“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.”  

That old song holds the dreams of almost every little girl, including myself.  I remember back in elementary school when that song was sung about me and the boy that I viewed as my Prince Charming, I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to get married and have children.  As long as I can remember, that has been my goal in life: marry Mr. Perfect and have a wonderful family.

It was not until I actually met my husband Jason that I really started thinking about the number of children that I desired.  We both thought that six was a nice number.  As I look back to our wedding over five years ago, we were oblivious to many things.  We prayed so hard that children would not come until after the first year of marriage.  Oh, the things we did not know then.  We would sometimes talk about what it would be like to have children, how we would raise them, the values we would instill in their lives, names that we liked, and the love that we would show them.  Many of our friends and family would often tell us that we would make good parents and that we would have cute babies.  It all sounded good to us.

While my husband and I talked about those details, the secret desires of my heart were overwhelming.  I would often wonder if I would be a good mommy.  How would I know what to do?  How does a mother understand what her tiny baby needs just by hearing the cry?  What would it feel like to be pregnant?  While I was thinking of all those questions and probably hundreds more, I never really thought about having problems conceiving, carrying, and giving birth to a healthy baby.  That is the very thing that no one ever talks about, or helps prepare you for.

After a year of marriage Jason and I started thinking about having children.  We did not put much effort into it, and much to our surprise, we discovered that we were expecting within a few months.  We were very excited, but we did not tell our family and friends.  To this day, we are not sure why we did not share that news.  Only six weeks into my pregnancy, I was experiencing heavy cramping and bleeding.  My thoughts were, “I could not possibly be having a miscarriage; things were going so well.”  That is exactly what was happening; we were losing our precious first child.  There are times I am thankful that we were not far enough along to know the gender of our child, but there are other times that I would like to have known so that we could have named that special life.

No one knew what to say to us.  Surprisingly, there were very few women around us that had ever experienced a miscarriage.  We started praying that one day we would be able to get pregnant and stay pregnant.  Seven months after the miscarriage we decided that we would actually try to have a baby.  Once again we had no trouble conceiving the precious life, but at six weeks we experienced the same tragedy: we lost our beautiful baby.  At that point I started wondering why people did not tell us that it was not just deciding to have a baby, getting pregnant, carrying a life for nine months, and giving birth that made you a mother.  I was always hearing from girlfriends that they really would have liked to hear about how not all babies sleep through the night at so many months, and how husbands really do not always know how to make bottles and change diapers.  Those are the very things that I should have been worrying about right then.  Those are the struggles new moms face, aren’t they?

After the second miscarriage, we decided that adoption was maybe a route that we should take.  We had not given up on having a baby naturally, but we did not want to wait until we were forty something to start our family.  We started doing what we thought was thorough research on as many aspects of adoption as we could imagine.  Again, we were embarking on a journey that was very new to us, and we had no with experience one to hold our hands.  We ended up choosing someone to facilitate our adoption who had all her ducks in a row.  At least it looked that way.  Once again it was all too good to be true.  We signed a contract for one year, made a profile, paid money up front, and waited for the call that we were to become parents.  Over the course of that year we received twenty-two phone calls telling us that we had been matched and could expect our baby.  We also received twenty-two phone calls in that year telling us another story of why that child would not be coming home with us after all.  You see, once again we had just learned a lesson that we wished we would have known before we started down the path to parenthood.  Not all people who have a document on their wall and references to call are legitimate adoption facilitators/agencies.

We decided to try to conceive on our own again, and two more times we miscarried at six weeks.  Doctors did many tests that always came back with no results.  They always had the same answer, “We cannot tell you why, but after four miscarriages I would not plan on having a family by natural means.”  At this point it seemed as if that childhood dream of the baby in the baby carriage was slipping through my fingers.  Every month when it was time to pay the dues on the loan we had taken for the adoption, it was just another reminder of a hope that seemed to be gone for good.

After three and a half years of young hopes slowly fading, we had come to the realization that we would be a family of four only-- my husband and me along with our two dogs.  The prayer still was there, “Please bless us with a child, somehow, some day.”

This story we call our life does not end on a sad note.  The day after Jason and I officially together decided to stop pursuing adoption, an agency called us and said they had heard we were interested in adopting hard-to-place children.  They had a little girl who was due in a week.  That they had no one who was ready that soon for a child, so therefore she was deemed “hard to place.”  Could this really be happening?  It all seemed too good to be true, but it was real!  The next morning we woke up to a phone call saying that we needed to get from our Midwest home to Texas because our baby was being born that day!  We drove twenty-six hours and arrived at the hospital when our princess was twenty-two hours old.  We were able to take her home from the hospital, and she has now been with us for over a year.  To add to the joy, when she was three months old we had a call from our social worker asking us if we would take in a newborn baby boy as a foster child.  We agreed, and picked him up from the hospital when he was six days old.  He just turned a year and we were recently told that we are going to be able to adopt him into our family as well.

We are so blessed.  I am unsure if we will ever make it to our goal of six children.  We have had many other foster children in and out of our home in the past year.  I watch our children sleep every night and think back on the journey that brought the four of us together and how wonderful it will be to tell them their story as they grow.  I do wonder why no one ever prepares us for the difficult times of parenthood.  As a little girl, I could never have imagined the trials that we would have to endure to bring our beautiful babies home.  My little mind could never have grasped the idea of having anything less than a perfect pregnancy.   The thoughts that filled my head were those of happiness and the simple questions such as “what will I name my child?”

Born on June 24th 1983, Ashley Hartung graduated from a small Minnesota school, was married to Jason Hartung in 2002, and now lives with her husband, two children, and three dogs in Western South Dakota.  She has been given many roles in life: one being that of a Pastors Wife, another being an adoptive and foster mother.

Ashley has many interests, some of which include: theater, music, blogging, scrapbooking, traveling, dogs, and anything to do with weddings!  She is very passionate about anything she is doing, especially helping with adoption awareness causes.  Ashley is a devoted wife and mother, dedicating each day her homemaker responsibilities.