We're choosing to be happy.

Today is the last day of the most interesting and emotional month of my/our life. Unfortunately for you, this will be a long post.

I know I've been sort of elusive this month (not only in lack of posting but in the posts themselves) but I suppose it's time to do what I do best. To own it (my story) and to write about it and to be proud of where I've come from, where I've gotten to and where I'm headed.

On the evening of March 1st, Paul and I found out we were expecting a baby. We were thrilled. Beyond thrilled actually. We couldn't thank God enough. Seriously. We prayed like every 20 minutes about it and were having the hardest time keeping it a secret. I couldn't write posts because ALL I wanted to write about was the fact that we were pregnant. It was hard but for the most part we kept it a secret. We'd told my parents and my brother and the dentist (she had to know...).

We spent the next two weeks making lists of all the things we needed to do to our house before the end of the year came. We needed to have the wood floors refinished, we needed to fix the ceiling in the office, we needed to do this and we needed to do that. We were exhausted just making the list but thrilled to have a reason to get it all done.

Paul and I became closer to each other and to God because of the pregnancy. We prayed all the time together and separately. I was thrilled at how much it was helping our spiritual lives.

We worked on the kitchen and the house feverishly before we left the country for a week. We were off for a little bit (or a lot) of reading by the pool, eating and sleeping. We left Oklahoma City on a very cold and snowy first day of Spring and headed to the Dominican Republic where we met Paul's parents and sister (his brother, our sister-in-law and our neice were to arrive the next day). We gave them the big news in an anniversary card and everyone was thrilled. We were feeling very blessed.

Three days later, we had a miscarriage.

We were heart broken. We cried, we prayed, we cried some more and then Paul found his mom and let her know what was going on. She got us set up with the medical center at our resort where they did a quick exam, put an IV in me and sent Paul and I in a private ambulance to the nearest hospital (about 20 minutes away). I was terrified, and so was Paul; however, when I was upset or visibly scared, Paul pretended not to be, he was in charge and calm and collected and I loved it. When he wasn't ok, I was the one that was calm and collected and all day long from the time we knew it happened until we were in the taxi on our way back to the resort we played the ying and yang game, and we rocked at it.

It was and is still sad but we weren't and aren't angry, confused or hysterical. We dont understand and we probably never will but it isn't necessary for us to understand. It's necessary for us to trust, and that, we are doing. Remember how I told you how awesome the pregnancy had made our spiritual lives? Well magnify that by 10 and that's what the rest of this month has done for it.

It was a terrifying day. In fact, I was so nervous about the health care and the procedure I was going to have to have that I made Paul help me determine if there was an integral oxygen system to the building. I was in a foreign country about to partake in a less than stellar quality of health care. I won't even tell you how big of a fit I had when I found out that I couldn't come home to have the surgery, that it had to be there. I begged but it wasn't going to happen. So, I had surgery in the Dominican Republic (and I lived to talk about it). Insert small chuckle here.

The day it happened all I could think about was how much I wished we had been at home, to be with my doctor, at my hospital, in my house. But the more we thought about it the more we realized our location may have been a blessing (in a few ways). I still would have preferred to have been in America for the procedure, there was nothing about the DR's hospital that I could consider a blessing. Sorry. But the things that were blessings included the fact that we had family with us. We have good friends in OKC and my brother is there but there was nothing better than having a set of parents and siblings there to be with us at the hotel when we got back. Second, we HAD to rest. For days after there was nothing we could do but sit, sleep and eat. If we had been in OKC, we would have cleaned the house or worked on the kitchen or gone back to work and being somewhere where we were forced to relax and reflect was so imperative for us. Another blessing, my doctor was also out of town and wouldn't have even been the doctor to see us if we had been at home. We were blessed in so many ways, we just had to make sure we looked for them.

We also got to spend the rest of our week celebrating a marriage that has lasted for 35 years and the good company of our siblings and niece.

We went to my doctor first thing Monday morning to get checked out and everything looked fine. No infections, no concerns. The doctors did everything they were supposed to and it looks like they did it well. Again, so blessed.

Our kitchen remodel has also made this month quite stressful. We've been eating horribly and last night I had a "what in the world were we thinking?!" episode as we were installing crown molding and cutting in with paint but today when I saw the cabinets being installed, I felt some major relief. Isn't that just the story of life, to get right in the middle of something and to freak out, only to be reassured later that it was all OK, whether it was the right thing or not?

It has been a month of highs and lows for us. But we're OK. We're actually more than OK. We have such a good thing going between the two of us (Paul and I that is) and I am so thankful to God for teaching us so many things in such a short period of time.

We've been trying really hard to follow that "Everything's awesome and nobody's happy" mantra and it's working really really well for us. We're choosing to be happy.