Naming your kid is hard. Will and I poured over boy names looking for the perfect one. It is such an overwhelming responsibility to find the name he will bear for the rest of his life. We thought about so many names but nothing seemed to fit..till we came upon Lucian. It felt right. It felt meaningful to us. After such a crazy year, he felt like a light in a time of a lot of darkness. And after his diagnosis, we now fully understand why his name was put on our heart.

Lucian: from the latin word lux, which means “light”

There have been a lot of uncertain and dark moments throughout this pregnancy. Without going into too much detail, an IVF cycle is a rollercoaster of emotions; needles, medications, testing, numbers, risks and percentages. And we did not walk into Lucian’s cycle with the most confidence from a medical perspective. But we felt God’s reminder that although we were using the miracle of modern medicine to grow our family, that He was still in control. If He wanted this embryo to be our living child, I would be pregnant whether my “lining” was the ideal number or not. And so we made the choice to move forward with his transfer, trusting God to grow our family. I felt so much anxiety in the early days of being pregnant. Maybe it was intuition or simply a reminder to continue trusting the Lord at every uncertain step. At 12 weeks, I woke up bleeding and certain we had lost our little boy. We were again reminded that He had our best in mind when we saw our baby’s heartbeat in the emergency room that day. As a result, I was placed on bed rest for a few weeks due to a hemorrhage that caused the bleed. I was hopeful to stop the bleeding and we continued to trust and envision our life with our boy. And yet the darkest time came at our 20-week scan when we received the news of his heart defect.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”

John 1:5

“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life”

John 8:12

As sad, scared and uncertain as our future feels, we know we do not walk in darkness. We are not walking alone.

Theodore; from the greek word theodoros, which means “gift of God”

His middle name, Theodore, is one we chose after his diagnosis. On the phone with Will’s parents the night we found out about L’s heart, his mom, Chris, said something that stayed with me. “Lucian is our gift, whether he lives for a short amount of time, or he outlives us all”, she said. Her words were so powerful and I thought about them that whole week. At the time, I felt as though I had already lost Lucian. That the joy of his life and this pregnancy had been ripped from me. I was mourning. I really needed to hear Chris’ sweet reminder of truth; he is our gift. No matter the outcome.

We look forward to finally being able to hold the boy whose name was much more than we ever dreamed it could be.

Love, Jessica