And the story begins, part 1

Ben and I started dating in 1999, and after four years we got married.  A few years later we gave ourselves a deadline.  We said that by the time Ben was 28 (2009) we needed to have a plan for how we would start our family.  Until then, we would just continue on as we were, both working on our careers and enjoying our time together as a couple.  That time flew by!  Ben was working full time as a power engineer, renovating our lakehouse, playing hockey, and playing around with his old car.  I was teaching elementary school, playing soccer and hockey, and coaching volleyball.  We had a lot going on and were really enjoying our life together.  However, as we got closer and closer to Ben turning 28, we thought that we better starting talking about IT.  

We knew what our options were, adoption and surrogacy.  I knew for 100% sure that my body can never carry a pregnancy, and honestly, that was a pretty big blessing for us.  Though I don't think the pain of infertility will ever fully go away for me, I had had several years to comes to terms with it.  I had thought a lot about what the reason might be that I have this issue...perhaps a different call on my life than what I would have expected.  Also, because I knew at a young age (before marriage) that I would never carry a baby, Ben and I didn't have to go through the years of trying to conceive and failing, or painful and expensive IVF treatments.  We knew what our situation was and we knew what our choices were.  BTW, when you tell your boyfriend of three months that you know for sure you will never carry a baby (I thought that it would be a deal breaker, so I said it early), and he says, "I love you more today than I did yesterday," you know you have a keeper.  

So, in order for surrogacy to happen, you have to have someone offer to do this for you (In some other countries women do this for a fee, not Canada).   Carrying a baby for someone else is just one of those things that about 99.99% of women are unable/unwilling to do, and we knew this.  Though the idea of surrogacy was amazing, we were not counting it as a realistic option for us.  Adoption was on the table!  Before we had a chance to get anywhere with adoption, a bombshell came!

There was someone willing to be a surrogate mother and carry a child for us!  Never did we think that this was going to happen, but we jumped in with both feet!  If you want to check out how our surrogacy journey went, our amazing surrogate mother wrote a blog about the entire thing, and here is the address: beautifulsurrogacy.blogspot.ca.   Everything went extremely well and we were blessed with our son, Logan, in 2010!

When Logan was two years old, we tried again because we had embryos still frozen that we could never discard (those who don't believe in an embryo being life might discard these, sadly).  To us, the embryos were our possible children, and we hoped so deeply for them to join our family.  However, the Lord, in His wisdom, didn't allow that for us.  It is still hard now, after almost two years, to think about the loss that we incurred at that time.  Thankfully, we know that God has ours lives in His hands and that we need to wait on His timing if we are to be blessed with another child... not an easy thing to wait for.  God has something else in store for us though!  We know it!  We believe that the Lord is faithful and that we can trust Him!

Isaiah 55:8-9: "My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the Lord.  "And my ways are far beyond anything you can imagine.  For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts."

This is us back in 2010, a few months before our son, was born.

In part 2, I will write about our decision to apply to adopt and describe what we have done so far to get there.