PART 2
Once my doctor gave us permission to try again, Brayden and I decided we wanted another baby.
We knew something very important:
No baby could ever replace Miclaine.
We weren’t trying to erase what happened.
We simply wanted to experience the joy of raising a living child.
Getting pregnant wasn’t difficult for me.
Keeping a pregnancy was.
Our first pregnancy after Miclaine ended as a chemical pregnancy.
Then, a few months later, I suffered a missed miscarriage at nine weeks.
Then came an ectopic pregnancy.
Three losses after losing our daughter.
At that point, we knew we needed help.
We began seeing fertility specialists and underwent genetic testing.
The tests didn’t reveal an obvious explanation.
Everything came back essentially normal.
Doctors suggested IVF as a way to help us create and select healthy embryos.
I began the medications in July.
In August, we went through egg retrieval.
In September, we had an embryo transferred.
For a moment, we thought maybe this was finally going to be our chance.
But in October, I experienced another missed miscarriage at nine weeks.
That was our fifth consecutive pregnancy loss.
We were completely defeated.
For so long, we’d imagined becoming parents.
Instead, our journey had become one loss after another.
Around this time, we started seriously considering another path to parenthood.
Brayden and I had talked about adoption early in our marriage.
We always knew adoption could someday be part of our family story.
Now, after everything we’d experienced, it began to feel like something we should genuinely pursue.
We attended adoption seminars.
We met adoptive families.
We researched agencies.
We prayed.
We talked with people we trusted.
Eventually, we felt drawn to a local agency called A New Beginning.
In February 2024, we officially began the adoption process.
Over the next couple of months, we completed training, background checks, interviews, counseling sessions, medical appointments, and our home study.
We created a book introducing ourselves and our story.
Finally, we entered the waiting pool.
We had no idea how long we would wait.
We had been warned that becoming adoptive parents could take around two years.
So when we said yes to our first potential adoption in May 2024, we tried to keep our expectations under control.
The situation involved a young woman in nursing school who was expecting a baby boy.
She wanted a better life for her son.
We were incredibly excited about the possibility of becoming parents, but we didn’t assume she would choose us.
We were told to guard our hearts.
Then, just two days later, everything changed.
The day after Mother’s Day, I received a phone call from our adoption coordinator.
She told me:
The birth mother had chosen us.
I was stunned.
We had been waiting for only two weeks.
She didn’t want to interview multiple couples.
She already knew that we were the parents she wanted for her son.
And there was another important detail:
She was going to be induced in just four days.
I immediately called Brayden and told him to come home from work.
Suddenly, we had only a few days to prepare for a baby boy.
We hugged.
We cried.
We laughed.
We prayed.
Fortunately, we had already prepared almost everything for a baby because of Miclaine.
We had a nursery.
We had baby supplies.
We had most of what we needed.
The one thing we didn’t have was boy clothes.
So we quickly got everything ready.
Our family and friends were informed.
Our home was prepared.
And our hearts were trying to understand how quickly everything was happening.
But there was one more unbelievable piece of news.
We had just discovered that I was pregnant.
On Mother’s Day, the day before we learned that the adoption birth mother had chosen us, we found out we were expecting another baby girl.
After years of loss, we were suddenly facing a future we never could have imagined:
We were going from a childless home to two babies born less than six months apart.
We met our future son’s birth mother a few days before his birth.
She was kind, gentle, and soft-spoken.
She explained that she’d originally planned to raise her son herself, so naturally we worried she might change her mind.
But she remained confident about her decision.
We discovered that we had several things in common, including living in the same neighborhood.
She told us she had been calling her baby boy Cooper.
We had always loved the name Callum, so we decided to name him Callum Cooper, keeping Cooper as his middle name to honor his birth mother.
She invited us to the hospital for his birth.
We met members of her family and spent time getting to know one another while she was being induced.
She was induced on a Monday, but Callum didn’t arrive until Wednesday.
Those extra days gave us an opportunity to build a relationship with his birth family before he was born.
But there was one difficult part.
Callum was going to be born in the same hospital where we had lost Miclaine.
Walking back into that hospital brought back memories I wasn’t prepared to face.
The place where we’d experienced the worst moment of our lives was now where we were waiting to meet our son.
And then, while we were waiting, something unexpected happened.
A young photographer overheard that we were adopting and came over to ask about our story.
As I began telling her about Miclaine, she suddenly recognized us.
She asked if I was Miclaine’s mother.
She attended our church.
She knew about Miclaine’s Mission.
She had actually been praying for us.
She offered to photograph our family for free.
It felt like one more unexpected reminder that Miclaine would always be part of our story.
