Bitten by the garage sale bug!

Unfortunately I didn't inherit Mema's ability to sew, crochet or knit. But, I did inherit her ability to refurbish furniture! A family down the street from us was having a garage sale this morning ( I was up bright and early to go have 6 vials of blood drawn as part of the fertility testing I'm doing this month). They had a few things I saw that we could use in our nursery. Since we have decided to go with white furniture, I found two small bookshelves with 4 cubbies containing wicker baskets. They wanted $10 for the set. They needed a little sprucing up since they had been scratched and the baskets were a little worn, but I figured it was a great price considering the baskets alone run about $7 each at Babies-R-Us. SO, I got them and then headed to Home Depot for a couple cans of spray paint. A little elbow grease, and they looked good as new :) I washed the little cloth inserts before putting them back in the baskets and moving everything upstairs to the baby,'s room. I'm really happy with how they turned out!! :)

Before








During


After












Today we also finally put together our patio furniture. I love having a nice place to sit and watch the sunset!!




And, Here's a picture of little Champ playing in the backyard :)



All in all, it was a great Saturday!!!

July 30th

July 30th is the big day when, if the baby cooperates, we'll find out if we're having a boy or a girl!! I can't wait! Only 5 weeks!!!!

15 weeks and 2 days

Today baby Thomas is 15 weeks and 2 days. Depending on which website you're visiting the baby can be as long as 4.5 inches and up to 2.5 ounces today. Fingernails are forming and lanugo, soft hair, has started to grow in order to help insulate and keep the baby warm. His or her legs are now longer than the arms, and the body is quickly growing to match the head. The bones in the middle ear are beginning to harden, though the baby still can't hear quite yet. The baby even has taste buds!

Eric and I plan to record ourselves each reading a book to the baby and send it off so that the baby can learn our voices even long before we get to meet. Not sure which books yet, but hopefully they'll become favorites in our nursery.

Eric and I are anxiously waiting to learn if we'll be having a son or a daughter. We may be able to find out as early as next week or we'll be waiting until the end of July. As soon as we know though, we'll be able to go baby shopping and start decorating our nursery.

Luckily, time has been passing rather quickly. I have been busy at work getting recertified in Neonatal Resuscitation and CPR for health care providers. Luckily, both went well and I'm good for another two years :) Eric has been busy at work with meetings, and I'm hoping he gets to stay home for a while. I hate when he travels!

We're preparing for Mema and Papa to come next week. I'm so excited they're coming to visit. They'll be here for the Fourth of July. We'll have a BBQ and watch the fireworks from our back yard. I'm definitely planning on taking Papa on the Coors Brewery tour!! :)

We've had a few good thunderstorms in the last week. Last night was really neat. A lot of thunder and lightening. Champ does pretty well. He just looks up to the sky a little confused when the thunder is really loud. Luckily he doesn't bark or get scared.

Well, that's about it for the last few days. I hope to be able to share more soon!!

Love at first sight

I don't know if I ever really believed in love at first sight, until today. Today we got the first glimpse of our baby to be. I had hoped the ultrasound pictures would arrive today and probably ran to the mailbox three times before the mail lady even came!! Finally around 3pm, I got lucky. I saw the envelope and ran to open it with Eric. There they were, 3 beautiful pictures of our little baby. I got teary eyed reading the nice card Lori and Richard sent and staring at the first pictures of our first baby. Finally, it was all sinking in. Until today I could only imagine our little baby growing by leaps and bounds every day. Now I have something to look at. Something I can see with my own two eyes. Our baby looks perfect in every way, and I can't wait to see more!!!!

Baby Thomas at 6 weeks 2 days


Another shot of Baby Thomas at 6 weeks 2 days


Baby Thomas at 13 weeks 2 days - Really looking like a baby now :) Eric is very happy that it doesn't look so much like an alien anymore, lol!!


Love,
Jenny

Preparing for the baby

Saturday, June 20, 2009

You would not believe how excited I am to prepare to bring our baby home. Today our baby is 14 weeks and 3 days old. He or she is about the size of a fist...4in long and about 2.5 ounces in weight. Hair is starting to grow, but doesn't have any color yet. The baby has fingerprints, and can suck his or her thumb!!! :)

Hopefully Eric and I will find out if our baby is a boy or a girl in about 6 more weeks, at the end of July. The wait is killer!!! We have decided on an airplane theme for the nursery, whether the baby is a girl or a boy. The planes are great since Eric is a pilot, and we're hoping to gear the baby toward becoming a pilot someday so we can get free flights, lol! Here are a few pictures of things we might use:

If it's a girl:
The pink plane and clouds


The name Emily (this would go above the crib)



If it's a boy:
The blue planes and clouds


Not sure on a boy's name yet, lol


Bedding would coordinate somehow.

As for names we know if it is a girl the name will be Emily Kathryn Thomas. Kathryn was my mom's middle name. We aren't quite sure for a boy yet. There are a few names in the running.

I contacted an adoption agency yesterday to get an idea of what this process is going to be like. We have to start with an application to be approved for adoption. I don't think we'll have any problems there. After we're approved we have to a home study which requires several visits with a social worker (before and after the baby arrives). I believe we meet once together, each meet once separately, and then do a walk through of the house to make sure it is fit for a baby. After the baby comes home there are a couple more visits to make sure everything is going well. I totally and completely understand the purpose of this, and think it's great that people are concerned that children are adopted to good homes but I also find it funny that any moron junkie can get pregnant and have 12 babies without a question, but two respectable successful adults want to adopt a baby and they are put under the microscope, lol. Eric and I will also each be fingerprinted and have background checks done. We will also have to take a training class which I think involves infant care, and teaches you how to bond with an adopted baby.

Eric and I are still trying to work out the logistics of getting to CA for the delivery. I think what we may do is drive out to CA for Thanksgiving and then fly back home, leaving our car in Livermore. Then, we can fly back to CA in early December. We would ideally like to be there a few days before the baby is due and then stay through Christmas. We would then be able to drive back home. Eric and I are trying to figure out lodging during this time. He's going to try and see if he might be able to get a deal with Sandia through their corporate housing program. That way we could potentially rent a furnished apartment for about a month. That's the plan for now anyway, but we'll see what ends up happening!

So far everyone has been great. The support has been wonderful and we really appreciate it. We are so excited.

Well, that's the latest and greatest. Lori and Richard mailed out our ultrasound pictures, which will hopefully be here on Monday. We can't wait to get the first glimpse of our little baby!

:) Jenny

Expansion of the Thomas Clan

I wanted to start this blog to write about the expansion of our family. I have kept a written journal since Eric and I started trying for our first baby in June of 2007.

Our journey to start our family didn't quite take the path I would have expected. My greatest fear in life was always that we wouldn't be able to have children. I was realizing that fear when, after 25 months of trying, we still hadn't gotten pregnant.

I watched all of my friends get pregnant or have babies. I became jealous and bitter that Eric and I couldn't have the one thing in our life that was missing. It was a difficult two years.

But our prayers have been answered. After months of praying for a baby, crying, and asking God why this was happening it finally became clear.

In May of 2009, shortly one month after my mom passed away, we got the most amazing phone call. Eric's sister Lori, who I have been lucky enough to be close with ever since I met Eric, called to tell us she and her husband, Richard, were 9 weeks pregnant. Before I could get the entire word "Congratulations" out of my mouth, Lori was telling me to wait. For various reasons she and Richard had decided not to parent this baby. They knew Eric and I had been trying for a long time, and said they couldn't think of two better people to adopt this baby. Needless to say we were shocked. We had just made an appointment to see a world renowned Reproductive Endocrinologist who was local, and had an IVF success rate of about 70%. By this point, we figured we wouldn't get pregnant without some medical intervention. Thinking with emotion first, I of course wanted to adopt this baby. I wasn't quite sure what Eric was thinking, but I knew I needed to give him time and not push the issue. We spoke a few times about it and decided that we needed to first see our RE and figure out what his recommendation for fertility treatments was.

On May 26 we went to see Dr. William Schoolcraft at the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine. He was a very nice man. Very humble. He talked to Eric and me, went over our medical histories, and in the end recommended Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) with Clomid as a first line of treatment. We would both need tests done, which will still happen in July. Eric will need to repeat his semenanalysis and I will repeat my hormone labs plus have a histerosalpingogram (HSG) to make sure my fallopian tubes aren't blocked. He recommended IUI a maximum of 3 times, and if that failed then we could move on to IVF with ICSI. He did say though that if Eric's SA came back again with 0% morphology he would let us choose whether to do IUI or move straight to IVF. We decided either way, we might as well try IUI at least once. If it worked...GREAT, if not...then at least we had tried it and could move on. Now that we were armed with some info about treatment, we needed to talk about the adoption.

June 1 rolls around and we left on vacation to Maui. Ten wonderful days in paradise! We talked more about the adoption. In a perfect world, we would have conceived on our own...didn't happen. Next best would have been to try a few fertility treatments and THEN make a decision regarding the adoption. BUT, we knew from the beginning that time was an issue and we couldn't wait until Lori was 8 months pregnant to give her an answer. After talking to our adoption liaison at work and learning that typically birth families and birth mothers aren't placed together until 6-7 months gestation (in order to give the birth mother more time to consider her decision and hopefully decrease the chance that she will changer her mind about the adoption at the last minute) I thought we might have time to try one IUI before making our final decision. Lori's OBGYN however let her know that if we weren't going to adopt this baby then they needed to seek an agency and start paperwork asap because it would take a few months to clear. We couldn't keep debating the issue. We had all of the information we needed, and just had to make a decision.

We had many options to weigh. Did we want to try fertility treatments, which may fail, and hope to conceive our own biological child, or did we want to go ahead with this adoption. After talking a lot about it in Maui, Eric and I finally decided that this adoption was the answer to our prayers. We had been praying for a baby for two years, and here was this beautiful baby that would need parents. We decided that putting off fertility treatments for a few extra months wouldn't hurt. My chances for conception wouldn't decrease as I would still be in the same age bracket, and it would give Eric and I more time to get healthy...only increasing our chances of getting pregnant. We plan to try fertility treatments sometime around March 2010 when the baby is 3 months old (depending on whether or not I'm ready for treatment with a 3 month old in the house!). That way, if they work on the first try the babies would be a year apart in age. Eric and I will still try naturally. If we happen to get pregnant on our own, we will be more than happy. In fact, I've had a ton of people tell me that now that we're adoptiong we'll probably end up pregnant, lol.

I am happier than I have ever been in my life. It is hard to actually describe the amount of joy I feel right now. After two years of trying for a baby, months of dissapointments, dreading the next phone call from a friend to tell me that she is pregnant I really had become bitter. I wasn't the same person I was two years ago. I did a lot of crying, questioned my faith, and became depressed thinking that I may never have children. But, now I am finally going to be a mommy. This year has been full of ups and downs so far. After battling infertility for 2 years and then losing my mom in April I had a very hard time imagining that things would be looking up any time soon. I even boycotted Mother's day this year. I couldn't become a mom and I had just lost my mom. I can't believe that 2 months after my Mom went to Heaven, I have been blessed with a baby. I can't help but believe that she had a hand in this, and is always watching over me! I only wish she would be here so that our baby could know her!!

So, this is the beginning of my blog chronicling our adoption. I can't wait to finally meet our baby, Due on December 16, 2009. I can't wait to hold him or her in my arms and finally be a mommy!

--Jenny

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