Mallory: “This is my first Mother’s Day, and I wanted to come to the beach. It’s perfect. Our daughter’s name is Remington. She’s almost nine months old. We’ll be driving down the road and there’s a whole kid in the back seat. That’s crazy.”

Micah: “I’m playing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ Remington loves music. We’re so enamored with her because it took us so long to have her.”

Mallory: “She’s our miracle baby–it took six and a half years. We started trying with a lot of the same-age couples in our church; all of them got pregnant before us. We were happy for them and guessed it wasn’t our time. We felt God was calling us to be foster parents and went through six months of foster classes. We were two weeks away from getting a foster placement when we found out we were pregnant. Those foster classes were better than any parenting classes. 

I had planned for years how to tell our parents we were pregnant. If I got pregnant around my birthday or Valentine’s, we would give everybody gifts around those days. But we found out we were pregnant the day after Christmas. At 2:00 AM, I felt God was telling me to take a pregnancy test. I’ve taken plenty of tests; I thought I was just being hormonal. Positive. I woke up Micah. Look! Look! Look! It couldn’t be real. I had to wait until the next day to get off work and buy another test. Positive. We told our parents we had an extra Christmas present we forgot at home and gave them the positive test. They were so happy for us. 

I’m very kid-oriented. I take photos at preschools and used to work at a preschool–those were rough when we were trying to have a baby. Now, people at preschools ask if I have kids, and I say, ‘Man, I’ve got a story for you. Sit down. This might take a minute.”