Ramblings on Anything

Oh my word, there has been a few goings on here in the Roberts house!! I don’t blog anymore, clearly, but it seems that major events still need to be documented here..so this is certainly such an occasion. I think I’ll just copy and paste the e-mail I sent to some friends back in September…

Roberts Baby #4 is on the way. 

I’ll do my best to answer every question going through your minds right now:

• Are you kidding me Jill?? No. Not kidding! This is not a joke.

• Was this a surprise? Umm…YES. 

• Did you have any frozen embryo’s?? How did this happen? NO. The doors to the fertility clinic were shut tightly after our 6 years we spent there off and on. 😉 

• Are you crazy? For the next four years, yes, I think we will be.

• You live in a tiny house!!! I know. We do!! It’s quite hysterical!

• You seem pretty crazy right now being home all the time with your kids… True!  We are just embracing crazy here!

• How far along are you? 12 weeks

• 12 weeks? And you haven’t told anyone? Nope. I’ve needed to process this one for awhile internally. Also, turns out getting pregnant the “normal” way gets you a lot LESS early care. So while I had one ultrasound at 7 weeks, I basically was not convinced it was real (because I have post infertility crazy girl syndrome and we process these things differently) and didn’t have another ultrasound until today. Normally I would have already had 4 by now!

The truth is, since the day we got married, we’ve talked about wanting four kids. But…6 rounds of IVF later we were beyond grateful for the 3 God gave us and really just were completely open handed as to if God wanted us to add another baby to our family. Needless to say, we were open to it, but never expected it to happen this way.

There is obviously still a long way to go, and I don’t take a single day for granted. But so far, things look good. We would certainly cherish your prayers for the journey ahead. Lord willing, this little one will arrive around mid March. 

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That was back in September…now at 24 weeks it’s  STARTING to seem a bit real to me but truthfully this whole experience has been so surreal. Turns out, getting pregnant withOUT months of prep, weeks of shots, and enough hormones to make you a tad nutty is…well, a delight. Being pregnant with 3 littles underfoot means it goes by really fast, and I don’t have time to sit around obsessing over it. It’s all just been a totally different experience this time, and I don’t take a single day of this for granted. I feel so overwhelmingly grateful, and if I’m honest, I haven’t always known how to process it because I do walk with so many precious friends who are  walking that hard infertility road. So, I’m not one to do a lot of pregnancy talk on social media, but we did put it on our Christmas card and several friends have reached out being like “wait..WHAAAAAATTT?” so, I figured it at least deserves a blog post.

So grateful. Blown away by the stories God writes.

I rarely blog these days, but figure I need to at least document our little guys birth, since it was a bit of a crazy story. 😉

July 4th weekend I was 36 weeks pregnant and all the sudden it just became hard. My feet blew up, I hit that “so exhausted I might cry” point…etc. You know what I mean if you’ve been there. I would look at the calendar and think that July 28 seemed SO far away. I mean, I’m not one to complain about anything pregnancy related, but let’s be honest, the end is hard…it was hot, and with two littles running underfoot, phew! I was hanging on by a thread. I actually told a few people that week, “is it bad to hope that maybe my blood pressure is slightly high or just something minor is going on at my appointment on Friday? I’m ready to have this baby…” The Thursday before I had him, I told two different people how much I was ready but that “my babies never come early. So no, it won’t happen.”

Friday morning, July 11, my sweet niece came over to watch the girls and I headed out to the Dr., telling them I’ll be home by lunch. 😉 The tech takes my vitals and goes “hmm…is your blood pressure ever high?”…to which I go “umm…no.” (and my head starts spinning with possibilities but I tell myself to CALM DOWN because for the love, my babies don’t come early, remember?) She takes it again, still high. A few minutes later the nurse takes it, and it’s still high. She has me lay on my left side for 10 minutes and takes it again…still high. My Dr. comes in and is like “yeah, I’m going to have to send you to L&D…they’ll monitor you for awhile, talk to perinatology, and go from there.” She did tell me if she had to guess, the baby would be coming “soon”..but I thought we meant like sometime that weekend. Ha!

So, while she’s getting paperwork ready for me to take to the hospital, I start flying out text messages. I didn’t want to over alert people, because I was still pretty convinced I would just be on the monitors for a bit and come home, but at the same time, I needed help with the girls and needed a few people to know what was going on. I literally sat in the parking lot of Northside Hospital on my phone for like 30 minutes before I went in! Andy had a lunch meeting to go to and I told him he should go, because “nothing happens fast in a hospital…I’m sure I’ll just be sitting there for hours!” Thankfully he decided on his own he could NOT attend that lunch meeting because he would never be able to focus. So I sent him a list of essentials to grab at the house, and he headed to the hospital too.

I checked in around 11:30, got back to a room, answered the zillion questions you have to answer, and they told me perinatology was on the way. (BTW, my nurse who was working with me was amazing, turns out she goes to our church, and she was just precious. Then, the perinatologist on call from the practice we go to, was one of our friends from church. He’s the reason we go to that practice, though I actually hadn’t seen him, and he didn’t even know I was pregnant until he got the call to come see me in the hospital!) So he came in, looked over everything, tells me my BP is pretty high, and that yes, we should go ahead and deliver TODAY. (it’s now like 12:45)…Everyone tells me it will be after 4:00 since I had something small to eat around 8:00. Well, five minutes later the nurse comes in and goes “scratch that, we’re going at 2:00”! WHAT? So then things start happening fast. When you arrive for a scheduled C-section you get there two hours before and it’s busy..but when they make the call to do it in an hour, people start flooding in and it’s busy in there! I’m now going “OK, i know you need to put in the epidural but I’ve got two kids with my 17 year old niece and I NEED to have some time with my phone and get stuff figured out real quick!” Ha! It was comical…text messages start flying and all works out…and at 2:20 I hear Andy say “It’s a BOY!”

 

Some of my friends knew this, but I was 90% sure it was a boy already, based on a comment at an earlier ultrasound. In fact, I was frustrated because I felt like for once I went in to a birth truly knowing the gender, and I LOVE the surprise. 😉 So…no, I wasn’t surprised it was a boy but I WAS of course very excited, overwhelmed, all of those things! That picture above is basically all I got to see of him for about 1 minute…when I was rolling to recovery, they were rolling him down the hall with Andy following, up to the observation nursery. They assured me he was fine, they just wanted to observe him for 6 hours because he was grunting when breathing. I was OK, he was 36 weeks 6 days…and I know, especially with boys, missing even those last few weeks in the womb can make a difference, so I knew this was probably to be expected. Oh, and I found out he was 7lb 14oz…at almost 37 weeks. Ha! Would have been a BIG boy had I made it to my scheduled date. He and I were both ready!!

The hospital was super busy so I ended up being in recovery for about three hours, and honestly it was all just really peaceful. It was weird not having the baby there, but it was just three quiet hours which I think I needed to process what had all just happened! We called Lindy, texted/called family, but asked no one to come until the next day since we weren’t sure what time we would get the baby anyway. So, though it was crazy, in many ways it was my most “relaxed” birth, and I think it just kind of suits my personality to have things thrown at me like that and just have to go with the flow. I was starting to stress about the plans for the days when I was in the hospital, what the girls would do, etc…and now, it all just happened and people stepped in and helped and it was fine!

Andy sent me this pic from the nursery and we finally got word that he would be joining us later that night. (which was good because Mama bear had started to come out and after about 3 hours I was like “no one has held him! Please go up there and ask if you can do skin to skin with him!!”)

But then sweet Andrew Wiley finally appeared in our room around 8:00 that night…

and I got to hold my boy. My BOY!! Oh those moments holding your baby for the first time….I handed him over to Andy after a bit, and he started crying and Andy just gave him right back and he settled back in to me quietly. Though I felt bad for Andy, it WAS sort of the sweetest thing ever. Maybe the whole “mama’s boy” thing is true….

The girls came the next morning and Lindy especially was SO excited to meet him. It had been hard for her, me leaving so suddenly to have him and her world had been a bit chaotic…

Can’t believe we are a family of 5!!!

We had a long hospital stay that included about 36 hours under the lights for Wiley…

 

And boy was I excited to see this sweet boys eyes again on Tuesday morning after those 36 hours!!

 

My BP was still up and down too, so it took us awhile to both get cleared to come home, but finally we did!!

 

 

 

And we are settling in to life as a family of 5! It’s had it’s chaotic moments for SURE, mostly from Lucy..toddlers make having new babies a true adventure. 😉 But the girls love him so much and it’s just the most precious thing ever.

 Grateful beyond words for this miracle!! I NEVER would have imagined six years ago that I would one day have three kids under the age of five. Wow. God writes such beautiful stories.

Well, it’s been almost a year since I’ve blogged. And Iwouldn’t necessarily call this a “return to blogging” because I have no idea when I’ll blog again! But, I did want to return to the blog just because I can’t simply announce a pregnancy like normal people. (In fact, I almost didn’t “announce” this pregnancy at all. MANY a pregnancy announcement on Facebook has made this infertile girl spiral. Those who are walking this road who I know, I have told in person, and for those out there who I don’t know…the whole reason I am writing this lengthy blog post is because I want to give hope. Not make your day tank due to another pregnancy announcement. How I pray this story gives you hope…and know that I would love to walk with you through this journey, please E-mail me or message me on FB.) My story is just not normal, and God needs to get every bit of the glory for this and it requires more than a cute picture for me to explain this miracle. 

Because you know it’s a miracle. Every pregnancy is. But if you don’t know my story, you can catch up on it here. In that post, I referenced that in our last IVF (IVF #4, for those keeping count), out of 9 eggs retrieved, we had three embryo’s. We transferred two of those embryo’s and froze the 3rd. Lucy was one of those two that we transferred.

When Lu was a few months old, we found ourselves discussing this frozen embryo. To be totally honest, I almost viewed it as a nuisance. I KNEW it would NOT work, because we had been through this so many times, that to think that just transferring one embryo  (which, by the way, wasn’t a perfect looking embryo…for those who understand IVF, it was a 12 cell day 3…the ideal is 8 cells on day 3..and while 12 sounds better, it’s not) might actually work? No way.

BUT, we really wanted more babies. I’ve always wanted three or four and never gave up on that even in the midst of all this infertility stuff. It was just something I would pray about often, and just had peace that one baby at a time, God would lead us as to what was next. This was no different. 

I definitely was desiring another baby, but was also having a hard time wrapping my head around doing another round of IVF, for so many reasons that would make this post way too long. When I walk with girls through infertility, my #1 piece of advice is “follow the peace and don’t get too many steps ahead of yourself”…so that’s what we did. We figured we would start with this frozen embryo, and deal with the “now what do we do” when it didn’t work. Yes, I said WHEN it didn’t work. I didn’t think it would work, but I also believed that God would show us at that point what was next and give us peace about it. He’s always lead us that way on this crazy journey.

So on Lindy’s 4th birthday, November 25th, I was SO annoyed to have to go to the Dr. and give a blood test to determine if I was pregnant. For the first time EVER in all these embryo transfers, I didn’t take a home test in advance. I just kept thinking it would be really annoying to fork over money for negative tests. Think how many Starbucks those tests could buy!!! It was Peppermint Mocha season!!!

I ignored my phone all day because I didn’t want to have the “I am so sorry” conversation with my Dr. He is absolutely amazing and we have had many of those conversations but I wanted to focus on Lindy’s birthday. Finally around 3:30 I noticed I had a voicemail. I was relieved, like “yes, here we go, let’s get this over with”…and well, that voice mail was the nurse telling me it was POSITIVE.

To say I was in shock is an understatement. 😉

Then began the usual up and downs that come with a post IVF pregnancy…lots of early blood tests which means analyzing #’s which actually was quite stressful for me because my #’s this round were quite lower than the last two successful pregnancies. I even had another miscarriage scare which led to having to lay low for a bit…but at 16 weeks now, things look good. All the early tests have come back totally normal, and I’ve already had 5 ultrasounds. (I know right? I don’t know how you “normal” people do it, only having like 2 per pregnancy???!)

So, friends, I am blown away. He TRULY is the God of immeasurably more than all I could ever ask or imagine. I don’t take a day of this pregnancy for granted and obviously there is still a long way to go. The due date is August 2, so Lord willing, a late July baby. And as always, we will remain on team surprise!! (Could have found out the gender weeks ago thanks to these new early blood tests they do now…but we LOVE the surprise!)

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21

Photos by Joy Cannis Photography 

Well I know everyone knows since it’s been over a week but our GIRL is here!! To say I was surprised to have a girl would be an understatement. I thought boy, EVERYONE (almost…) thought boy. Based on wives tales. Turn out, my friends, wives tales mean nothing. 😉

Scheduled C-Sections are weird – such anticipation to know exactly WHEN your baby will be born. Last Sunday night I think I slept maybe two hours. And when you add not knowing the gender – well, anticipation all around! I LOVE not knowing though. Just like it was with Lindy, that moment when Andy said “it’s a girl” will be forever etched in my mind as one of the greatest moments in my life. And, just like Lindy, my reaction was kind of surprising. I didn’t burst in to tears…I just kept saying “it is? Are you serious??” and then busted out laughing, and just asked a ton of questions. (This C-Section in particular I couldn’t see anything at all, where they had the area to take care of the baby was on the other side of the curtain, whereas last time I could sort of turn my neck and see a little of what was going on). My Dr. definitely commented as she was coming out and then right after how big she was…I seriously thought I had a 10lb baby based on the comments I was hearing! But no, 8.9lbs of pure love. It was an absolutely amazing moment.

Her name: Well, Lucy has been my favorite girls name for like ever. Had Mom not passed away, Lindy would have been Lucy…it’s just always been the girls name for us. So while I struggled a little with “does Lindy and Lucy sound too Bobbsey Twins like?”, I finally went “who cares. It’s a name I love.” It’s my grandmothers name – my Mom’s mom. (Well, she was Lucille but went by Lucy…). Hope…well, ever since this journey to baby #2 became a little harder than we ever imagined, that has been my word. Actually, that has been my word since Mom died. Our Christmas card the year Mom died just had one word on it “Hope”, with a verse from Scripture about it. I just knew for awhile that if we ever had another baby, and it was a girl, Hope HAD to be a part of her name. Lucy means “light”…so her name means “Light and Hope”.

We are home now. I’m feeling really good (I had forgotten how the first 48 hours after a C-Section are rough but then you recover really quickly, or at least I have, thankfully! I think God makes you forget those first two days so that you’ll do it again…HA! I’m sure it’s the same for the “normal way” of having babies!), and Lucy is just as easy and laid back as her sister. It’s different the second time – we were saying yesterday that we were wondering what it was about the first time that was so crazy? I guess it’s just the not knowing what you are doing. I mean, I still don’t know what I’m doing (do you ever in motherhood?) but that doesn’t freak me out. 😉

Lindy is doing well too. She’s mostly indifferent to her for now, and has had a few moments where you can tell she’s frustrated that I have to devote so much time to Lucy, but at the same time she’s been really sweet and does talk about her quite often.

Sorry it took so long – we were in the hospital until Friday and all week long my internet access was spotty there.

Here are just a few of my favorite pics. My friend Joy came to take pictures – what a gift!!

Lord willing, until we meet our little one. What? That.Is.Crazy. And when I say “Lord willing” it’s not just an expression. I sincerely mean it. I don’t take a day of this for granted.

I’ve just had the incredible privilege of having a front row seat to watching 1300ish people connect in to community groups this weekend. It was amazing. I can’t believe I get to call this “work”. Don’t get me wrong, we work HARD..in fact, this past month has honestly been incredibly difficult juggling later pregnancy with a super busy time at work, and I’m not even sure I can remember the last time Andy and I had a night where we were both sitting around on the couch going “hmm…let’s hang out and watch a movie.” That just doesn’t exist in our world right now at all. (Lest you all start worrying, we do try to balance it out with getting babysitters and doing date nights though that also hasn’t happened at all in the last month. But it will!) But wow, it was really an incredible weekend. It’s part of my wiring that I love being a small part of something big. (I think this is why I loved spending so much of my life in an orchestra.) I also love being behind the scenes…I really would way better be involved in putting ON an event than just attending it. It’s way more fun that way!! 😉

I think as a working Mom you are always questioning if it’s the right thing to do. And you should always be holding that with an open hand and evaluating, I really believe that. But the more I’ve learned about myself, the more I am at peace with where we are as a family. I’ve noticed recently that for the first time since I became a Mom 2.5 years ago, I’ve become very confident about the fact that I work. I think for years I used to feel the need to justify it..like “yeah, but see my job is different and I get to take her with me, and, but, and, but…” and lately I’ve just realized I can stop trying to justify and compare myself to others and just walk confidently in this path God has me on. For how long I’ll be on it, I don’t know, but it certainly is a tremendous blessing. I mean, there are seasons that are ridiculously hard, like the one I’ve just been in…but it just means that when that craziness dies down, like it’s about to for me, it’s time to huddle up with my family and reconnect.

8 more weeks. I want to spend them just loving on my girl and being with my little family of three before we become a family of 4. So I’ll be saying no to a lot that doesn’t involve just them, but I can’t wait. I’ve spent the last 6 weeks working hard for 1300…now it’s time to focus on the ones that matter most.

Any tips for the last few weeks with just one kid? I’m starting to feel a bit of those emotions…wanting to savor every moment of just me and her. It’s so been just “me and my girl” for these last two years, BUT, of course I couldn’t be more excited to welcome another little one and for Lindy to become a big sister. What kind of special things did you do the last few weeks with your first? And any fun ideas to help with the transition? After Lindy was born, because I don’t have Mom to help me, I really didn’t want anyone around to help…I just wanted it to be us three learning what the heck we were doing. And it was AMAZING. I actually like recommend that now all the time to friends having babies (though I do get that if your Mom is around and helpful I can totally see how that would be awesome so by all means utilize…but at the same time, it’s pretty amazing to just figure it out on your own, it’s such a sweet time!)…and I plan on doing that again with this one. I know it’ll be crazy, but I want it to be just us when we get home. I love that. And Lindy of course can stay in her routine with going to weekday at Buckhead which will be HUGE for her too. (Not to mention, how spoiled does that make ME? 2nd baby and I still get to have hours in the day with just him/her?)

Oh, and lastly…friends, NEXT WEEKEND it will be September and there will be FOOTBALL on!!!! How fantastic is that?!?!

I’ll end with a pic of some mother/daughter bonding that we did during this crazy last month… 😉

AMAZING Games so far. Michael Phelps. Are you kidding me?? Here’s the thing…I actually tried swimming on my high school team. For like a DAY. Seriously. Went through the dry land training and then did the first day in the pool and promptly QUIT. Holy cow it was hard…(and I was so NOT a swimmer. What was I even thinking??) I vividly remember like barely even being able to lift myself out of the pool that day and being like “what was I thinking? I hate this!” But, the good thing about kids trying different sports is that it DOES give you an amazing appreciation for the sport and I think every dang swimmer out there is amazing. And Phelps? Wow. Truly the greatest Olympian of all time, and one of the greatest athletes of all time in any sport. How amazing to have been able to watch him all of these years.

Also, love Missy Franklin!! Can’t wait to follow her in the years to come!

And of course…GYMNASTICS!!!!! Way to go Fab Five!! Just love this team!! And Gabby – so happy for her! And sweet Jordyn, I was SO sad for her, but so impressed watching her in the stands cheering for Jordyn. What class. This was an amazing moment!

I know we are all sleep deprived…but it’s just so fun isn’t it? What’s been your favorite moment so far??