This is not how I Planned It.

I am a planner by nature. I love to organize, research, and to be multiple steps ahead.  But if these last few years have taught me anything (and they have taught me a lot!) it is that it's not in my hands, it's not my plans, it is Gods.  Sometimes that is very comforting, and sometimes honestly it really makes me mad.

I can really say I am blessed in that the early years of my life, pretty much everything did go as planned.  I grew up in a very loving family, I had four older brothers, and parents that loved me (yes youngest and only girl!) Although we weren't rich, my parents made the sacrifices they could for us each to get a good education, I was able to nurture my love of music and singing. I worked hard in school and got scholarships to go to college.

Through college things still continued to go as planned. I met my husband in the Spring of my Freshman year.  And he literally is my other half.  We both loved to sing (met in church choir, of course) and both share a strong faith which I am more and more thankful for every day.  Despite that though, we are actually different in very many ways.  He is loud and out going, I am soft spoken and shy. He is always Mr. Positive, and well I will be the first to admit I tend to rush to the worst outcome.  I thank God every day for bringing us together.  He really does make me a better person and I can't imagine going through any of life's battles without him.

Things continued to go as planned after college too.  Although my husband and I (I will refer to him as Mr. V) had a few of our ups and downs adjusting to how our relationship changed as we went from school to the working world we figured out how we needed to support each other and our relationship got stronger.   Then a bout a year after graduation we got engaged :)

After a year and a half long engagement we got married in July of 2010.  We were married at the Church we met at, and of course had all of our favorite church songs as part of the ceremony.  I remember for the homily, the priest had interviewed us each about each other and then used what we said about each other as the basis for his homily.  He mentioned how we both talked about how the other person made us a better person, and how we helped each other through struggles to come out on top.  Thinking back to that day and that homily as well as our vows of "In Good Times and In Bad" We really had no idea what we were getting into or how true those words would need to be to us in the coming years.

After we had been married for about a year was when "my plan" for life started to be de-railed.  The Summer of 2011 my mom was rushed to the hospital as she went in to heart failure.  She was a healthy, fit woman, and even the doctors couldn't explain why it happened, just bad luck.  She didn't tell me until later but when they diagnosed her, the only positive they had for her was that she would be at the top of the list to get a transplant..  She was in the hospital for over a week and when she did get out of the hospital she wasn't allowed to walk much more than the distance of the house. Through what we are convinced was a miracle , she ended up recovering without the need of a transplant, but it was a long recovery.  Other than my husband, my mom is my best friend and the thought of losing her is unbearable.

We received our next round of challenges in February of 2012 when Mr. V's father was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer.  Mr. V's father was the most faith filled, kindest person I have ever met. And it is in times like today that both Mr. V and I really wish he was around to council us.  Well in what was a whirlwind of worries, and flights back and forth to California to Visit, Mr. V's father passed away only a month later in March of 2012,  It was a devastating loss  and also as a wife, I tried my best to be a support, but not having lost a parent myself, I didn't know how best to help.  Thankfully through this all Mr. V leaned on the faith of his father, and we both continued to grow stronger in our relationship and partnership in this journey of life.

It was around the time of Mr. V's father's passing that we had started to talk about starting a family. The loss of his father put off our decision a bit, but in the later spring of the year we decided we would casually start trying. Little did we know how difficult getting pregnant would actually be.

In the spring of 2013 things started getting very stressful for Mr. V at his job.  He was working here in the states, but his company and many of his clients were global, and he was the only US resource. He was working long hours and we both could tell he was unhappy. We knew we needed to find him something else, but nothing seemed to be coming up.  It wasn't the end of the world that he was working so much, but it just seemed to add one more thing to the pot of stress that we were dealing with.

After about 6 months of taking a laid back approach to it all the Planning side of me came back with a vengeance and said "enough with letting it happen" and we pulled our charts back out and started to take it more seriously.  After another 6 months of trying in June of 2013 we were ecstatic when we found out we were pregnant! We lived in the blissful happiness for 11 weeks, when to our devastation at out 11 week appointment they found our baby no longer had a heart beat.  We decided to wait and go through the process of a natural miscarriage and I "delivered" our beautiful baby Luca Adriana in the early morning of August 10th 2013.

Losing Luca was the most difficult thing I had ever been through and it is part of the reason I started this blog.  The journey that we continued after losing her (we don't know if it was a girl, hence the somewhat androgynous name, but we both thought she was a girl) was just salt in the wound.  We waited to try to conceive again for about 3 months, and then started trying again, without success.

We ended up going through a lot of tests and procedures, ultrasounds, progesterone pills etc and nothing seemed to work. Finally they found I had uterine polyps which were most likely preventing us from getting pregnant.  I had them removed in July of 2014 and then amazingly got pregnant the cycle after!

We found out we were pregnant July 31st of 2014, almost a year after losing Luca.  We were overjoyed, but also extremely scared of what could go wrong.

This pregnancy has been rocky from the start, with a Subchorionic Hemorrhage, and bed rest during the first trimester and now our little girl has been diagnosed with IUGR.  The Drs have only given us a 10% chance that she will make it to delivery and if she did, she would be extremely premature.

This is not how I planned it, not at all.

But in the midst of all of this I thank God that I do have the support system around me that I do.  My loving husband, who is always trying to stay on the positive side, and how lucky I am that he prays with me every night for our angel Luca and our little baby girl I am carrying now.  For my parents, That my mom is still healthy and that she visits every day to make sure I am OK while on bed rest.  For my other friends and family praying that our little girl defies the odds, and knowing I will have the support if it doesn't turn out how we want it.