baby 4. it’s still sinking in and i still am having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that our cups are overflowing with blessings.
if you’r new around here, you can get caught up on our pregnancy announcement HERE + our early gender reveal HERE.
whether you’ve been here for a day or for the last nearly 3 years {yikes!}, this space started as an outlet + a resource for other families like ours. while we had 6 month twin girls, our road to get there wasn’t easy. miscarriage. cancer. infertility and we were also told that we would never be able to have kids on our own.
we sought out a donor and while it’s a situation you’d never envision for you and your spouse, it was our story and we wanted to grow our family. it was weird and we were searching for stories of couples who had been down this road before and let me tell you…there were none. it was that moment that we decided we wanted to provide a resource for other couples like ours that just wanted some sense of community.
we’ve put ourselves out here, shared our hearts and have built a community in this space that i never could have dreamed of. couples from all over the states have reached out to us and all the fears we had of sharing our stories have gone away.
it’s still hard. it’s still raw. so know that when these posts come, they don’t come lightly and i tread softly, vulnerable to share our hearts…but in the end, it’s always worth it. we’re not ashamed of our journey and it’s simply our ‘normal.’ we have zero plans to hide any bit of it from our kids, but of course we know it will come with some bumps.
…welcome to our family…

baby 4

it’s been no secret that we’ve wanted a big family… on our very first date we talked about 4 kids and since then, i’ve known in my heart we’d grow to a family of 6. at one point, all of that hope was taken away and we weren’t sure we’d ever have any little feet running around here. we went through 3 viles of sperm to get to the girls {you can read that story HERE}  with the use of gonadatropins {mega meds used in IVF… hence the twins}. when we decided we wanted to have a third, we live fairly close to the sperm bank in columbus and given our troubles with the girls, and how ridiculously expensive shipping is, we wound up buying 3 more viles from the same sperm donor and picked it all up at one time. our clinic stores the sperm so we tried for #3 and were successful with the first cycle! you can read that story HERE.

fast forward to late spring and we decided we were going to start trying for #4… although chaotic, we’ve loved the age difference between the girls + mills and quite frankly, anything seems easy compared to the twin preemies! we had two viles left and while we weren’t going to use the IVF meds again, we figured this was our ‘if it’s supposed to happen, it will happen’. we started all the testing and baseline scans early summer with the hope to get goin in june/july but the dates just never worked out. we weren’t planning to cancel any family trips so we wound up in a waiting game until my cycles aligned. things looked good for us to get rolling in august but my body had a few other plans and i started my cycle 6 days early, meaning we were in north carolina when our first ultrasounds would need to be. we told my mom + stepdad, cut our trip short and came home to make it work.

baseline ultrasound + blood work looked good
started 3mg. of femara
around day 10, i had my HSG {dye ultrasound}…a procedure that they put fluid into your uterus + tubes to make sure it’s ready to ‘house’ a healthy + successful pregnancy. while the ‘house’ looked good, my eggs weren’t quite cooperating and none were growing as we wanted. same story that happened while we were trying for the girls, hence the need to move to gonadatropins. we really didn’t want to use those meds due to the risk of multiples so we doubled the femara i was taking in hopes of giving the eggs a big boost.
2 days later i was back for a re-check and all looked amazing! we had one big egg step up, take all the hormones and got it in gear! woo!!
i triggered on day 14 {ovidrel shot to release the egg!} and 24 hours later i was back for the IUI {intrauterine insemination}.
we’ve had to laugh because zach had just started back to school so i went and got knocked up without my husband and WITH all 3 kids. it went hilariously well other than the 20 questions i got about what that doctor was doing DOWN THERE in my privates. hilarious.
5 days later, i take another ovidrel shot to trick my body into thinking i’m pregnant so it starts acting accordingly.
because of the shot, i can’t rely on the pregnancy test because it would come back positive regardless. it’s a mental game but i continue to take pregnancy tests, watch the line fade and then it will either go away {not pregnant} or it will then come back {pregnant}. it’s not really the most scientific way to find out, but it works so that’s what i did!

august 22, the first day of practice preschool and i took my final pregnancy test. the day before the line was almost non-existent after almost 5 minutes so i took the test, and then got the girls ready for their first day! i remembered to check it and bam. there it was. PREGNANT. between my babies going to preschool and now with the real possibility of #4…i was a mess. we would have to wait for bloodwork, so i called the clinic, went in for bloodwork the next day and then got the call friday….congratulations, you’re pregnant!
P R E G N A N T

i had bloodwork every few days which turned to every week for the first trimester. i have a blood clotting disorder which only affects me the first trimester, so i take heparin {a blood thinner shot} for the first 12 weeks to prevent my body from attacking the baby. it leads to a very bruised + sore tummy but it’s only temporary. my progesterone was low so i supplemented that but other than that, we had a very healthy textbook pregnancy!
ultrasounds confirmed {and re-confirmed} only 1 sweet babe and then at 11 weeks we found out we’d be adding another GIRL to the cline crew!

all the questions answered

how far along are you?
ha! i apparently failed to mention this…#bloggerfail. my due date is may 2, so i am currently 14 weeks plus a few days! i’m measuring a good 3-4 weeks ahead…turns out my uterus knows what’s up.

do the kids have the same or different donors?
we used the same donor with all 4 babies, so genetically, they are all ‘full siblings’.

do you plan to tell the kids that you used a donor?
yes, we plan to share every bit with the kids and will not be keeping it a secret from them for many reasons…medically, they have the right to know their accurate medical history to the best of our knowledge. it is their right to know their genetics.

what do you plan to tell the kids about who their ‘dad’ is?
we will always {and have always} called zach their dad. he IS there dad. we used a donor who contributed genetics…that doesn’t make a dad. we know that at some point teenagers may throw that in our face and we will tackle it with grace, understanding and love if that time comes.

how do you plan to tell the kids?
we have a book that we plan to read to the kids to explain to them at their developmental level of understanding. as they grow our explanation will change but it will always be honest and accurate. we don’t plan to have a formal ‘sit down and have the talk’… we don’t want it to be weird, it just is what it is.

do you have contact with the donor or know who he is?
as parents, zach and i have zero rights to request communication with the donor. when our kids turn 18 they will have the right to reach out to the bank, request contact and the bank will contact the donor. if the donor wishes to have contact, the bank will facilitate that communication and then it’s up to the donor + child to have communication if they so wish. it’s hard to say how we will handle all of that but my initial response is that they may be curious and again, that is their right and we will support them and would never discourage them. we will talk about everything that may or may not come with that knowledge but again, we’ll cross that bridge when it comes.

what do you know about the donor?
we have basic medical history about the donor we chose and we also chose to have extended medical history, a letter from the donor as well as a picture that we have not shared with anyone nor do we plan to except the kids if they want. we don’t know any sort of personal information such as name, location, etc.

does zach have a hard time bonding with the kids?
i’ll let zach answer this one.
“to be honest with you, yes, i struggled with this while lindsey was pregnant with the girls. i struggled with the fact that ‘biologically’ they wouldn’t be ‘mine.’ during that pregnancy, my dad told me ‘anyone can make a baby, it takes a father to raise a child.’ i still struggled and wasn’t sure if i would always feel that way or not but the second the girls were born and i saw them being evaluated, then when i held them, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that they were my babies. knowing how i felt about the girls when i held them and how we’ve bonded ever since then, i didn’t feel that way with miller’s pregnancy or with baby #4. i know god chose me to be their dad and in their heart, they know that too.’

i think i got all the questions but if i haven’t answered, feel free to shoot them my way and i’m happy to update the list. we want to be a resource for people and to take the stigma out of all of this. we’re SO very blessed and can’t believe in 6 months we’ll be welcoming another precious baby girl in the mix!