Back in the first week of December, we found out that we were expecting our first child, which caught me a little by surprise as my family medical history does not speak to easy conception. We began to tell very close friends and immediate family around the eighth week of our pregnancy and began to tell more friends closer to the end of the first trimester.
When we were in Thailand, a friend volunteered to take pregnancy announcement photos for us. Not long after we returned from Thailand, we shared these photos and our news with the rest of our friends and family on Facebook. Our school found out as well since many of our students and coworkers are connected with us online. Everyone was so excited, and we were thrilled at the positive support and love.
We had already been planning on staying in Mongolia through the summer–rather than go back to the US for a visit–and with the baby’s due date in early August, we assumed that it would be best for everyone involved to deliver in UB. We had been going to a great hospital and had been planning how next year would look compared to this year, and then everything changed in matter of seconds.
At our last prenatal checkup (March 4), the ultrasound technician could not find a heartbeat. Our normally active and wriggling baby lay unmoving. My doctor declared it a miscarriage, and it felt like how you would expect this news to feel like–like the air had been sucked from our lungs, like we were in a waking nightmare, like we were pitching headlong down a dark ravine with no parachutes to save us.
While in the hospital and back at home recovering, I wrote several posts on FB that go into detail on all that we’ve been through in the last week and a half. I will post those in chronological order to this blog, but we also wanted to share some of our favorite pictures from when we were looking forward to having a baby.
Judds in Mongolia 