“We are really ready for this!” After 9 years together and 3 years married, we were ready to start our family. Sounds simple enough! I had been tracking my cycles for months…okay, a year. I had my ovulation down to the day and I hadn’t been on birth control in over 6 months. We were ready, more than ready, for finally our turn at becoming parents.

You learn growing up that you do things in a certain order. For me, the most important order was

1) Find my Prince Charming.

2)Marry him.

3) Have babies!

Anything else was just the gravy on top and would fall somewhere in between my life plan’s main attractions. I can’t remember a time in my life when having children wasn’t a dream of mine. Growing up in a daycare, you learn to either love kids – or not care if you ever have any. I fall into the extremist category of “LOVE”. Little did I know that the home business of my mom’s was setting me up for who I would be the rest of my life. They should have named me “Miss Jamie” at birth, because that would be my name for the rest of my life anyways.

So, in true Jamie & Jake fashion, we decided to sell our house at the same time we were trying to start a family. Any sane couple knows that stress and baby-making go hand-in-hand, right? Why not. So, we put our house on the market on a Monday. It was sold by Wednesday. Oh goodness…what did we get ourselves into? The only option now was to move in temporarily with Jake’s parents in Salisbury until our house was finished being built. Sounds easier than it was, but you do what you have to when your home now belongs to someone else. We celebrated the sale of our house, with mixed emotions, and on September 2nd 2011 packed up 8 years of life and put it into 2 storage units and 2 storage trailers.

11 days later on September 13th 2011, I saw what any hopeful mom-to-be would give a paired organ to see: a PLUS SIGN on the pregnancy test! Could it be this easy? Really?! It was our first time really trying to get pregnant, and I was convinced that all those years of birth control had rendered me tainted. I didn’t think the one thing I wanted more than life itself could be this easy to get! I walked around like a 5 year old trying to keep a secret for the next week until a doctor’s visit and blood work proved me right – I was definitely pregnant. Although we both already “knew”, I decided I needed to commemorate this special day with -what else- a special card for the other person responsible for this miracle: Jake. We met on the foundation of our future home and I handed him a card with “Daddy” written on the outside. From many years of writing cards and letters to Jake from our 2 pups, Zoey & Sofey, I was a pro at the “looks like a child wrote this” style. “Daddy, I can’t wait to meet you May of 2012!” was the message on the inside. I felt like fireworks were going to shoot out of my head when Jake read it, and we both laughed and marveled at the fact that we were now going to be parents: no turning back.