Matt and Ali announced this week that a little Larson boy will join our family in January!  What exciting news!  We are thrilled to be grandparents! We are praying for this little guy already, and for Matt and Ali as Ali wrote this on her blog:

After declining all of the genetic testing for our baby, I somehow decided that it would be okay to get screened for the cystic fibrosis gene – it was a simple cheek swab that would tell me if I was a carrier for this disease or not.  Seemed pretty easy!  The odds of even being a carrier are 1 in 30, so I figured I may as well find out.  With no family history of cystic fibrosis that I could find, I was pretty shocked to learn two weeks later that indeed I was a carrier of the gene (a recessive gene, hence the lack of family history).  I was told not to worry, the chances that Matt had the gene as well were again 1 in 30 (so the chances of us BOTH having it were extremely small), and we both had to be carriers for any child to be born with the disease.  And so, Matt dutifully went in to the doctor’s office, got his cheek swabbed, and waited.
Two weeks later, I got the call from my OB that – odds be damned – Matt is indeed a carrier of the CF gene as well.  Who would have known?  This information was followed shortly with something along the lines of…”this means that your baby has a 1 in 4 chance of being born with CF…”, “keep in mind that there’s a 75% chance that  your baby will be born healthy…”, “some CF gene-carrying parents choose to do IVF for future children so as to make sure the gene is not passed on…”, “I’d like you to make an appointment with a high risk OB just for a consultation…”, and some other stuff that is all a little blurred at the moment.  One in four.  That’s all that kept running through my head.
After many many, many tears, I came home and did a little research about CF (feel free to visit http://www.cff.org) and was happy to learn that many CF kids go on to live happy, generally healthy lives, but sad to read the staggering fact that “the predicted median age of survival for a person with CF is in the mid-30s.”  Wow…

I’m not quite ready to talk about this all that much, but I did want to get my thoughts out there for now (the tears don’t come as easily as when I say it out loud).  Matt and I are both digesting/processing all of this information and praying that our baby, with CF or not, is happy and healthy.  We trust that God has a plan that is bigger than our own, both now and in the future, and that our baby is in His hands for the next five months (and forever).  As a friend was gracious in reminding me, I feel comfort that God is more powerful than me or any doctor.  And as she has offered to pray with Eph. 3:20 in mind (“now to Him who is able to do IMMEASURABLY more than all we can ask or imagine…”), so too do we.  No matter what, we know that he/she will be incredibly loved by the two of us and by the amazing friends and family surrounding us.

This week, Ali wrote:

We are also learning to be grateful in this precarious situation we’ve found ourselves in.  We trust that God is at work in all of this, and despite the unknown future, we are grateful for the little one growing and developing at this very minute.  We are grateful for the lessons in patience, trust, love, and grace that we continue to be learning through all of this.  And though we did not love hearing some of the news at this week’s appointment with the high risk doctor, we were SO grateful to find out the sex of our little peanut early!