Okay, here goes. I've been avoiding this for quite some time....only a month, but it feels longer than that. Maybe out of fear of feeling vulnerable....again, fear of going into the depths of my heart and pulling out what God has taught me through the most gut-wrenching pain a mother can bear and sharing it to whomever cares to take a gander, and hoping that it inspires you and brings you to the cross, to my sweet Jesus. I can't promise even a weekly post, but I can promise to be real, to be open, and to do my best to share with you our journey over the last roughly 10-11 months. Without further adieu, here I am....taking the plunge. So grab a cup of coffee, or a box of tissues, if you need, and read away. Thanks for stopping by and I pray that as you read you will be encouraged, challenged, inspired, and see the heart of our Father through our journey with Joscelyn.

   I remember the day just like it was yesterday......I waited anxiously as those little lines filled in on the pregnancy test to reveal whether or not baby #3 was baking or if I'd have to wait a bit longer before God blessed us with another little Graber. Oh the JOY and complete excitement I felt surge through me when I saw that it was positive!! I had been wanting another baby, surprisingly enough after surviving twins, for several months. Here we were in August 2012 anticipating yet another baby. My mind started going 100 mph like all of us preggo mammas minds do the second we discover a wee one is in the making. What will it look like? How shall I decorate the nursery this time? Is it a boy this time or is it another girl? God, please let it be a boy. Brenton NEEDS more testosterone in this house. As we ventured into the process of welcoming baby #3 I decided to go with a birthing center this time around because #1) it was just one baby, #2) it wasn't high risk...or so I thought, and #3) it would be so much more low key for me than a hospital setting which usually unnerves me. Ha, wow, looking back now, I really had no clue what God was going to ask of us. Funny how we just expect things to go well....like we have a right, like we somehow deserve to have everything go perfectly for us. "Perfect" according to our human standards is not at all what God deems as perfect. His plan IS PERFECT. Don't ever forget that, Jennifer. EVER. My checkups all went well and, as usual for me, the first trimester was completely overtaken by me hugging the toilet pretty much non-stop. My poor girls and hubby had it really rough for a bit. Thank the Lord it did end, and we planned to have an ultrasound done to check up on baby #3 and find out the gender on November 21, 2012.....the day right before Thanksgiving. Little did we know that it would be the most memorable Thanksgiving of our lives. We headed to our appointment with such excitement and anticipation never expecting anything to be out of the ordinary. As the ultrasound tech moved the doppler over my barely 20 week bump, we discovered, much to my hubby's dismay, that we would be having another girl! The poor man loves his girls to death, but let's be honest. We women have a way of keeping life very interesting for our men. :) But, praise God, as long as she was healthy and happy, we were happy. Well, she was happy, but the healthy part threw us for a loop. The technician took longer than usual which started making me a bit suspicious, but I was too excited to really think about it. After a while she went and got the doctor to further explain and diagnose what they were seeing. He proceeded to explain to us that her heart was not normal and that she would not be born at the birthing center. At this point he only saw 2 maybe 3 chambers of her heart, there was fluid on her brain which is normal unless it's paired with a heart condition, and I wasn't as far along as we originally thought. We would need to do extensive monitoring to make sure she was growing well throughout the pregnancy, and watch the progress or digress of her heart. My heart shattered into a million pieces. I almost immediately started crying right there on that ultrasound bed. This couldn't be real!!! I'm only 25 and perfectly healthy! How is my baby NOT perfectly healthy??!! My dreams and hopes of finally having a risk-free, birthing home pregnancy/delivery suddenly was ripped out of my reach, thrown to the ground and stomped on....repeatedly. God in Heaven, how can this be???!! Surely YOU can fix this for us and save our baby. PLEASE don't let this be real! Maybe they got it wrong somehow. Maybe it's too early to really tell if they're right or not. Maybe......just maybe. We left that appointment beyond devastated. We were crushed; full blown, hard-to-recover crushed. One of my biggest fears was staring me right in the face with eyes wide open like a staring contest that I kept losing.

      Nothing that I have ever gone through, and trust, me I could write a book on my life, which is a very good possibility, nothing even comes close to what I felt at that moment. I don't know if I can even put words to it. Knowing that we were at that time facing multiple surgeries after she was born to "try" and save our baby's life and mend what the doctors were seeing, with death being the eventual outcome for her in her late teens was the hardest thing in my short 25 years of living that I've ever had to face. I feel like I got a slight glimpse of what God must have felt knowing He would be sacrificing His ONLY Son for us all. For me.....for our baby.
     All this took place the day before we're supposed to give thanks for our many, countless blessings. Wow, the irony of it all.... GIVE THANKS???!!! I wrestled with anger, rejection, and just complete and utter shock of what we were facing. And then to try to give thanks. We told our family but just kept it in our immediate family until we had our first EKG to find out specifics with our little girl. Everyone was equally as devastated and as shocked as we were, but our line of prayer warriors was started and the prayers began to find their way to the holy throne of God as we began our journey with our little angel.