7 years ago today...i said I DO

Today is SEVEN years since Jim and I were married. On May 14th, 2005 on a beautiful Saturday in May, Jim and I were married. We were both 20 years old (I turned 21 on our honeymoon). We had been dating since we were both 15 years old. My dad married us, which I loved because he made it so personal and it made the day more special because of him marrying us. When you get married, you say your I DO's and truly though you have no clue what to expect, what is laying ahead of you in your future and how things are going to turn out. You just know you are in love with him and he is in love with you and in that moment, that is all that matters! I am so thankful for the true, deep, faithful love that God has given Jim and I, for each other. Though in those moments that day, we had no clue what to expect so I thought it would be fun to write a little caption for each year after we got married....

YEAR ONE: We didn't realize we would get pregnant with our first child by surprise just a few months after our wedding. We never realized how awesome it would be to see your child's heart beating on the ultrasound and know life was growing inside of you. We never realized in just our first year as husband and wife that we would lose our first baby. Up until that point, we thought when you got pregnant, you had a baby...we never realized or thought about loss, so it was VERY shocking and hard for us. Through it, God grew us and we clung to each other and Him through it.

YEAR TWO: We got to know each other even more deeply as we continued to heal from our loss of Jeremiah. We learned what it felt like to WAIT for the first time in our lives as it took the whole year of 2006 and lots of doctor's appointments and fertility drugs to help us conceive our second baby, PEACE. We were hoping we were the kind of couple that just miscarried once and went on to have babies with no problems. Yet, we found ourselves on Christmas Eve of 2006 miscarrying our second child. Through it all though, we turned to Him and He continued to reveal Himself to us in new and beautiful ways and strengthened our marriage. We grew and grew in our love for each other that year as we leaned on each other through the good and the bad!

YEAR THREE:  We bought our first house and our first dog, Emma, this year. 2007 was another year of much loss for us as we lost two babies that year. One on Easter Sunday, our baby Hope and one in October of that year, our baby Sky. That year was a hard year as doctor's would have us try something new with each baby, in hopes it would help us keep it and we would get our hopes up, only to have them crushed with each loss. I am so incredibly thankful though that through all these losses, God used them to grow Jim and I together. Our marriage got stronger and we fell more in love with each new year, no matter what hardship came our way.

YEAR FOUR: We grew in our friendships with friends at church and I went on my first road trip with some girlfriends to NYC in the winter and had a blast. We tried for children most of that year, but I had a lot of health problems and that made getting pregnant very hard for us. So it was another year of waiting. We longed for a family but we had to keep waiting!

YEAR FIVE: God blessed us with an amazing new church home and church family in 2009. We tried for a little bit of this year but we also decided to take a break from trying, after all we had been through. We wanted to get healthy, we were just having trouble doing so. The summer of 2009 God started laying adoption on our hearts. So we started praying about it. We gave up our plans and asked God to make His desires for our lives, our family...our desires too. We announced to the family at the end of 2009 that we were going to adopt. What a joyous time it was for us to start this process...but oh how scary too since we had no clue where the funds would come in for us to adopt! We just trusted God and started the journey!

YEAR SIX: In the 6th year of our marriage, we had a BEAUTIFUL year...from the time of May 2010- May 2011 we not only were showered with blessings from friends and family as they threw us baby showers and helped us fund raise but we got the AMAZING call that we were matched with a birth mother who handpicked us for her baby. We found our Isaac James was born on Father's day that year and was just a few days old when we brought him home. It was an instant bond from our Heavenly Father. NO WORDS in our dictionary big enough to describe the love we have for each other and the adoption of Isaac. God did immeasurably more than ANYTHING we could have imagined. Then later on in the middle/end of our sixth year of marriage, we were COMPLETELY surprised as we were not trying, when we found out we were pregnant. Then even more surprised when we made it past the first trimester without miscarrying. Right after our 6th anniversary we found out we were having a baby girl, so we decided to name her Annabelle. Our 6th year in marriage was a JOYOUS year indeed!

YEAR SEVEN: Year seven gave us the hardest times of our lives and yet many joyous times too. The first half of year seven turned out to be the hardest year we could have imagined. We say that it was a year of mourning. Saying "I DO" 7 years ago, we never imagined having to bury our baby girl and buy a headstone for her. We were blessed to have had 5 beautiful months feeling her inside of me and watching her on ultrasounds and hearing her heart beat and I am forever thankful to have given birth naturally to her and had the chance to hold her as we marveled at God's creation and all her beautifully formed details of her precious little body, completely formed, just too small to survive on her own. Little did we know 7 years ago when we said I DO, that the "for worse" part of our vows was happening...but it only made us stronger and our love for each other grow deeper. We now have a marriage, a love that has gone through MANY hardships and MANY amazing things as well through our 7 years already and it has given us such an appreciation for each other and our children and all that God has blessed us with. God is in charge of how our family grows and if He decides to bless us with more children through adoption and/or biological ways, then we will be forever grateful but for now....we are a family of three and we are so happy, so in love, healthy now and excited to see what God has in store for our family and how He will use us for His kingdom and glory.

I love you Jim more than earthly words will ever be able to express. I truly believe with all my heart that the love we have for each other and the relationship we have day in and day out, is AMAZING and VERY RARE and so special and I thank God so much for it. I love you with all that I am. You are an amazing husband and such an amazing daddy. Happy 7th Anniversary sweetheart!

Love,
April