In the beginning...

In the beginning of our marriage we had this ideal picture that we would have four children.  Jeff has seven siblings and I have one so we thought that was a great meet in the middle kind of number.  Jeff had no desire to have a large family but definitely wanted more than two.

We got married before graduating college.  I was 21 and Jeff 20.  I had always dreamed of being a mom so I was ready to start a family right away.  My only goal was to get a degree prior to getting pregnant and it worked like clockwork.  I graduated in May and found out in July that we'd meet our newest little one in March.  I was excited and Jeff was terrified.  We had determined I would work full time teaching and Jeff would finish his degree and we'd re-evaluate after Jeff graduated.  Jeff was working full time and going to school full time.  It was a crazy beginning to our marriage.  By the time Isaac joined our family, the Lord had other plans and I quit my full time position to fully embrace this new role of motherhood the Lord had granted me.

Pregnancy was awfully harder than I ever anticipated.  I laugh and tell people that I'm not one of those women who adore being pregnant.  It's very hard on me in several different ways throughout each trimester.  After Isaac was born I said I was NOT going to think about another for at least 2 years.  Two years later Kaleb was born so that plan didn't really go as I thought.  And his pregnancy was harder than the first, plus I now had a one year old to care for while being sick.  Pregnancy and raising children was not bliss like I had imagined it would be.

By the time Kaleb was nine months old we made a decision.  It was December of 2006 and if history repeated itself I would be pregnant within a few months and it was a risk I was not willing to take.  We offered up a few prayers asking the Lord for wisdom but took the initiative to have our fertility stopped before we hit the new year with a new deductible to pay.  A twenty-five year old couple should never make such a permanent decision like this unless there is serious health risk involved or other factors that were not based on our particular reasoning.  We based our decision on fear for these reasons....

* My pregnancies were hard and made life really inconvenient
* It's expensive to raise a large family and we were just making ends meet
* The want to live a financially comfortable lifestyle in the future
* Possible health risks (Kaleb born with a heart defect and Isaac was a victim of malpractice with the potential for life threatening after affects).  We've always had a crisis with each birth and I was not willing to to go through the pain again.
*What if we had more boys?  How could I handle a rowdy household?

All these reasons were really just based out of fear.

I'm so excited to continue sharing our journey with you, friends.  I'm so glad God doesn't give up on us.  I'll continue our story in another post.....

Part 2 of our story continues here.