Why We Decided to Start Our Family

We have been trying to get pregnant since October 2011, ya, it's been a while.

I started off wanting to work for a few years and not have a baby until Daniel was almost done with graduate school (around 2016- 2017). The week before General Conference we started getting little promptings that children were a good idea. For example, Daniel was the second councilor in a singles ward, the Sunday before General Conference I was asked to give a talk about the importance of "The Family: A Proclamation to the World". I chose to focus on the importance of loving and supportive families, and it got me started thinking that one day it will be fun to have kids and to have a family. Later on during church one of the Family Home Evening (FHE) families gave us the FHE kit that they had made for our future family (the kind with lots of pictures to keep kids interested during FHE). After church Daniel and I talked about how we kept thinking about the importance of family, and we both pointed out that this felt like a sign that I should not have such a hard heart with regards to waiting to have children. We weren't thinking lets have kids now, but we were thinking lets have kids sooner rather than later.

The next Sunday was General Conference, and there was an amazing talk all about the importance of children. After that talk Daniel and I looked at each other and we both knew that Heavenly Father was telling us to start our family.

I was still reluctant because I still really wanted to work for a while after I graduated before we had kids, and that wouldn't be possible if we started trying to have kids now. Also, I still had a year left of school, so I'd have to postpone my graduation yet again, and I'd have to do my last semester of school, which is student teaching, with a baby. That all sounded hard and not appealing to me. I constantly prayed to Heavenly Father to tell him that I was willing to try to get pregnant because we felt so strongly about it, but I really didn't want to because I had all these plans that I was still interested in.

So, we did start trying, and I did keep saying those prayers, and we didn't get pregnant, and we were sad, but I was only kind of sad.... Well, finally we got to the point were I would graduate from BYU with out a baby, that was August 2012. By this point almost a year had past. That's when I decided that I did want a baby, and I didn't want to work after I graduated. Then we started praying for a baby, and a few months passed and we still didn't have a baby. At this point it had been over a year, so in December we went to see a doctor. The doctor told us all of the things that could be wrong, and how to fix them. He said he wanted to start by making sure I was ovulating correctly, so I just had to keep a chart of my temperature. That appointment was on the 12th, and we think we conceived less than a week after that :)

Boy does Heavenly Father have a great sense of humor.

We are so excited for September to come :)