Happy weekend friends! I hope you’re all enjoying the long weekend with family and friends! We’ve been busy celebrating Laila’s FIFTH birthday! Five always seems like a big birthday to me – it’s kind of a right of passage! No longer a toddler, and now a big kid 🙂 Laila is headed to kindergarten this fall and I seriously can’t believe how fast these five years have gone!

Laila is what they call a rainbow baby…and that description couldn’t be anymore perfect for her…

I recently shared a bit about how we became a family of five, and I wanted to tell you all a little more about our journey of growing our family. Rewind back to 2010, when I had Reza. It was such a roller coaster becoming a first time mom! He quickly became my entire life and I left my full time gig as a pharmaceutical sales rep to stay home with him. Nazim had just finished dental school and residency and was working crazy hours, so it was just Reza and me most days. He was my best buddy, and I just loved being home with him.

When Reza was about two years old and Nazim’s work schedule had calmed down, we decided we wanted to start trying for a second baby. For some background info, I have always had an irregular menstrual cycle so conceiving Reza took us a bit longer than we expected (six months), but I had a very smooth and healthy pregnancy. Because of my past cycle issues, we decided to go ahead and get on a first line oral fertility medication to induce my period & ovulation – which is exactly what we did to conceive Reza. Within a few weeks, I found out I was pregnant. We were so excited and to be honest, a little relieved because this meant we weren’t going to have to wait as long to have another baby! What was also exciting is that two of my closest friends were expecting too and we were all just weeks apart…it seemed perfect.

Well…it turned out, that baby wasn’t meant to be for our family. We went to the doctor after a few blood tests confirming we were pregnant, and the heartbeat was lower than they hoped to see and after a few more days we went back and found out that we had miscarried. I was so sad, of course, but I was also so confused. I had never had this issue before, why now? Did this mean something was wrong with me? So many thoughts floated through my mind the next few days but one thing I knew, is that I have always believed that what is meant to be will be. Sadly, a week later, one of the two friends who was also pregnant miscarried too. I didn’t want this for her, for me, for anyone…but I just kept telling myself this is all in the plan, and that those babies were not meant to be ours…and that everything will be okay.

We went straight back to trying again a month later, and just like that – I was pregnant again. I thought- ok, here we go! This is it! What are the chances something could go wrong again, right?

Wrong. A couple of weeks later, we lost that pregnancy also. This time I was worried. I was disappointed, and I wanted answers. Everything looked perfect on paper, so I just didn’t get it. My doctor wasn’t very helpful and wanted to just continue on the same path but I decided that I needed to find a new provider that could give me some answers, and that was the best decision we ever made.

Right away my new doctor made me feel safe, comforted, and confident. She looked at my charts and immediately knew what the problem was. She felt I was on too high of a dose of the fertility medication for my body, which for many reasons ultimately led to the issues we were having. She had a plan for us, we got on the lowest starting dose and that very next month…we were pregnant…again 😉

I was cautiously optimistic…but this was it. She was our rainbow baby, the one that was meant to be for us. And she was just perfection. The sweetest, easiest, chunkiest little thing (weighing in at 9.2 lbs at birth OMG) and we were OBSESSED. To say she was worth the wait is an understatement, she is truly amazing and we are so so thankful for her.

I decided to share this story with you girls in hopes that if any of you are struggling with similar issues, that this brings you a little bit of hope. A little bit of confidence that what is meant to be WILL be. And to know you’re not alone <3 If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading 🙂

XOXO,

Nas