Category Archives: The Ins and Outs of Us

us

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I’ve been thinking about the things that make Adam and I us. What has made our marriage be as strong and awesome as it is after over 18 years? What makes “us” tick.

Things you may or may not know about us:

  • We both know every (I mean EVERY) line to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and we often use it casually in our everyday discussions. “I don’t knoooow, Margo” or “bend over and I’ll show ya” are both classics.
  • We own a sign-repair company (the kind of digital signs you see at gas stations, malls, schools etc). We were blessed with a tremendous opportunity almost two years ago and purchased EDS/SignCo-a company Adam had worked for off and on for many years. This is (for the most part) Adam’s baby but I have learned more and more the past year and now help with much of the billing, paper-work, ordering, etc.
  • We sleep in our own beds. Ha! I am a horrible sleeper and there are nights that Adam is very busy in his sleep (not too long ago he dreamed he was running on ice…literally). Did you know that two twin XL mattresses=king? Well, they do.
  • Adam proposed to me in 1994 at Dumb and Dumber. Well, not literally. He took me to a nice dinner and proposed at the restaurant and after we went to the movie. The lines from this movie are also commonly used in our home day-to-day. And, yes we did see the sequel a couple of months ago and boy was it disappointing!
  • Our first date was on March 10, 1992.
  • SHMILY: For one of our first anniversaries we received the book Night Light: A Devotional for Couples by James Dobson as a gift and SHMILY (See How Much I Love You) was mentioned. We embraced it and it has been “our thing” ever since. From emails, love-letters or chicken-scratched notes, almost everything we have ever given one another says SHMILY. (Last year I found an artist on Etsy that made me the SHMILY art you can see in the upper right corner on this wall in our happy room).IMG_5447
  • We are healthy wanna-be’s. We eat only organic, free-range, hormone free meat, milk and eggs and try to purchase all of our other food organically also. We don’t buy canned goods with BPA in the lining and do not drink out of plastic containers, nor have anything plastic in our kitchen actually. On the flip-side, we are both overweight and love to eat out! Go figure.
  • We are huge animal lovers. We would do anything for our fur babies and we have. We’ve done CPR on a cat on the way to the Hospital (and did revive him for a brief time) and tried to save our first love, Hastings (a border collie that we got when we first were married). Hastings had a pulmonary embolus and we sped the 60 miles to the nearest Animal ER/Hospital before we lost her. We watched while they did CPR and did labs, EKGs, etc on her but were unable to save her. We both remember seeing her eyes right before they closed for the last time. Years ago we paid for our kitty Corona (Miss Corona Barona!) to have a root canal (I’m serious). She was our 20-year old that we had to put down last spring for cancer in her airway. Boy, we loved that old gal. We once had a beautiful orange cat that had renal failure from getting into some lillies that we literally gave IV fluids to for days at home trying to save his little kidneys. Mr. Pepper, our 18 year-old siamese had an over-active thyroid about ten years ago and we sent him to K-State for radioactive treatment. Again, I am serious. Ha! He had to stay there for several weeks under quarantine before we were allowed to go pick him up. We have cared for this same old guy since May when he suffered a stroke. He is blind and deaf and loving life now but it has and still is hard-work for us to care for him. We love him so. Two of our cats are buried on my Father’s property in Montana (both with their own headstones!) and our beautiful Hastings and other cats are buried on Adam’s parent’s property in Mississippi-all in oak boxes lined with velvet that Adam made for them. Yes, we are well-experienced at shipping our animals on dry-ice. Weird, we know. I work with a woman who often says that when she dies she wants to come back as one of  our pets. Not a bad idea at all.

Check back tomorrow for more!

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L is for Lainey

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We got wonderful news yesterday. My DNA does NOT match the fetal tissue UNMC has, which means Lainey was for real. And, she was normal.

We are thrilled to be able to move forward with a little more clarity. We still do not know for sure what path is the correct one, surrogacy or adoption. One day I feel like one is the right choice, the next day, the other. Both options bring with them their own set of circumstances. We are adamant that we definitely want an “end-point” to this journey and we want to go into the next step knowing what our end-point is. For example if we do surrogacy we will need to determine if we are going to use our own goods =) and try for our own embryos for transplant into a surrogate or should we use donor eggs, etc. Due to the testing being done on Lainey our appointment with our specialist in Denver has been postponed twice and is now scheduled for this Thursday. We are sure he will present us with multiple options….nothing can be easy, of course!

Deciding where our end-point will be with surrogacy is difficult. Many women need multiple IVF attempts before achieving a successful pregnancy with IVF and of course, miscarriage is always a possibility. These are all things we will need to decide as to how far we will allow ourselves to go.

We have decided to move forward with the home study process for adoption. We most certainly haven’t ruled adoption out. We have narrowed down to some of the things we would request but still are unsure on others. Where would our end-point be with adoption? After a certain amount of years without being chosen? After a failed adoption? From what we are told approximately 20% of adoptions fail. Maybe we will shoot for our endpoint to be if there are two failed adoptions? Again, not easy decisions but they are necessary. This journey we are on is all-consuming and therefore we need to know when we will stop if not successful.

We did make a decision this week, though and that is that regardless of which one of the above we chose we need money. A lot of money. I don’t know if I know of anyone that has the type of money that we need just sitting in their account, us included. It is important to us that we remain financially stable and therefore, going into huge debt to have a child is not an option for us. We have decided that we want to sell our home and move into a cheaper rental. This will allow two things. First, whatever equity we have in our home (albeit probably not a lot) we can save and secondly, our monthly rent and utilities will be undoubtedly lower than for our (large) home. We don’t need this big of a home…we love our home and the thought of selling is not a fun one but we believe is a smart move. We have (tentatively) set a goal for ourselves to have our home appraised within the next 6 weeks so we know where to start from. So, if you know of anyone looking-spread the word!

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Worn

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A friend sent this to me. I am worn. As they say in this song, I am tired from the work it takes to keep on breathing. I am perhaps at the lowest point I have ever been in my life. It seems so many things are not working in our lives and therefore, we are so unsure. We are juggling plates full of issues and dilemmas trying desperately not to drop them. I am a broken record, repeating over and over again every day. I am lost and I pray He continues to try to reach me, to resurrect me.

 

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Stuck

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Our appointment with the fertility specialist last Thursday was postponed until the correct chromosomal testing results on our baby from December are back.

As we wait to find out if we really had a Lainey, or perhaps rather a son, I feel like we are in an alternate universe of some sort. We are stuck in the middle and the world is continuing to go around us. I wish I had it in me to just jump and join everyone. I wish I had the emotional energy.

We have had a couple of people mention that perhaps we just need to stop and breathe for a bit. Four babies, all lost in 2 years is difficult. Emotionally on both of us and physically on me (the hormones alone!). The problem is that I cannot seem to go on with life simply putting all of this aside “until we feel stronger” and more ready to cope with things. It feels like if we know what we are going to do with our future that we can maybe heal quicker, or at least move forward with other things in our life. I want us to soon be able to make the decision as to if we are going to adopt, go down the surrogacy road or remain child-less forever. This is actually something that we both agree on. We need to move forward on this decision soon.

If we are going to adopt we have a lot of work ahead of us and the wait will likely be long as we would be more picky than what others have recommended.

If we do surrogacy….well, that is for an entire different post. What type of surrogacy? Do we make an embryo out of my eggs and his sperm or do we adopt embryo’s? My guess is this is why our appointment with the fertility specialist last week was put on hold. I imagine if we didn’t really have Lainey-if it was not a normal little girl or boy-that the specialist is going to recommend against using my eggs…and perhaps Adam’s sperm as well. Then what? If it isn’t even a child of our genes, why not just adopt? That brings us full circle to how fearful we have been previously about our (albeit minimal) education on adoption we have had so far.

Finally, we could choose to remain child-less. This is an option I cannot even imagine but we are discussing it every day. We’ve discussed changing our lives drastically enough to do mission work in other countries to fill our time that way instead of with a family. Perhaps we could open an animal shelter and devote our days to saving those innocents (we love our fur babies so very much). Maybe we could just travel the world….plan one or two big trips per year and do this every year until we are too old to travel any longer. These are all things we talk about but none of them seem fully satisfying to both of us. None of them will be with us holding our hand saying they love us when we are old and gray….

For now we will stay stuck while the world goes ’round until we know more about the baby we lost on December 2, 2014. We will continue to thank God for the blessings He gives us each day and pray for guidance in the coming days.

I, personally, am also looking forward to the first day I make it without crying.

 

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