Hannah's Campaign

There must have been something very interesting down on the floor that day when I took the picture because both babies are looking it at it.

Hannah is such a big helper. We have been very careful to make sure that her world didn't change too much when the girls came. We wanted her to still be a normal kid. After all she started this whole thing! About 3 years ago, it must have been after a Sunday School lesson on prayer, Hannah started this whole campaign to get a baby. It started out innocently enough--she first started off by asking Heavenly Father to "help Mommy have a baby" at bedtime prayers. She was about 5 or 6 years old when this started. She had always wanted a sibling. I, frankly, thought it was really cute when she would pray for it. I had pretty much given up, after all I had been praying to have another child for, oh, 7 years! I finally had closed a part of my heart off so that I could feel the sting of longing for another child.

Hannah's campaign started to branch out, eventually she would thank God for the food at dinner and throw in at the end "please bless mama to have a baby". She persisted. Eventually she got what she wanted last March I had been feeling like absolute garbage, so one afternoon I finally broke down and secretly took a home pregnancy test. Through all the years of trying, I had gone through the drill so many times, that I expected it to show a big fat negative. But it wasn't! I cried out "oh my gosh!" Hannah was playing in the other room, oblivious to what I was actually doing, she came running in and yelled out--"You're having a baby!" It was like the Holy Spirit whispered it to her before I had even decided to take the test. The next day I confirmed it at the doctor's office. We were all so excited! We broke the cardinal rule to tell people early and told everyone!

A week later I started to have a miscarriage. I was devastated. I felt horrible for letting my excitement out about the pregnancy and telling everyone so early. How would I break the news to Hannah. She was old enough to know that I wasn't going to have a baby, but still have the question of "why?"

Weeks went by, Hannah kept up her campaign of prayer to have a sibling. Eventually "things" did not get back to "normal" so I took another test at home, and it was positive again. This time I kept my mouth shut. I did call Nathan, to which his response was a matter of fact, "huh?" We went together to have the test confirmed at the OB, they wanted to do an ultrasound to check for a heartbeat right away to make sure that they hadn't made an error in assuming that we had miscarried earlier. We found out that day that it was a new pregnancy, it looked like it was about 6-8 weeks along, and there were TWO HEARTBEATS! What???? After all of these years and a miscarriage, to have two heartbeats-twins, we were, understandably so, over the moon.

The lesson I learned from all of this is how close children really are to God. Hannah set her mind to this. It took her complete faith, but it happened. We adults have so much to learn from children.