The Beauty of a Snowflake

Our agency asked if we would be willing to share our embryo adoption story with prospective families. We love getting to share about the amazing way the Lord formed our family, so we were more than willing to share!

They have posted our story on their website, and I also wanted to provide that here. We hope that our story can help encourage others as they pursue God's plan for their family. And ultimately, we want others to know how great our gracious God is. 

“To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.”

– Anonymous

The day we were diagnosed with infertility (and given very few fertility options) was such a dark day for us. In an instant, our dreams of becoming parents to genetic children vanished, and we felt so overwhelmed with that loss. While we were heartbroken and frustrated that we were given so few options, we see now how God was preparing our hearts for the family He had always intended for us.

Early in our research, we had come across the beautiful option of embryo adoption. The fact that you could carry and give birth to your adopted child seemed like such an amazing thing! So when we were faced with the reality that we would not have our own genetic children, we knew that embryo adoption was something we wanted to pursue.

We didn’t really know where to start in the process, so we knew we would need some guidance. We chose the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, because they pioneered the process, and we wanted to partner with an agency that would uphold a high value on life. We are so grateful for our relationship with them. In each step of the process, we felt confirmation about our decision to pursue embryo adoption.

While we knew this was the path to a family we wanted to pursue, it was not without its own set of heartaches and struggles. We initially matched with a sweet donor family in our home state. We gave all the adopted embryos a chance at life, but unfortunately, we did not have a successful pregnancy. We were once again left heartbroken and frustrated, wondering if we would ever have children.

Nightlight was kind and gracious through the whole process. We did decide to rematch with another family, and soon we adopted more embryos. We welcomed our first 2 snowflake babies in November of 2016, boy/girl twins! They are our rainbow babies, the beauty of God’s faithfulness after the storm.

We transferred another embryo in November 2017, but unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to that sweet little one. We tried again with our last embryo, and we welcomed our third snowflake baby in August of 2018! He is such a blessing and joy to us, and we love the fact that all 3 of our snowflake babies are full genetic siblings.

We will forever be thankful for embryo adoption because through it, we got to experience pregnancy and become parents. There will never be enough words of gratitude to express to the donor families for the gifts they provided to us by making the decision to donate their embryos and entrust us with their care. It is incredible to me how God was preparing our family, even way back in 2007 (when our first embryos were frozen), and then again in 2009 (when our second set of embryos was frozen). How He led my husband and me to each other, walked with us in our road of infertility, and led us to pursue embryo adoption. He allowed us to skip all other fertility options so that we would discover and then choose this unique path to growing our family. I believe this is part of the reason we had to walk the road of infertility- because God always intended us to be the parents of these precious little ones. We had to stand out in the cold for a bit so we could stand back now and be amazed at the beauty of the family God created for us.