Last night, I tucked a five-year-old boy into bed for the last time. This morning, I woke a six-year-old up with the birthday song and made him scrambled eggs for breakfast. After he left with daddy to meet the bus, I sat down at this computer and pulled up the journal I kept for more than three years leading up to Corin’s birth. The first entry was dated December 28, 2006. I addressed the journal to our as-yet non-existent child.

It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that journal and remembered what those years of infertility were like. I cried as I read back over the entries and remembered months upon months of delayed hopes and crushing disappointments, the endless prayers of longing and fear and hope and trust.

On July 28, 2009, I wrote:

I find myself feeling almost superstitious as I type this entry, as if by writing out the same hopes and dreams I’ve expressed so many times before, I might chase away the possibility of a different outcome. I’ll admit, I am scared. I have moments where I can hardly breathe for fear of the crushing disappointment that may wait just around the corner. But as I said, I have hope, too. And in those moments when emotions swell, I reach for my only true recourse: prayer. I know God continues to be with us, and I am determined to trust Him with my life – and yours, little one. I plead with Him to let me now be carrying our firstborn child, but I pray that above all, His will is done. What is faith if I only trust Him in smooth waters, when I can see what lies ahead? Faith becomes real in these uncertain moments.

The next morning, I went in to our local clinic for a blood beta pregnancy test. After so many times staring at a tiny window and wishing for a line that never appeared, I was too afraid to test at home before the official blood results. On July 31st, the nurse at the clinic in Maryland (where we had gone for the actual IVF cycle) called with the news that the test was positive. Jon and I jumped with joy and trembled and cried, and then we stopped to say a prayer of gratitude and to ask for God’s protection for the tiny life that was just beginning to form.

Today, I still pray over that life, no longer so tiny. I remember the little butt that was wedged for weeks under my ribs and the tiny hands and feet that rocked my belly, and I marvel to see those parts walking around, pieces of this marvelous, challenging, growing boy. That tiny life we longed and prayed for is my six-year-old son, who throws his arms around me and says he loves me several times a day. I look at him today, and I remember the longing of those years. I remember the baptism by fire of his newborn days, and I remember so many moments of joy and frustration and exhaustion and laughter since. There is no honor in my life – no accomplishment or goal met – that will ever equal the fulfillment of being this boy’s mother. He is my firstborn, the child of those many years of longing, God’s answer to innumerable prayers.

Happy birthday, Corin.