A birthday party in the park

Trigger warning: mention of loss. Five years ago, we were struggling with grief after our daughter was stillborn at 18 weeks. We were also desperately praying and hoping that we would have a healthy, earthside baby. In September of 2018, we found out we were pregnant with Jimmie. More about waiting for Jimmie here

And, in May of 2019, Jimmie was born! Read Jimmie’s birth story here.

These four years with Jimmie have been miraculous. The more we’ve learned about fertility and secondary infertility, Jimmie’s life becomes even more of a gift. The statistics that are widely shared related to fertility and women over 40 are quite discouraging. In spite of that, we delivered our baby Jimmie when I was 41 years and 10 months old.

Today, we celebrated this precious gift of life with a party at a park in our neighborhood.

We reserved a bounce house from Extreme Climbing and worked with the city to get a permit to have the bounce house in the park.

Jimmie had family and friends join from his preschool class and his BLL teeball team.

Jimmie loves iced donuts with sprinkles. He has called them “Happy Birthday Donuts” for a couple of years. We have this great specialty donut shop in Houston, River Oaks Donuts . I asked friends where to get donut letters so we could have donuts instead of cake. Everyone suggested River Oaks Donuts. I ordered HAPPY (small letters) 4 (large) JIMMIE (medium) and the decor was Astros, baseball and Spider-Man! They did a great job and Jimmie loved it!

We are so thankful for all of our children and especially thankful that God has given us these five earth-side. I hope they always know how loved and honored they are. Life is a gift. And, today we celebrate four years of JIMMIE! Cheers to many more!