Guys. In two weeks, this little blog will have its one year birthday.

A year ago, I would have never guessed that….

…hundreds of you would read our blog

…dozens of you would come forward sharing your own stories

…we wouldn’t go a week without someone showing their support for us through a kind word, a gift, or a hug

I would have been devastated to hear that…

…we still wouldn’t have a baby

…we would over pass our expected costs by quite a bit

…we would be heartbroken when our IVF cycle failed before it really began

I wouldn’t be surprised, but wouldn’t fully understand that…

…my devastation would quickly turn into a peaceful hope

…the love we feel and the strength we receive from you is absolutely, literally tangible

…I couldn’t have gone through that heartbreak if it weren’t for your support

…my immeasurable love for Jason would somehow manage to double

I can’t believe how quickly this year has flown by! And yet at the same time it doesn’t feel that long ago since I was anxiously writing and rewriting my first post, debating wether or not I wanted to go public with our story. I had only just become comfortable telling our extended family and good friends what was going on,  wasn’t that good enough? I thought so. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to do more.  After thinking about it for a long time I decided I really needed to reach out to a larger audience. I knew it would be awkward and uncomfortable for me to share such a personal story but I felt that there was someone out there who would benefit from what we were going through.

I hope you can see that even though we still don’t have Baby Knoell here, this last year has not been a waste. We didn’t know, but we needed that year to learn more about ourselves, our trust in God, and our gratitude for loving friends and family.

And for the cherry on top, we’ll end with a happy update! In our last post, we found out that Jason’s testosterone had drastically dropped from the low-end of normal to a severely low 26. Since doubling his dosage for the last month, today we found out that he is now at 675!!! Yay!!! This is fantastic news.  The doctors want his testosterone levels in that exact range before his procedure. The only drawback is that because he’s making so much testosterone his body is turning that testosterone into estrogen and now his estrogen is a little too high. Figures, right? Haha. Luckily, that’s a super easy fix. Along with his shots 5x a week (which he’s been doing for almost a year now) he will be taking a pill twice a week that will block that and bring his estrogen back to where they’d like it but still keep his testosterone in the right range . It should *fingers crossed* only take a short while to balance out his estrogen and the doctors are confident that we’ll be able to schedule his procedure for as early as mid May! So instead of Jason getting embryos for his birthday we’ll just settle for it being my birthday present instead.