It's my Soap Box...

If you ever ask me about how Madigan came to be, I wouldn't hesitate to tell you that my freshman health teacher was a liar about how easy it is to get pregnant. 

When we first talked about having a baby, we gleefully told God how to put this child together. 

Please God, from my genes give this child my nose and cheeks, my sense of humor, and my love of the water. From Brett's genes, give the baby his eyes and mouth, his patience, and dear God, please give it his head circumference. Is that too much to ask?

Then after almost 2 years we changed our demands a little bit:

Dear God, please give us a baby. Amen. 

The short story is that we had to try a bit harder than your average couple to get pregnant, and in the end we learned an important lesson:

Patience. 

Modern medicine is wonderful, but it's not fail-safe or fool-proof. I left the clinic after hearing my doctor tell me "You can't get pregnant this month, so don't get your hopes up" and came back 6 weeks later for an ultrasound where I saw and heard a beating heart. My doctor then said with a wink "There you have it for modern medicine...." 

That little 6 week sac of baby and beating heart is now a 1-year-old, 22 pound sassy baby girl who owns her mother and father in the best kind of way. 

Although what we endured to conceive Madigan is most definitely considered "Infertility Treatment Light" I won't hesitate to tell our story to anyone who might listen, in hopes that it alleviates some of that loneliness that is inevitable when (in my own words) "you can't even get done with money and medicine what two teenagers can accidentally do in the back of a car". 

Infertility (the inability to conceive after 12 or more months of trying) affects 1 in 6 couples. 

Think about those odds. 

So thank your lucky stars if you happened to have all your prayers answered the first time around. 

Heck, I thank my lucky stars that I didn't. 

Because the lessons I learned along the way were indispensable to my ability to be a better mother. I realized that when I stopped telling God how to do his job, I could hear him telling me how to do mine. 

In the end, we didn't get that baby we special-ordered from God...

We got better.