It's About Time!

So some exciting things have been happening at the Cunningham house. As some of you may know (and others who may not) Clint and I have not been able to have children the "good ol' fashioned way." We have explored a few things and seriously considered adoption but we left the adoption agency feeling very discouraged for the following reasons:

1. It was going to cost AT LEAST $22,000
2. You have to wait to be picked...some wait more than a year!
3. There is a 20% chance the mother will change her mind once the baby is born
4. You have to prepare a scrapbook of sorts so mothers can view your profile and I do not have the talent (like my friend Carson) to produce gorgeous scrapbook pages that would get Clint and I noticed!

We were still seriously debating the adoption idea when last Christmas, a coworker of mine told me that, through artificial insemination, his son and daughter-in-law were having triplets. So I started researching the process and Clint and I met with a doctor in March to see if we could get pregnant through artificial insemination as well.

It took two months of tests, blood draws, ultrasounds etc. but they determined that with the right medications and artificial triggers we had a really good chance!

So we tried in May and it failed. We tried in July and it failed again. But as they say, "three times is the charm" because our third attempt in September took and we found out in early October that I was pregnant. When I took the test and it came back positive I almost didn't believe it. I took it downstairs to Clint's office and just set it on his desk and he looked at it, sprang out of his chair, hugged me so hard, and we both just started crying!

I am currently 13 1/2 weeks pregnant and while I find it sort of weird to be displaying pictures of my uterus for anyone to see, I thought it was pretty cool to see our baby developing from a little blob to an actual human form in such a short amount of time:


This first picture was our second ultrasound taken on 11.4.2009. This was the first time we got to see the flicker of a heart beat.



This is a picture of the 3rd ultrasound taken on 11.16.09. I was feeling really anxious and every little pang in my abdomen was freaking me out so my doctor told me to come in to see the baby again just to put my mind at ease. Poor guy. He is very patient with me.

Again, I was worried last week and my appointment with my doctor wasn't for another week and a half so Clint took me to Fetal Foto and they did an ultrasound and took several awesome pictures for me. This one below is the profile shot they took. It's amazing that it is already looking so much more like a person here!

At Fetal Foto they also recorded an amazing DVD of our baby moving around, sucking its thumb, putting its hand up to its face, etc. And we got to hear its heartbeat for the first time too!

So there you have it folks! We are so excited and are crossing our fingers that by mid-June we will have a healthy baby to take home! Wonder how the dogs will do with this...