Baby #3

[Trigger warning: In this blog post, I discuss our successful third adoption match and the first few weeks with our third child. If you’re in a sensitive place due to infertility, miscarriage, pregnancy loss, etc., please proceed with caution.]

This post could not be more different from my baby #2 post, which is a lot like a Grammy speech. I literally spent years thinking about what I would write, and I thank a ton of people in it. In a lot of detail. I’m still going to thank a lot of people here. But I promise to keep it a little shorter.

Baby #3 is truly the part of the journey that we never expected would happen, especially so soon after Olivia’s arrival. For over a decade, Jake and I have felt crazy even talking about having three kids because it seemed like such a pipe dream. It’s going to take a long time for it to sink in fully.

The other element of baby #3 that is still so surreal is that she arrived six weeks early. Just 24 hours after we got the call that our birth mom was headed to the hospital, we dropped everything and drove 18 hours over two days. We met our little girl in the NICU when she was just over 48 hours old. For months now, I’ve been thinking about having two girls with January birthdays. I still can’t get my head around the fact that baby #3 arrived in November. As of writing this post, she’s been out of the NICU for eight days and is doing so well. We couldn’t be more thankful.

Most importantly, this time around, we have to thank our girls’ birth mom and our adoption attorney for both believing in us to be the right family for this little miracle. It means more than we’ll ever be able to say that our relationship with both of them led to us being able to raise Olivia with one of her biological half-siblings.

To our daughters’ half-siblings’ adoptive moms, our adoptive mom friends in Wisconsin, our son’s birth family, and a select number of close family and friends who have been so supportive as we’ve waited for baby #3’s arrival, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. These amazing people have been our rocks through more months of waiting and have been praying for everyone involved in our little girl’s life. We also owe a huge thank you to both sets of parents and a neighbor who stepped up and took care of our house and cats for three weeks on very little notice.

As always, thank you to everyone who has continued to pray for our family this past decade on our journey to grow our family. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you.

Just as I did for Tommy and I have been for Olivia, I’ll be writing monthly updates for our second daughter. I look forward to sharing her first update with you in a couple of weeks. I’ll also be sharing an FAQ about baby #3 and our newborn favorites for the third time around in the coming weeks. You can find all of my baby/toddler update posts and other family updates in the family section of the blog.