When we were in the middle of our pregnancy journey, I messaged a mom I’d been following on Instagram for a while (@marshallpartyofsix) after she mentioned their girls were an IUI success story. I just told her I loved following along, getting to see her precious girls, and that her story gave me hope. In her response she told me she knew how it felt to be in the middle of that struggle and that she always held on to the mantra “Believe it and PROCLAIM it.” So I started doing just that.

It’s a fine line to walk between proclaiming favor on our lives and trusting that God knows what He’s doing - I never wanted to demand something that wasn’t supposed to be part of our story. So I started verbally, audibly proclaiming things like “God, I know you are capable of miracles and I believe You can perform one with me.” “God, You are in control of this outcome and I fully believe this can happen for us.” “God, I believe you have placed this desire to be a mom on my heart for a reason and I know You can see this through.” Saying things like that daily, out loud, helped my confidence in this process immensely.

In February, I shot a wedding in Colorado and as much as I would’ve loved for Andrew to tag along, he couldn’t take off work so I made the trip by myself. When I pulled up to my hotel, wouldn’t you know there was a Carter’s baby store right next door. It felt like a cruel coincidence - the holidays had been hard, our first round of Clomid hadn’t done anything and I was trying not to think about babies 24/7. But that dang store kept taunting me - I went in one night and left with a tiny pair of soft gray baby jogger pants. I felt guilty and stupid for even buying them but I hoped so badly that I’d have a use for them some day.

When the day came that I finally saw those two pink lines in May, I remembered that little pair of pants I’d tucked away in my nightstand. I put them in a paper bag with one of the tests, stuck the bag on our front porch and when Andrew got home, I tried to act preoccupied and told him I thought someone might have dropped off a package outside. I’ll never forget his face of pure shock when he opened that bag!

We wanted to keep the news to ourselves for several weeks, but we had a Memorial Day lake trip with some close friends coming up and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide the secret from them for the whole weekend. I wanted to tell my parents before that happened, and it worked out that I needed to stay with them while I shot a wedding in Austin just a few days after the positive test. Luckily, the fertility clinic was able to get me in for two rounds of bloodwork that week to confirm my HCG levels were in fact doubling, so I felt okay about telling them so soon.

The app One Second Everyday has been a favorite of mine for a while - it takes one-second clips from your Live photos and strings them together into a video, so if you take one photo everyday, it’s such a cool way to watch back and see how the little highlights and moments of each day, even the mundane ones, add up to something really cool. It’s like a little timelapse of life! I’d had my parents watch my 1SE videos a few times before as a way to catch them up on what I’d been up to lately, so I thought it would be a fun way to let them in on our secret. I compiled a video from the past month or so and ended it with a picture of my positive tests as the last clip. The clips go so quickly, my parents didn’t fully realize what they’d seen after the video ended. I had them watch the last few clips again and that time, my mom FREAKED out! She said, “Are those yours?!?” Like I would take a picture of someone else’s … ha! We hugged and cried and my dad got really emotional. It was an awesome moment.

The next few weeks were pretty blissful. I helped throw a baby shower for my college BFF/maid of honor and loved getting to tell her in person and knowing we’d be pregnant at the same time, even if just for a couple of months. We told our friends at the lake with a letterboard (we set it on the patio table and just waited for them to notice). Of course I knew things could happen early on, so I didn’t let myself think too far ahead, but it was so special having this secret only Andrew and I, my parents and a few close friends knew about. Pregnancy is a roller coaster of emotions in general, but we had no idea just a few weeks later, that roller coaster would get a whole lot scarier and “believe it, proclaim it” would take on a whole new meaning.