2 years of "trying"...

Given the fact that Ryan has 4 kids, I'd say it's fairly clear that he was married prior to meeting me, and after 4 kids, they were done.  He had had a vasectomy 9 years before I met him.  I do give him a lot of respect and credit for being very honest with me from the get go about this because he wanted to be fair to me, knowing that I'm someone that has always wanted kids and has always looked forward to being pregnant.  Even after knowing all this, I wasn't willing to walk away from something that could potentially be a really good thing, so I decided to just wait and see what would happen. I was proven correct… He's an incredible guy - and all that worked in my favor… in more ways than one!  He was more than willing to have a vasectomy reversal in order to try and fulfill my dreams of becoming pregnant and being a mom.  I might add that he sold his beloved motorcycle in order to pay for a major part of this procedure.  (Double points for this guy! I'm a lucky girl and it was clear from the get go.)  So, in September 2011, the month after we got engaged, Ryan had a reversal.  All went well and we were very hopeful.

Here's a picture on Ryan's bike from a session of engagement

pictures a friend of mine took. 

Since this was before we were married, I wasn't interested in trying for a baby before then, so we waited until we got married to actually start trying.  Neither one of us thought it would be an issue and we figured it would happen without much problem.  Little did we know, the Big Guy upstairs had a different plan than our own.

After a year plus of trying - seeing multiple negative pregnancy tests, tears of sadness and frustrations, special plans that were supposed to help the "sperm meet egg", using Preseed, OPK's, timing everything, acupuncture, cutting out alcohol, cutting coffee, and praying more and more… we still had no luck.

So, we decided it might be time for a sperm analysis as well as testing on me just in case.  All my test came back fine and his analysis came back with a lower than normal count, but we were still given hope that we would be able to conceive naturally. We were told that we'd be good candidates for IUI if we didn't want to wait to out much longer.  We met with a fertility Doctor, but still felt the need to keep trying on our own, hoping for a miracle.  After all, we knew that God had a plan for us and we were hoping conceiving naturally was part of His plan.

 We decided to move forth with IUI in February 2014.  When we did that we found new information from Ryan's semen analysis results.  We were given the news that we were really hoping not to hear… his count had gone down significantly since the year before. It had gone from 22 million to 6.5 million.  We were now considered to be good candidates for IVF.  Without doing further tests on Ryan, the fertility specialist is assuming his Vas Deferens (tube that carries sperm) may be closing off.  (Poor guy's been through too much!)  Together we decided that if IUI didn't bring a miracle, that we wouldn't waste any more time or money on it and that we would go straight to IVF.  I'm sure you can predict what the outcome of IUI was for us.  It wasn't surprising either, unfortunately.

We are now 2 months shy of our 2nd anniversary which means it'll also be the 2 year mark of trying. I am now 30, Ryan is 42 and we are in the very beginning stages of our first (and hopefully only) round of IVF.  My age is working in our favor in regards to IVF.  My cycles are normal, I ovulate regularly and have no known issues.  It seems we are simply dealing with low sperm count.  We've been given good odds of success and we're getting very excited to being one step closer to having a baby or babies together.

Hopefully this is the answer that we've been looking for.  In the meantime, we continue to pray and do our best to leave it in God's hands.