First of all, thank-you for stopping by our blog. We don’t know what has brought you here, but we are so glad that you’ve stumbled upon our little spot on the web. Feel free to poke around, look at pictures and read through old posts. We’d love to hear from you, too so leave a comment if you feel like it. Through sharing our story, it is our hope and prayer that somehow, our experiences will speak to your heart as much as they have been molding and shaping our hearts along this journey.
So where do we start our story? Boy meets girl? That’s a good start, but I’ll keep this part brief... Boy meets girl at Bible college... They fall in love, get married, travel the world together, go into ministry, then finally settle down and decide to start a family. So that’s the gist of how our love story began, but of course there is so much more to it than that. What’s a good story without some trials, triumphs, challenges and hope?
Nice to Meet You
Introductions are good... I’m Sheyenne and I’ve been married to Sean for almost 6 years. Sean is a local outreach/missions pastor and I work for a non-profit pregnancy care center. After we’d been married 2 years or so, we decided it was time to start a family. However, after 3 years of trying to get pregnant, scores of testing, a diagnosis of ‘unexplained infertility’ and some low-level fertility treatments, we decided to start an adoption. We stopped the fertility meds, and with a great deal of excitement, sent in our application to adopt a baby boy from Ethiopia. That was the first week of July, 2009. July 31, on a wishful whim (more so than a realistic hunch) I took a home pregnancy test. Much to my absolute amazement, it was positive! For the first time in my life, I saw TWO pink lines!! We put the adoption on hold for the time being (the program we were adopting through didn't allow simultaneous pregnancy and adoptions) and excited began dreaming and praying for this miracle of a life growing inside of me.
Two Pink Lines! It was clear from the very beginning that this little life beginning inside of me was all God’s doing. It was as if God wanted us to know all along that this baby was not conceived by any of our real efforts... Not the medicines, not the testing, not the doctors and certainly not our timing. (Sidenote: Now that we are at a new chapter in this journey, we have seen God’s timing in so many ways. But that’s for a completely different post. I’ll link to it here when I finally write it, so stay tuned.)
Everything was going well in the first trimester of my pregnancy. I only had a tiny bit of nausea, no puking and for the most part, I felt great! By my 4th month, I barely had any baby bump showing. I thought it was just because I have a small build. From the very beginning, I had an uneasiness about my pregnancy. I attributed it to the difficulty we’d had getting pregnant, and first-time-mom nerves. But on the day we went for our “half-way there” ultrasound (I was almost 19 weeks), that feeling got stronger. Before Sean and I left our car to go into the doctor’s office, I look at him and said, “No matter what happens, we are in this together, right?” He hugged me, told me I was silly and reassured me he'd be by my side every step of the way. We prayed then went in to find out the sex of our baby.
Its a Girl!
Since I work at a pregnancy center, I have the privilege of seeing many ultrasounds. I can pretty much tell “girl parts” from “boy parts” at first glance. When the sonographer moved her wand over my still-small belly, I saw the three little tell-tale lines... A girl! Sean said he knew from the beginning that it was a girl and to be honest, I think we were both slightly disappointed. (I had thought all along that it was a boy.) But as the sonographer continued to check out our baby girl, we began to fall in love with her. While I was watching our baby on the big screen in front of me, I noticed some of the measurements that the sonographer was getting... Her head seemed to measure correctly with where I should be, but her tummy was measuring very small... Several weeks behind. When the sonographer was taking a close look at her heart, I could see three bright spots that I knew I hadn’t seen before on any 'healthy baby' ultrasounds. I wasn’t really sure what that all meant, but I knew it wasn’t good.
Something Is Wrong
After the sonographer had thoroughly checked and measured our baby, she told us she needed to go talk to the doctor and she had us wait in the waiting room. I knew that wasn’t good. We’d seen several couples go in before us for ultrasounds... They got to just leave when they were done, smiling as they exited while looking at the black and white pictures of their little baby beans. When we finally got to talk to our doctor, he said there were some ‘soft markers’ that concerned him. It could mean some kind of genetic problem, but most likely it was nothing. He just wanted us to go to the Children’s Hospital to have it checked out by a more sophisticated ultrasound machine. Our joy of finding out the gender had been quickly dampened by the fear of the unknowns and what was to come. Our doctor told us we needed to get in for that appointment as quickly as possible because we were running out of time. “Running out of time? For what?” I thought. He explained that we only had a limited amount of time left terminate our pregnancy, if something was wrong. WHAT?! Was he out of his mind? Just half an hour earlier, I saw my baby girl’s beating heart on a huge TV screen. ‘Terminate’ our pregnancy? Get rid of our baby girl?! I couldn’t believe what he was saying.
Sean and I decided to go ahead and go out to eat like we had planned. (We’d said earlier if it was a girl, we’d go to Olive Garden. If it was a boy, we’d go to a seafood restaurant in town.) We ate a great dinner at Olive Garden, celebrated the fact that we now had a daughter, and tried to not worry about what could go wrong. We chose her name-- Whitney Jill-- and prayed and cried out to God to heal our daughter. This is pretty much where our story picks up with Sean’s first post HERE.
In case you don’t have endless hours to read through all our old posts (:-) I’ll catch you up to where we are now... After nearly a month of testing (and being advised multiple, multiple times to 'terminate' our baby), we found out through an amniocentesis that our worst fears were coming true... Our baby had a fatal condition called Triploidy . She could die any day. Most babies with triploidy don't make it past 8 weeks' gestation. It was a miracle our baby had made it to 22 weeks. We struggled. We grieved. We prayed. We sought God. But when it all came down to it, we knew that Whitney was God’s from the very beginning, and we chose (against the advice of our doctors) to continue to carry Whitney until God took her home. We would not choose to stop her heart... That precious heart we saw beating on the screen. God had blessed us with her little life for some reason, and we determined to honor both God and our daughter by continuing to carry her in love.
Whitney was born into heaven on February 11, 2010 at 12:58 p.m. She was 13.6 ounces and 26 centimeters (about 10.5 inches) long. She was perfectly formed. Beautiful.
I would be lying if I told you this journey was easy. I would be lying if I said that I was strong every day. Multiple times throughout our pregnancy, I needed my husband, family and friends to remind me of God's goodness. But God is good. And His loving compassion is written all over the pages of our story. I hope and pray that you can see it as you read our hearts. This blog shares our honest struggles with life, God and losing our daughter. It also shares the precious, priceless hope we have in Christ and the promise we are clinging to-- that we will one day hold our daughter in our arms again... And she will be perfect. Whole. A new creation.
Here are some highlights from recent posts:
He Sings Over Me (God's Loving Care)
So that's our story. Like I said before, we'd love to hear from you... what brought you to our website, where you're from, who you are, etc. But most of all, we hope that the short life of our daughter has some kind of impact on those around us. She forever changed our lives and the way we view so many things. We are parents of a baby who never breathed in our arms, but who also never knew anything but perfect love. We were so blessed to be able to carry her in that love her entire life, and we rest in the knowledge that her life was not in vain. God is continually using Whitney to shape and mold us into the people He wants us to be.
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