A new respect for this guy:

The lyrics to “Oh what a night” come to mind first. Last night at about 1am Sarah called and was admitted to the ER while at work. She was short of breath & had a high heart rate. In the ER they gave her an EKG and noticed something that resembled a pulmonary embolism. Scary! They wanted to run a cat scan but we were worried that the radiation might affect our baby. After much discussion we decided to go along with it. After much praying and text’ing people to pray, they rolled Sarah back into the room. The tests came back negative on the blood clot, amen to that!!

 We are still concerned over the radiation to baby, please keep that in prayer. We’ll find out if anything happened in about 6 months when Sarah goes into labor. Though we are concerned we aren’t terribly worried. God pulled us through last night and we are confident that He will pull us through this one as well.  

p.s. Sarah hates the photo that I put up here  

December 11, 2007. What a memorably beautiful day! We had our first ultrasound of Baby Ritz and heard their heart beat for the first time! It was the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard. 161 beats of music to our ears! God never felt so real as he did in that moment. We stared in amazement and I immediately began to cry with joy. We had just seen our little one for the very first time and now eagerly look forward to the next “photo shoot”! Since it was Christmas time and my creative husband was feeling festive, he decided to give our baby a Santa hat for fun. We liked it so much, it even became our Christmas card.

On November 14, 2007 Patrick and I’s lives changed forever. It was a typical day for me, but I was experiencing a little cough and decided to run to the store to buy some cough drops. As I passed by the pregnancy tests, I decided to pick one up just for the heck of it, although I had doubts that I would really be pregnant this month, after all, we weren’t “actively trying”, but on the other hand, we weren’t “actively preventing”. We just felt comfortable in the knowing that “God opens and closes the womb as he pleases”, as one of our friends puts it. So I figured I’d take the test in a couple of days. But by the time I got home, I had thought more about it and the curiosity was killing me. I knew it was four days early to really know for sure, but I thought “I’m just going to take the test now”. And so, I began the ceremonial ritual of peeing on the stick. As I eagerly watched the the line turn color, I assumed it would be as other tests had been in the past, just a line. But this time, something was different, another line very faintly appeared behind it making a plus sign! I stared at the stick for a very long time not believing what I saw. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. I wanted to tell the world. But, the problem was it was 2:30 in the afternoon and Patrick wouldn’t be home from work until at least 5:30. I had to wait 3 hours!!!! But, I did manage to wait until he got home and then surprised him with a gift box. (I didn’t know how to tell him). When he opened the box , all it had was a pacifier in it. He looked at it and then looked at me and paused for a moment until it clicked ” you’re pregnant?” and I nodded. We were very excited and went out that night to celebrate over dinner. Just as a side note, I ended up taking 5 more pregnancy tests that were all positive, just to “make sure”. Patrick said we wouldn’t be able to afford a baby if I kept buying tests so I agreed to stop after 5.