letters to baby : who we are & how our ivf journey began

Hello and welcome!

My name is Kendra and I am 25 years young and happily married to my husband Mitchell, of 24. I am an oncology and palliative care nurse and Mitch is a refrigeration mechanic and gas technician. We have been together for just over eight years and married for almost four of them. He is truly my souls counter part and my mirror image.

To get to this point of writing, it took a lot of prayer, courage and inspiration - and a lot of days back and forth on moving forward. These entries will be personal, vulnerable and true to what a couple experiences with In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Our vision for this blog is to shed light and hope on the process of IVF and the emotional journey it encompasses. It is more involved than most people could ever imagine and many people in society have a somber view of it. Our hope is to inspire others with our story and share how we have come to a positive and hopeful place in our expedition. These entries are as much for you and your knowledge of the subject as for ourselves, to remember this journey and to better answer questions for our future children.

I will be the one primarily writing this blog but I will be sure to include my husbands input, points of view and editing on every post. This is after all, one of our biggest and most exciting journeys yet. As you may be just getting to know us, the other members of our immediate family include Cooper and Bowen. Our fur babies of course. Cooper (he sometimes goes by Rupert) is one of the cutest most emotianally manipulative beagles you have ever met and Bowen is our tall glass of water walker hound mix. He also goes by Mr. Bo, Mr. Sticks, Mr. Stilts, Mr. Stamp and Bobobaggens.

Mitchell and I just recently moved into our dream century home, Gable Oaks, back in March of 2015. You can check out our renovation and restoration journey at gableoakshouse.blogspot.com. You can also meet our pups through that blog as they each have their own debut of course.

Now seems like a good time to take you back in time to where our journey began. It was a cold day sometime in early November of 2007. I was 17 and headed to my weight training class (all I did was stretch and spin). It was already a few months into the semester but for some reason at this time I had noticed him. Mitch and I dated shortly after meeting for two weeks starting on November 16, 2007, and made our relationship official on November 26. The rest was history!

It was a summers day in 2009 when we first arrived at a doctor's office in Toronto out of Mount Siani Hospital. Our appointment was to visit a specialist to investigate further into our reproductive health. Within five minutes of a physical assessment we were told that we would not be able to have children naturally due to something specific. I will be leaving these details out at this time. Our world was turned upside down. This was something that could not have been forseen unless we chose to investigate. There were no markers and no signs, only an intuition. We were not married or engaged at this time so we knew in our hearts that there were many conversations and trials to come. We were in tears all day and had so many questions. One thing was for sure - we knew that we were meant to be parents and meant to be together. We knew that one day God would bless us with a child.

The next two years after this appointment were full of excitement as we had become engaged and we're planning our wedding. It was also a very difficult time as we were sorted through our new information. We had gone through the grieving process over and over. We never blamed God once for our situation. We still praised Him in the storm. He picked us up off the floor MANY times and has been carrying us ever since. We knew we had to trust him to be able to function and move forward.