Brigham Turns One!

So back in June our sweet little Brigham turned one.  I cant believe how fast the time has gone!  He is a miracle in our lives and that is for sure.  If you know me you may know that I have stage 4 endometriosis.  To put it simply its scar tissue all over my uterus, bladder and intestines.  This scar tissue causes serious pain in my body, some days its all I can do to get myself out of bed.  I am lucky and extremely happy when I have a day that I do not get to experience the pain.  Besides daily pain it can cause infertility, in fact I was told it would be very difficult for me to get pregnant as the scar tissue pretty much covered everything.  Sean and I were married in April of  2011 and in October 2011 (Sunday of General Conference in fact) we had the most wonderful surprise of our lives, we were PREGNANT!! I truly felt the Lord blessed me with the thing I wanted most in my life, to be a mother.   The excitement about being parents seemed to grow everyday.

  At 12 weeks we went to a high risk pregnancy center to just take a look and see if everything was going smoothly.  Going in we didn't think we would do the blood test to see what the risk of having a child with down syndrome was because we did not care, however we changed our mind and decided it would be good to be prepared.  It turns out we had next to no chance of having a child with down syndrome.

 They then began the usual examination and we discovered a few issues.  First I had placenta previa, which means the placenta was in the way of the birth canal so they wanted to keep an eye on it.  Then it was that I had a Bicornuate uterus that was also Septate.  What that means is my uterus was heart shaped instead of the usual pear and then there was a wall dividing it further into two pieces.   This meant that Brigham had a high chance of pre-term labor (as early as 25 weeks) because he had half the space and it was oddly shaped he would just run out of room.  It also meant needing a C-section because the chance of being breach was so high. Being Bicornuate or septate alone  would make it hard to get pregnant but combining them together and with my endometriosis it was a complete miracle that I was pregnant.

  Later we discovered that Brigham's umbilical cord was a two vessel cord instead of three.  Now this means a couple of things, first that could be a major sign indicating down syndrome and it could also mean that he would not get enough nutrition, so he would be smaller and may need to be delivered via C-section.   While these things seemed to make our pregnancy a little scary we still felt blessed to have this baby become a part of our family.

 The Lord truly had a hand in our little mans life because he was born at 39 weeks at 6lbs. 15oz and 19 inches long which surprised even the doctors!  I love him more then he will ever know and I hope that I can raise him to be the man he is meant to become!  Anyways here are some pictures taken by canico studios of his birthday party!