We're Adopting!

Hello everyone! Welcome to our first post! If you found our blog by accident, welcome! More likely though, you already know one or both of us and got to our blog through us talking non-stop about it!

Matt and I are adopting. Surprise! You never knew right? :P This blog is going to start off as our adoption blog but we hope to keep it up with info about our little one as he/she grows as well as our daily lives as a family. We're going to try and update it whenever we have something to say. This is mostly for us just to be able to write down our feelings (the good and the bad) but it's also to keep our family and friends in the loop of our journey. Hopefully we'll make some new friends along the way!

I've wanted to start this blog for a few months now. For a few weeks, I kept bugging Matt to help me come up with a name. I had a lot of bad ideas and even some really good ones. But low and behold, Matt came up with this one (he ALWAYS has the good ideas!). Here is the info behind the name. If  you've ever watched Friday Night Lights, you'll probably get this reference. In the show Friday Night Lights, they always say "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose". We both love the show and it really fits how we feel about our adoption journey. We decided to change Full Hearts to Open Hearts because were pursuing Domestic Infant Open Adoption.

Now that we got the introductions and basic information out of the way, lets get on to the reason for this blog!

Matt and I have been married for 5 years. About 3 1/2 years into our marriage we started talking about kids. I went off birth control and we let nature take its course. About a year into trying we knew things weren't working like they should. (That, or nature needed a GPS!) We saw my OBGYN and she did some blood work. The blood work came back with me having a high FSH. She didn't tell me the number but she did say that it was "a little" high. She then referred us to a Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE) at Hershey Med. We met with Dr. Dodson (whom I can not say enough great things about... we LOVED him) in his office. He went over our issues and history. Just through talking with him he thought I might have PCOS (Polysystic Ovarian Syndrome) but he wanted to wait and see what my file said that my OBGYN was sending over. A week or two later we met with him again. He said that my FSH levels weren't "a little" high as my Dr. had said but very high. And average FSH level in normal women is 3-12. Mine was at 31. He said that he didn't think I had PCOS but instead he thought it was POF (Premature Ovarian Failure). Since the tests were a few months old he wanted me to have them taken again to be sure.

After the test results came back he gave me a call. He said that in the few months between the first test and the latest one, my FSH levels went from 31 to 81 and he officially diagnosed me with POF (Dr. Dodson prefers POI - Premature Ovarian Insufficiency).

A month later Matt and I went back in to see what our next step would be. Dr. Dodson said there is a very slim chance that I would ever be able to get pregnant on my own (not out of the question but not likely either). Really the only way would be to do IVF using a donor egg. That would cost about $20,000 for one try.

Matt and I talked it over. There were many factors involved with our decision but in the end, we did not want to go through with any medical treatments and decided on pursuing adoption.

I searched and searched for agencies. I got brochures from 3 different ones and compared them. We met or had phone interviews with a couple of them and in the end, the right one for us ended up being Adoptions From the Heart.

Stay tuned for more information about what we've done so far with our agency and other info. Thank you taking time to read this and we hope you continue to follow our journey to creating the family we've always wanted!

Special shout-out to our good friend, Karlo of Karlo Photography for the awesome photo of Matt and I!