Five years ago today, I was begrudgingly posing for photos I didn’t think I wanted. Some colleagues of my husband had been begging me my entire pregnancy to have photos taken, even promising that they would set it all up and take care of it. Realizing they were not going to give up, I caved towards the end of my pregnancy, mostly because I just wanted them to leave me alone already. So they dressed me up and dragged me around the campus  where my husband worked and we lived to get THEIR idea of a perfect pregnancy photo shoot. My idea of a perfect pregnancy shoot was, of course, no shoot at all. I was almost exactly 36 weeks pregnant, so I had a little under a month to go until my due date. I was not prepared for how much my world would change in the next 24 hours. I thought, possibly like all first mothers during their very first pregnancies, that my baby would actually arrive on her due date! Ha! About two hours after these photos were taken, my contractions started. Throughout the night they became closer together and more intense. By 3:00 the next day I was heading to my doctor’s office, and by 6:59 pm Annie was born.

Most of you reading this know how that day went. And the first few weeks that followed. Initially I had a very hard time with her diagnosis. But those scary first days soon blossomed into one of the most beautiful and meaningful years of my life. And so a week or two before Annie’s 1st birthday, I arranged for a student (with mad photography skills) to take my photo again on March 31, one year after those dreaded but now incredibly treasured photos were taken. This time with my beautiful baby girl in my lap, just one day before she turned one. Those photos were never taken. On the morning of March 31, 2012, I started miscarrying my second pregnancy. We had only known for a couple weeks we were expecting. And so I never got those pictures of that little girl in my arms in that same spot on that same special day…

Until today!

We’ve been incredibly fortunate and blessed to have the opportunity to return to Rome for three months for my husband’s work. We are temporarily living on the same campus where we first brought Annie home and lived until she was 2 1/2. And to top it off, we got to return as a family of four after a long four-year battle with loss and infertility. And so FIVE years later, and four years after that sad day, a friend captured these…