August 5th

Today's been a big day for our family!

• Celebrating Anna's upcoming third birthday

Anna turns three on August 8th, so today we celebrated with our friends and family. I can't believe our little girl is three years old and will be starting preschool in just under two weeks! It was an excellent party and everyone had so much fun!! I love how close Anna is with her cousins and how much fun everyone has together.

• Today marks six months since I delivered the twins

Six months ago, today, our twin baby boys were born. It hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this much time has gone by already. Sometimes I try to imagine what our life would be like now if they were born full term, but that makes me sad and it's impossible to know how things would have been different. But....we've had some exciting news to focus on the last couple months....

• Today, we announced at Anna's party that I'm pregnant again with our rainbow baby!! 

Anna will be having a new little brother or sister arrive in February 2018. She will also be having a new baby cousin! Baby cousin is due on the twins' birthday, February 5th, and our rainbow bean is due just ten days later!
This baby is already loved by so many and its arrival is very anxiously awaited by many as well. It's been a different start to pregnancy for me this time around because it's been stressful but exciting to be pregnant again. This time we went through IVF, which was different from Anna and the twins, but we wanted to ensure that we only got pregnant with one baby. There's a lot more detail in my "fertility journey" posts, but I'll just share a little of what is was like this time around with some pictures of the process:

Meds arrived - top box is CF med, bottom box is IVF meds

Everything that was in the box -- a little intimidating at first

Coaching my way through my first couple injections - it took almost 30 just to get pregnant

Here's our little rainbow baby as a 5-day embryo! This is RIGHT before they inserted it into my uterus. 

A HUGE shout-out to Tim for giving me a nightly progesterone shot for 10 weeks! Every single night, from retrieval (May 25th) until yesterday, at 8:30pm, he would give me my dose of progesterone.....right in the booty cheek! He never once complained and was always so good about it!
So if you're keeping count, that's just about 100 injections over the last 12 weeks to conceive and maintain a healthy environment for this little bean. I have a lot more posts to share that I've been writing over the last 12 weeks, but we're very excited (and I'm a little nervous/anxious) to have this shot at being parents again!!

• Last but not least, one month of compliance with my treatments since my birthday

In honor of our beautiful children, I've been working really hard over the last month to remain complain with my treatments. It was especially hard to hook myself up and shake tonight after such a long, draining (but super fun) day, but it's all for Tim & our kids! :) I plan to keep this streak up for a long time!!