Our Baby in the Sky

As many of you gather to welcome our rainbow baby, we want to take a moment to dedicate this page to our very first pregnancy - our baby in the sky. This is their story, and ours.

In 2024, we found ourselves in Japan - walking through the lantern-lit streets of Tokyo, wandering the bamboo groves of Kyoto, and getting lost in the energy of Osaka - when we discovered, quietly and unexpectedly, that we were going to be parents. It was new and a little scary, but it was also filled with a kind of wonder that is hard to put into words.

We chose to celebrate. Every temple visit, every bowl of ramen, every moment of that trip was shared with our baby. We talked about nursery colors on bullet trains, debated stroller models over Konbini store snacks, and let ourselves dream - fully and without reservation - about the life we were going to build. Tokyo Disneyland felt a little more magical knowing we were a family of three.

Then, not long after we returned home, something felt wrong late one night. We rushed to the emergency room, and in the quiet of that hospital, a nurse gently told us that our baby had passed. It was sudden, it was devastating, and it was a grief we were not prepared for - the kind that settles into the quiet moments and stays for a while. We cried together, and we held each other, and we let ourselves feel the full weight of it.

What came next was its own kind of mountain. Month after month, we held onto the hope of growing our family, only to be met with the silence of infertility. We learned a new language of waiting - cycle tracking, blood draws, monitoring appointments, the crushing lows of failed IUI cycles, and eventually the long and demanding road of IVF. For over two years, we showed up for each other through every step of it, through the hope and the heartbreak, through the appointments and the waiting rooms and the tears we cried on the way home.

And then, after all of it - our miracle arrived.

This journey changed us. It deepened the way we love each other in ways we never thought possible. It taught us that grief and joy are not opposites - that you can hold both at once, that one does not erase the other. We carry our first baby with us always, and it is because of that love, and all the love that surrounded us along the way, that this moment feels as precious as it does. We have learned, more than anything, that grief can coexist with joy.