscarriage in February of 2004. At this time, my OB/GYN, found a large fibroid tumor in my uterus. He did not think this was the cause for my miscarriage, and thought we should be able to get pregnant again with no problems. He did recommend that we try to have one child before we looked into the problem of the fibroid. He also stated that he could recommend someone we could see for a second opinion if we liked. Even though we have so much trust and respect for Dr. Soto, we decided that it wouldn’t hurt anything to get the second opinion. We scheduled our appointment with the specialist  that Soto recommended. When we got into our appointment, the Dr. advised us that we should have the surgery (myomectomy) to remove the fibroids before trying to get pregnant. She thought carrying a pregnancy would be more dangerous with the tumor. 

We decided that since she was the specialist, we would go ahead and do the surgery first before trying again. Several days later, we found out that we were too late and I had been about 4 days pregnant when we saw her. As I called Dr. Soto in tears and scared, he assured me that he would everything would be okay, he would take care of me, and that God does these things for a reason. Happily, at 37 weeks, our son was born weighing 8 pounds and 5 ounces. We are so thankful for the caring staff of Dr. Soto’s office that helped get us our beautiful baby boy.

Six months after our son was born Dr. Soto did the myomectomy to remove the fibroid. During this procedure he found a smaller fibroid that was hidden under the large one but were not able to remove it due to the amount of blood loss I was having during surgery. After I recovered from this surgery, he gave me 6 months to try and get pregnant. We were not successful. The small tumor that had been left was now growing at a fast rate and Dr. Soto did not think I was going to be able to get pregnant. We were reminded of what he said early on and that was that he wanted to be able to get us one healthy pregnancy before we discussed other options. 

In December of 2006 I had a hysterectomy. I didn’t realize how much this would affect me emotionally. As I watched our son getting bigger and interact with the babies that came to our house for daycare, I had a longing for the ability to have a sibling for him. I only wanted one more, I wasn’t asking for 4 or 5 kids. When I was carrying him I loved laying on the couch and watching him move around in my belly. I think I laid there for 2 hours each night just watching him kick, punch, and move! It was very devastating for me to accept that I would not be able to be pregnant ever again. What I have tried so hard to understand is that God has a reason for everything, and many of those reasons I might not ever understand. I am not in control of my life and God has a plan for us. 

In August of 2007, we had an initial meeting with an adoption agency in our area.  We thought everything sounded great and decided to start moving forward with the process, despite the $20,000 price tag.  


In September 2007, we were contacted by one of my (Amber) cousins who was offering to be a gestational surrogate for us to give us the opportunity for a biological child.  This opportunity was so great, there was no way we could pass it up.  We moved forward with this after switching gears from adoption.  After many months of tests, dr. appointments, pills, shots, and you name it- we transferred two beautiful embryos to Kris on May 27th and July 22nd, both times with negative results.  We are forever indebted to Kris and her family for the chance to provide us an opportunity to parent another child.  

Here we are...a few years down the road...and our hearts have done some healing.  We are ready to begin another journey, even though we know the road is long and will be full of hills and valleys.